Decado

DBTech News

Quiet week this week on account of Decado being on vacation, still a few updates etc though! As a special treat @Belazor is taking over the usual "Decado's Corner" segment of the blog

Our popular DragonByte MMO skin has been updated, which you can read about here.

There have also been bugfix updates for #vbshout , #APTL , #aut , and #Infopanels . You can read about all of those in this thread.

vBAvatars v2 has also gone gold and now has a v2 Lite version, which you can read about here.



Whats Going On

@Belazor is working on an update to #vBShop and a new mod.
@Dylan is stillworking on DragonByte #Gallery 1.1
@Darkwaltz4 is still working on the #vBArcade v2 closed beta.
@Ozzy47 is still working on making #vBNavTabs for vb 4.2 Lite.
@bszopi is continuing work on a new major version of vBSlider.
@Pandemikk is working on his #registrations mod closed beta
@Mokonzi is working on his new project.
@the-danzor is still working on a new skin and should have a mock up in the few weeks hopefully.

Coming Soon

DragonByte Gallery 1.1 in the next month or so
Questions & Answers mod from @Belazor in the next few weeks.
Registration mod open beta in the next 2-3 weeks.
vBArcade v2 open beta in the next few weeks.
vBSlider v3 Beta in the next few weeks
PM management mod in the next few weeks
vBShop v3 in the next couple of weeks
New skin in the next month.


Belazor's Corner

Hello gentlemen. It is I, Belazor, your favourite blog segment usurper.

I took over Decado's segment because I have a very important message for all my fellow coders out there: Never, ever use JSON as a response type to AJAX queries when the response can in some alternate universe contain Unicode (UTF-8) characters.

Alternate title: Dear God, Make It Stop.

As a result, I got to spend somewhere around two and a half days working on rewriting the AJAX response part of 4 mods (the ones that actually return complex data sets). For you non-technical minded folks, think of what happens when someone else submits a shout in vBShout and it appears on your screen. If they happened to use German umlauts or something like that, it wouldn't work right.


In other news, if you are not already playing The Secret World (a new MMO from Funcom), then you are doing it wrong. Yes, I am absolutely going to pretend that Age of Conan didn't happen, and so should you - TSW is actually really, really awesome.

The game is set in the present day, and is about about three secret societies; the Templars, the Illuminati and the Dragon, and their fight to control the world. Oh yeah, and an endless darkness called The Filth has also settled, so the world's in shambles.

It has atmosphere and style oozing from every orifice, and if you are jumpy then it will at times scare you. This one quest had you going down a car park in what eventually amounted to total and utter darkness, only to find that your contact had been brutally murdered, so you had to make your way back up.

At this point all the lights on the other floors had gone out, and your miner's helmet was almost certainly out of battery. Suddenly, out of complete nowhere, car lights turn on by themselves with your back turned, before an angry hellbeast jumps out to maul you.

Yeah, I was a little bit scared at that point.

The game has a great narrative, enough lore and backstory that is completely optional to explore that those who are interested will never lack reading material, and a fun class-less and level-less mechanic that is intriguing.

It does come with an up-front cost and a monthly subscription, but if that doesn't turn you off the game I cannot recommend it enough.


Getting back to more DBTech related news, work on the next version of vBShop is progressing nicely. Thus far I've focused on doing / adding the small tweaks you've suggested, before starting on the bigger systems. The feature list I have to work from is the biggest one yet, and hopefully I will be able to get through a lot of it.

I look forward to your comments & feedback as always!

Thanks for reading,

Iain & The DBTech Team

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