Today I finished converting the Millenipede and Poing! PC pages into the new site format, which is cool - it’s been slow in happening (isn’t eveything with Firestorm? ) but better late than never.

Meantime, the world waits in hushed anticipation for the release of the first new version of Dwarf Fortress in over nine months - and judging by the stuff Bay 12 Games have been talking about on their development log, it’s going to be even more staggeringly detailed than ever before, despite its old version being a masterpiece in its own right. At some point today, the updated download link will hopefully appear. Edit: It’s out now, so go and enjoy a new ASCII-filled adventure!

Like a fair few other people around the UK, I spent last night watching the tense finale of the 2007 Rugby World Cup. Considering that our England boys were absolutely crushed by South Africa the last time we played them, the end result was actually pretty fair and nothing to be disappointed by. Still, in the second half, I can’t help but say anything other than “What?! Ref, that was a try!” Final score: South Africa 15 - 6 England. Make sure you enjoy it, ‘cos we want it back in 2011!

With that sporting bulletin out of the way, time for some proper news about the current state of Mordor: Return to Dejenol. As usual there’s nothing to report that really pushes the envelope in terms of excitement; editors and GUIs aren’t exactly thrilling things. Grinding onwards, work on the Guilds editor panel is moving fairly well and should start having functionality added to it during the coming days.

Some interesting indie releases, too, this week: Battleships Forever is a real-time strategy game that has some very detailed combat and damage mechanics, and Space Capstar II is a smoothly-executed flash game similar to Thrust. Both are worth taking a peek at. Also, though they’ve been out for a while, you might want to browse the entrants to IGF 2008 that were recently announced.

Last, but most certainly not least, Retro Remakes have put their brand spanking new Showcase online. If you’ve been missing the A to Z list of remakes since they redesigned their pages a while back, fear not, because now you’ll be able to find what you are looking for in double quick time. Kudos to Oddbob and The Codex for their coding wizardry!

Erp. Seems like the site had some downtime yesterday - at least, I paid my daily visit and couldn’t get in. I’ll keep an eye on things and be ready to harass the hosting people if it happens again.

I’ll (maybe) post some proper news tomorrow. Meantime I’m off to hack some more code into mah computer box…

Ah yes! A tweak here and a tweak there - it’s all coming together quite nicely now.

Mordor: Return to Dejenol is inching forwards in fits and spurts. Revealed exclusively on its homepage last week, some new art (shown on the right) was created for the intro sequence, and the editor’s Guild interface will start being pieced together once some tweaks to the record ID system have been made. There’s still so much to do… best be cracking on with it, eh?

I re-added the Fellow Developer section and am looking out for a Wordpress poll widget that won’t take too much effort to customise so that it fits in with the site theme. Typically, this has turned out to be more difficult than it sounds Can’t be without it, though, ‘cos I know you all really miss the utterly pointless polls each month!

A little bird on the Retro Remakes forums tells me that Ovine by Design is nearly ready to release the hotly anticipated Exile II onto an unsuspecting audience really soon. A brave platoon of beta testers have been assembled who should be squishing the last of its bugs as I write this, so with any luck the rest of us won’t have long to wait until we get our paws on a cracking remake of a tremendous game. Also released to a completely different set of testers was Dr. Derek’s Wizball remake. The original was a blast, so it’ll be good to see an up-to-date version some time in the next week or so (if we’re lucky).

After a mad typing frenzy, most of the old site’s pages have been re-added - the only thing missing is the page for Oil’s Well Redrilled, and I’ll deal with that tomorrow. I’d also better put the Fellow Developers banner links back soon, otherwise people might start shouting at me - and that makes me sad Later still I’ll think about some “titivation”, like adding some fancy whizzbang gadgets to the sidebar. But that’s for a spare moment of boredom… there’s plenty more important work to get done first!

The question that’s probably at the front of your mind is something like “Why on earth was September such a quiet month?” - well, amongst other things that were happening in the otherworldly place known as “Real Life™“, I was hauled off to do jury service. Now although it’s a very important and valued civil duty (at least that’s what it said in the paperwork… ), it doesn’t exactly fit in well with computer programming. To make matters worse, my laptop decided to die on me for the second time with a graphics fault, and this time it’s no longer in warranty. Cue lots of enlightening discussions with Dell’s technical support boffins. Fortunately the part it needs is relatively inexpensive - just today the order was confirmed, so within a week it should be working again. Hurrah! Will the optimism work? Answer: of course it will, haha!

Lastly, for no apparent reason, I’m enclosing a picture of a marmot. Because frankly, they just don’t get enough press coverage these days. Yes, you’re right… I’m quite mad