News

IfThen Software LLC's project which is code-named "Loradon 3.0" has finally been unveiled as Volund!

Volund Screenshots:

This marks the start of the closed beta for the Volund Preview. Closed beta will last for at least two weeks, at which point we will release the Volund Preview to the public.

We have released the Volund website, which is located at http://www.volundgame.com. Volund also has a Facebook page located at http://www.facebook.com/pages/Volund/294832706108 so be sure to become a fan!

A new article titled "From the Testers" has been added to the newsletter. This article will contain information on what is happening in the Volund Preview closed beta, along with a screenshot taken while testing.

This issue also introduces a new article titled "Funny Quote of the Week" which we will include in the newsletter as quotes become available. These quotes are taken from our community, and could be from our online chat, forums, or the chat from any of our

News

The IfThen Software LLC homepage has been given a facelift. Head on over to http://www.ifthensoftware.net and check out the new site.

From the Programmer
Written by Invisible

With the bulk of my coding duties finished, I have been able to spend the last week relaxing. Unfortunately, this means that my article in this newsletter issue will be lacking in content. What programming I have done, I can't discuss since it relates to features in "Loradon 3.0" that we haven't announced yet. I will say one thing though; working on a website rather than computer software has been fun. I hope you all like the new ITS homepage. If you have any thoughts, please leave a comment.

Artist's Easel
Written by GreyKnight

iScribble Sketches #17

(Click to enlarge)

Community Spotlight
Written by Jay

With the "Loradon 3.0" Preview being so close to completion, several players from ITS's older game Loradon Online have come back to the forums to express their long-held excitement for the game.

News

Overall progress for the Loradon 3.0 Preview has reached 75%!
www.ifthensoftware.net/loradon_online/progress/

From the Programmer
Written by Invisible

Unfortunately, I have not had much time to program since the last newsletter issue. The little time I have had has been spent learning line-cylinder collision detection. On a related note, I highly recommend the book "Real Time Collision Detection" by Christopher Ericson.

Artist's Easel
Written by GreyKnight

I have decided to simply mirror the completed side to save time.

The two columns closest to the viewer appear to be too far apart from the other columns in the row. This has been bothering me since I started work on the outline. After I mirrored it, I realized what the problem was. It looks strange because our eye will generally not see those columns, since they are too close to the edge of our vision. Those two columns are actually directly to the left and right of you.
(Click to enlarge)

I have determined that the area in the red box is what you would actually see.
(Click to enlarge)

This is the result.
(Click to enlarge)

This is the final image, for the preview release anyways. I've been working too long on this background,

Cross-posted from members.gamedev.net/ifthensoftware/journal/

News

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 e

Cross-posted from members.gamedev.net/ifthensoftware/journal/

News

The overall progress on the Loradon 3.0 Preview has reached 58%! This is up from 55% the previous week.
Loradon 3.0 Preview Progress Page


From the Programmer
Written by Invisible

After working on it for the past month, secret feature #2 is finally finished! This means that we were able to release a demo to the development team for testing last Friday. Within an hour, 10 bugs were found, but luckily they were fairly simple to fix.

Earlier today, I ran into a rather odd problem. I was using OutputDebugString() to output debug strings (big shock) from a member function of a struct that is inherited by another struct. For some reason, the strings weren't being displayed, even though I knew for certain that the function was being called. I output some test strings around where the function was being called, and they displayed correctly... After about 20 minutes of testing, I decided to clean the solution and rebuild. Surprisingly, it worked! For some reason, the struct changes were not being compiled. Yet another quirk to add to my list of things to try if the code is not working the way it should be (right next to the

Cross-posted from members.gamedev.net/ifthensoftware/journal/

News

Stick Adventures Online is now packaged into an installer rather then inside of a .zip file. Some players would install the game incorrectly, so this should make getting into the game a lot easier and error free.

Overall progress on the Loradon 3.0 Preview has reached 55%!
Loradon 3.0 Preview Progress Page


From the Programmer
Written by Invisible

After describing the problem I was having with Webkit and the progress page last week, sprite_hound was kind enough to show me a solution that used divs for layout instead of tables. Thanks for the help!

Unfortunately, I can't say much about what I am currently working on since we are trying to keep it under wraps. Hopefully I can make this article more interesting in the next issue!


