I’m experimenting with a new blog format – namely one which uses Tumblr. I’ll be migrating the rest of the posts over and will more than likely map the old permalinks to the new Tumblr entries. Tumblr seems to strike an ideal balance between power and ease/speed of use, and as much as I like Wordpress, I think the future of blogging lies on more ‘connected’ services such as this.

The home page of the website will be more like the Rotates.org of old, and will include links to current projects or items of interest. It’s been a blast putting it together with Tumblr’s fantastically simple template language and thanks to being able to edit the CSS and Javascript in realtime via Web Developer and Firebug. You can check on the progress of the new blog over at http://blog.rotates.org/ – have fun and let me know what you think!

I’ve been exceptionally busy with work, and only had the energy left to play Global Agenda on an evening – I’ve not made any progress with Archaos since the last update but once I’ve gotten this swathe of hard labour out of the way, I’ll be finishing the server, building a basic client and inviting people to begin beta testing. Sorry to those few of you who are still checking the site every day (I love you all!), I will have goodies for you soon – promise!

As another little aside, I’ve hacked in some configuration for Chaos Enhanced. Use the form below to launch a game with your desired settings – though please note that this is an abandoned demo with missing features and bugs!

Forgive the awful form and jQuery... it was quick!

The Archaos server now validates, processes and outputs a full turn of human interactions. This is a pretty major milestone in the development process, and I’m very happy with the results so far:

{
  "turn" : 1,
  "phase" : "move",
  "interaction" : "sequence",
  "finished" : true,
  "actions" : [
    {
      "type" : "move",
      "player" : "lewster32",
      "time" : 1263682234,
      "data" : {
        "piece" : "p0",
        "path" : [
          {
            "x" : 1,
            "y" : 7
          }
        ]
      }
    },
    {
      "type" : "end_turn",
      "player" : "lewster32",
      "time" : 1263682234
    },
    {
      "type" : "move",
      "player" : "bobster16",
      "time" : 1263682234,
      "data" : {
        "piece" : "p1",
        "path" : [
          {
            "x" : 13,
            "y" : 5
          }
        ]
      }
    },
    {
      "type" : "move",
      "player" : "bobster16",
      "time" : 1263682234,
      "data" : {
        "piece" : "p3",
        "path" : {
          "x" : 11,
          "y" : 4
        },
        "flying" : true
      }
    },
    {
      "type" : "end_turn",
      "player" : "bobster16",
      "time" : 1263682234
    }
  ]
}

I’d like to mention the huge amount of support, encouragement and fantastic resources provided by certain people of late. @andy_herbert has been a fantastic vocal advocate and provider of much inspiration and technical knowhow (he’s an utterly brilliant multi-talented programmer in his own right) and I owe an awful lot to his ‘cheery’ tone on Twitter!

Secondly, I’d like to shout out a big hello to the Slashdot horde, who accosted the site a few days back. I got a hell of a lot of visits from these guys and I’m sure it’s helped spread the word about Archaos (even if that wasn’t actually my intention) and more importantly the Chaos scene in general!

Finally, a big thanks to @Zolyx for mentioning the project on his blog along with the other fantastic Chaos projects out there – muchos appreciated!