Got kind of side tracked on another project for HCS this week, so may not get everything done before Christmas that I was hoping. Didn't want to leave players concerned or worried about our future over the holiday though, so here is what is happening.

In January my main priority will be to finish the tutorial stuff and new Legacy combat system, above all else that will be getting done first. Once that is done we'll be announcing Legacy officially to the HCS player base, which is quite large. We'll see how the current servers cope, but we expect we'll need to invest in more hardware to cope with demand.

So stick around or take a break. But definitely come back in January and have a happy holiday!

Patience is a virtue, some people would do well to remember that. I'm pretty settled in at HCS now but it's been a crazy few months. People seemed to expect sudden change after the merge, but that was never going to be the case. Hoofmaster is happy to let me work on Legacy when I wish, but I am aware it was not the reason I was initially hired.

So I try to split my time equally between the projects that require my attention. All in all though, I'm working more on Legacy than I used to, you just can't see all of it. I have completed 3 massive projects on Legacy and a 4th is near completion.

The first was the one you saw, the merge in to Hunted Cow and staff changes required a lot of time to sort out with many scripts changed and there is still more work to do on that front the integration of their new payment systems in particular was a nightmare.

The second you have yet to see because it has not yet been activated, the new tutorial system has facebook style objectives that drop down the side of the page to guide new players through how to play our game and give tips when new features become available.

The third you'll never see, but it was a complete rework of all the code in Legacy. Before the scripts just assumed they lived on the server because that is where they had always been, now they determine their enviroment... be it Windows, Linux or a cluster of servers and change accordingly. Allowing me to host the project locally or anywhere and provide updates in a much more efficient manner.

These changes had to be done, I'm sorry they were not interesting or exciting but needs must. The 4th project is now starting staff testing on the development server and once a nicer UI is completed, will undergo testing by avatars. The new combat system should be more fun for new players and a breath of fresh air for old players, it is already over 3000 lines of code and growing.

Everything should be working again now, after I managed to break quite a few things last night updating the server and rebuilding the code. Also fixed some issues with email activation and password recovery. The advent calendar is being designed and will be up on Monday, got a long week end ahead.

Took me about 4 days longer than I planned to move Legacy to local hosting and SVN.

All legacy scripts have now been updated to run through version control, they also detect their environment so no changes will be needed when moving scripts between development, main and local projects. This should make development easier, I've had to remove the line counts from the updates page as the new PHP encoding software we use makes it impossible.

If you find any bugs with the new scripts let me know. More news coming soon!