WIP'S PROFILE

WIP
I'm not comfortable with any idea that can't be expressed in the form of men's jewelry
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I made this site and it's awesome. But I don't run it anymore. Now I'm just a plebe like you.

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The Biggest Shocker: I am leaving (for real)

I am leaving. Don't expect me back for another hour or two.

Oh and we are playing Age of Empires 2 this weekend and you everyone should play.

RMN3.1 Upcoming Features

In this post I am going to detail some of the upcoming features I am working on. Some pieces will be out earlier than others. I'll also detail some things that have already been put live.

Friendly User Profile URLs
Put up just tonight and the cause of various errors encountered, I reworked the URLs for user profiles to include usernames instead of just IDs. I had avoided doing this for a while due to the large number of funky usernames in the system. What I ended up doing is saving a "slugified" version of the username and using it for URLs. This version has no spaces, dots, dashes, or whatevers in it. Usernames from now on will also have this restriction. In the future, I want to sync the real usernames up with this slug version. Due to the way the site does password hashing, however, I can't just change usernames and have passwords match up.

Current usernames that have spaces, dots, or anything else NOT alphanumeric will have their passwords reset when this change occurs. Make sure your email address in your account is up to date!



Achievements
As noted in our Halloween Contest Topic, the site will be getting an achievement system. Achievements are neat and really they just help us keep track of people who participate and do other things on the site.

All the official contests we have had (pixel contests, game contests, etc...) will retroactively be granted achievements for each participant and winner. All contests from the point of this system going live will have achievements as well.

Eventually there will be a bot placed in #rpgmaker.net that will keep track of activity levels and will also dish out certain achievements in there.



Game Achievements
I have also been working on including this achievement system for GAMES on the site. Just as all the COOL NEW GAMES have, the games on this site will also get them! You'll automatically get achievements as you accomplish goals set by the developers themselves. Developers will setup their achievement information on RMN and that will automatically be usable in their game. Developers will use provided scripts in their game to set these achievements as the player accomplishes them.

I was rushing to get this system up and going for the final release of Visions & Voices, but decided to hold off until I could polish the experience more. It requires an internet connection at the moment, and I wanted to try and eliminate some of the pains while playing offline. That's one of the reasons for the prolonged development.

The Game Achievements will only be available for scripting-capable engines such as RPG Maker VX, RPG Maker XP, Game Maker, etc. and only completed games. While it is technically possible to do them for RM2k/3 games, the experience would be very watered down and completely different from the workings of the system so far. And for completed games, well the reasoning should be easily understood.

There will be easy-to-use premade scripts for as many engines as I can make them for. Currently VX and XP are to be the first ones ready. These will all communicate with RMN to dish out achievements as you get them in-game.



Game Profile Customization
Some may have seen this in action on a handful of games on the site, where the backgrounds are different. Eventually you will be able to customize the look of your game profiles with images, colors, and so forth. The system is technically live right now, but there are no restrictions built-in. I need to set limits on what users can and cannot modify (like the top bar, footer, logo, etc.).



Those are the main things I am working on or have worked on. What I really want to do, is allow developers here to really go fullbore on creating their game profiles. It should be capable as to replace an entirely custom website for the game. Please let me know what ways I can help improve this.

Cross Site Forgery DESTROYED

For Clarification
A lot of people were getting a "Cross-Site Forgery Detected" error when trying to login.

I made some tweaks to the site that should have eliminated this. Let me know if you ever see it again.

Epic Mickey - Exclusive Wii steampunk action game by the maker of Deus Ex and Thief!



There's been a lot of buzz for this thing since the concept art leaked out. Either way, GameInformer confirmed it coming to Wii next year. Later today they are going to have a video up about it.

Not much is known about the game except that it's a steampunk version of Disney. Warrent Spector, the dude who made Deus Ex and Thief and some Ultima games, is the lead behind the game. Here's some more concept art to check out:

http://www.fredgambino.co.uk/web_pages/epicmickey/zombie01.html
http://www.fredgambino.co.uk/web_pages/epicmickey/seatransport.html
http://www.fredgambino.co.uk/web_pages/epicmickey/castle02.html

It's like Disney realized all that Final Fantasy bullshit was dragging down Kingdom Hearts and asked a well-respected designer to fix that!


Update: 10/06/2009
More details come from Eurogamer: http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/first-epic-mickey-details-spilled Villains and overall story info!

Updates: User posts, Makerscore tweaks, and more!

A few updates have been put up today.

-There is now a new tab in the user profiles to show the user's forum posts! I am still not entirely happy with this page but it works.
-There is also a new button in the user profiles to easily send that user a message.
-You can click your username in the top left to go directly to your profile.
-The Makerscore updating has been fixed and the values associated with games has been drastically revamped. Completed games give the netted MS a nice boost as well.
-This wasn't mentioned when it was fixed, but the Locker had a few file bugs inside it that have been removed. Thanks to Craze for trying to use the Locker and getting me frustrated.

Small Update: More Genres available

I went ahead and added in more genres. Not sure why it took me so long to do it, but yeah. Go ahead and pick one that is more fitting for your game!

CAPTCHAs Added

You may notice that RMN now requires CAPTCHAs for registration and also creating new forum topics. This is to help avoid our prolific bot problem. I tried to not make it too invasive.

Hopefully bots are dead and dead. The /games forum is also open again for new topics.

Post Coloring

Some may have noticed that the site is coloring certain posts now. Here's the method to its madness:

The author of whatever you are looking at, will have their posts with a light orange background. The authors are determined like so:
-Forum topics: topic starter.
-Games: anyone on the development team.
-Reviews/Articles/Tutorials: the writer who submitted it.
-Podcast: anyone that participated on the podcast.


The other part of the new coloring, is when you are linked directly to a post. The linked post will now have a thick orange border around. This is to easily identify the post you were linked to. I've had this problem a lot where it was hard to tell.

You can recover your password now!

There were a few kinks that went on with the RMN3 upgrade. One of them being that I lost all existing members' email addresses. I pulled them all back in from the old database.

This means you can now use the Recover Password page to reset your password. If you have been unable to login with an "Invalid credentials" error, this is your departure point to arrive at Mt. Logging-In.

You are also able to easily change your password at the bottom of the Account page.

Sorry that took so long.

Has anyone else got this ad?