Community Spotlight
Written by Jay

Thanks to Invisible's new SAO Installer, players will no longer need to extract the files manually in order to play the game. This rids players from an unexpected error that occasionally occurred with the game before and during extraction. Since no more errors will present themselves, players are expected to be more populous because none will be turned away fr

Cross-posted from members.gamedev.net/ifthensoftware/journal/

News

Stick Adventures Online version 1.1.8 has been released! This new version features a chat filter and a few chat related bug fixes. Head on over to the downloads page to check it out!


From the Programmer
Written by Invisible

Last week, I was looking for a program to compare two source code files. I asked for recommendations in the #gamedev IRC channel, and was directed towards TortoiseMerge. One thing led to another, and I ended up installing Subversion and setting up a repository for some of the projects I am working on. I have been considering doing this for a while, and am happy I finally did it.

I also created a new chat filter system. It's my second attempt at creating one, and I think it's definitely better then my first. The server has a list of words that have a "strict" flag attached to them. If a word is strict, it is filtered no matter where it appears in the message. If a word is lenient (the strict flag is not set), it is only filtered out if it appears by itself as a whole word. The previous filter I created was designed to filter everything using the strict model only. This caused problems if

Cross-posted from members.gamedev.net/ifthensoftware/journal/

News

We are happy to announce that the overall progress for the Loradon 3.0 Preview release has reached 50%!

Loradon 3.0 Progress Page


From the Programmer
Written by Invisible

"Secret Feature #2" has turned into more of a project then I was expecting. The difficulty rating on the progress page has even been increased from "Medium" to "Hard". The actual feature isn't that difficult, but I need to refactor a bunch of code to ensure that it works. Naturally, this is a good thing.

I have made a few of the much used structures a lot safer to use by adding a Clear() member function. This prevents me from accidentally setting a member pointer to NULL with memset(), and it also makes the clearing code a lot shorter since I no longer have to clear each member one by one.

On an unrelated note; passing 123 variables to a variable argument function is somewhat ugly.


Community Spotlight
Written by Jay, Lee, and pifreak

As the progress of Loradon 3.0 comes closer to its finish (currently at 50%), the players are becoming very excited. Some are viewing the progress page a few times a day to see if any progress has

Cross-posted from members.gamedev.net/ifthensoftware/journal/

News

Due to a lack of time, we have dropped the chess project and have resumed work on Loradon 3.0. The overall progress is now at 46%.

Loradon 3.0 Progress Page (www.ifthensoftware.net/loradon_online/progress/)

From the Programmer
Written by Invisible

Nothing much to say other then it feels good to be working on Loradon 3.0 again. Starting a new project can be fun, but there's a lot to be said for working with code that you have 3 years of familiarity with.

Since last Friday I've been working to fix all of the currently known bugs so that nothing can sneak up on me while coding the upcoming features. So far I have wiped out all but 1 of the them, and that last bug should be fairly simple to fix.

Community Spotlight
Written by Jay and pifreak

As the Loradon Online and Stick Adventures Online communities continue to merge, more members have begun to be active on the merged forum. As time passes, many members of both communities have begun to feel more relaxed with one another and are continuing to flourish. Also, as more active members accumulate on the forum, the members have started to play the game which they did not try befor

I plan to cross-post to here from our main journal at members.gamedev.net/ifthensoftware/journal/. I'm not sure what the rules of etiquette are in the blogging community on cross-posting, but I hope this isn't considered rude.

We are currently working on an MMORPG with the working title of "Loradon 3.0" and an online game called "Stick Adventures Online". We are working to get a preview version of Loradon 3.0 released, but we have not yet given a release date. After releasing the Loradon 3.0 preview, we plan to add much needed features and content to Stick Adventures Online. This journal will detail the development of these two games and any other projects we are working on.

Here are the latest screenshots that we have released for Loradon 3.0.

Loradon 3.0 is temporarily using the Loradon Online website at www.ifthensoftware.net/loradon_online/ where you can find our forums and even play Loradon 2.1. Loradon Online might be considered the "classic" version of Loradon 3.0, but the two games will have nearly nothing in common.  A detailed progress page for the Loradon 3.0 Preview is located at www.ifthensoftware.net/loradon_online/progress/ and