Where does the time go?

Just where does the time go?   Another four weeks have flown by.  As usual, we've been alternating between being sick and working hard!

1. Graphics: Mat and Sándor met in Budapest (as he was visiting the country); the topics included our plans for additional graphic work and some fine-tuning of his existing arts.

Server Side:

1. Steve has returned and has gotten back to the remaining non-game management work items on his side.

Shared Code:

• Mat is pretty much done with updating the Game Frame, which is both a cornerstone of online gaming and game management lifecycle / game creating pipeline; and a tool for simplified, more robust local testing. It's a big module, but it's gradually getting closer to a working version. Changes may also allow some interesting slice of hardcore modding capabilities.
• Speaking of modding capabilities, we've also finished creating a basic authoring feature and a simple modding pipeline (with engine features and interfaces) for a selected set of contents and Mat continued and closed the implementation of the Persona Subsystem for the current requirements (this includes both the 'playable' implementation for player avatars and a core implementation for creating AI opponents and lesser AIs, like Mercenary Captains, Merchants or medieval Banks.
• We've also finally finished updating the Game Model. There have been many things we didn't originally intend to do right now, but have ultimately turned to be more beneficial to spend some time on them now rather than later. This made all of us a bit frustrated at times as it kept piling stuff up in front of the team at just about the same efficiency as we were closing work items, but finally we're off the treadmill, and all is left on this item is to test it throughoutly and fix any obvious mistakes we can find. 

There is an ongoing poll for modding priorities, please take a look and cast your votes. We've also re-opened our other poll about platform priorities, don't forget to also vote there if you haven't already. Yes, both questions mean we're crawling towards a new demo. 

Webpage:

1. Security: updated and continued tweaking our SSL certificates and the site's settings a bit further since feudums.com is not yet fully covered (note: the underlying platform & game servers are strictly operating under SSL since day 0). It's not fully functional as some inline references in our contents are protocol prefixed (ie. you're switching back to non-SSL and losing your session by clicking on them) and eliminating all these is a pretty annoying and repetitive task, given we have thousands of entries for the past years and the fact some of these were actually generated by the site's editor.
2. Forum Enhancements: in preparations for living things up a little in the foreseeable future, we've added a simple tagcloud to the forum, that will hopefully help people finding posts about more specific topics easier. Yes, I know, tag clouds are old. Better be late than never. ;)

 That's it for now.  Hopefully, we can start skipping the sick parts and just keep in the hard working parts!