Sorry about disappearing a couple weeks ago. We had to take a sudden break due to personal matters. However, we are now back in full force!
The Twitter widget is back! You can view it in the news on the Loradon Online website, or at the top of the forum index.
Overall progress on the Loradon 3.0 Preview has reached 62%!
Loradon 3.0 Preview Progress Page
From the Programmer
Written by Invisible
Aside from wrestling with the Twitter widget for an hour, nothing really interesting happened. Unfortunately, I will be starting work on the melee system soon, which means I will have to be even more tight lipped then usual. I will do my best to get something interesting into here each week though!
A word of warning to anyone that wishes to use the Twitter widget: Make sure you have the align property of the embed tag set correctly. I spent an hour trying to figure out why it wasn't displaying correctly, until eighty4 in the #html channel on freenode mentioned that align was set to middle...
Community Spotlight
Written by Lee and pifreak
This week I'll be honest, and say that SAO really isn't the best game in the world. It's fun and enjoyable, and some people even say it's addicting, but in all honesty there's not much to do whilst online. If you regularly read the newsletters it has probably been stated somewhere that SAO only has one map and two monsters.
Despite this, and one of the reasons I believe this part of the newsletter exists, the community is quite large and a fun place to be. Even though the most the game has ever been updated over the last couple of years is adding PvP, many people are still around within the community. People may think it's quite small on first viewing it, there aren't the most people in the world around here, not on the scale of some of the biggest MMORPG's anyway. But, looking at the size of the actual game itself, there is a very large variety of different and unique members, and the world (well, map =P) of SAO is usually full of people.
Overall, what I'm trying to say, is although it's been a very long time, a large number of people are still around, and as the game grows and expands in the future; this will hopefully not change.
SAO has been sort of a mess these past weeks. The problem is that a lot of people are disobeying the unwritten-rules. It is hard to enforce rules that don't exist in writing.
A player has been banned multiple times logging in at different i.p. addresses, and on an account that was locked out but somehow allowed to come back in.
New additions to the SAO system-
RULES!
Stick Adventures Online now has official rules, basic as they may be, will provide a foundation for the moderators to justify actions and for players not to have an excuse at all.
http://www.ifthensoftware.net/StickAdventuresOnline/rules.php
Project 1337-filter
A problem with the swearing filter is one that is commonly abused; using spaces or dashes to say something that is blocked. Creative players even have resorted to using numbers as letters!
How the new system will be designed to work is very interesting, making the filter ignore multiple spaces and dashes thrown in-between words, and it might even consider certain numbers to be letters when checking to see if there is a "bad" word.
This would be quite a task for InvisibleMan to program, so we will keep you updated on when it should arrive.
On a happier note, pifreak has decided to release a new version of his snowy mod, since the Holiday season is approaching! It seemed to be popular so he made some additions, and improved the graphics. See the forum post and description here:
http://www.ifthensoftware.net/forums/index.php?showtopic=1191
