September 26, 2003

Hey ! Long time no see... I'm sorry for the two-month delay... I wanted to update the website sooner, but unfortunately my webhost had the "great idea" to update their servers to something they promised would be "stronger". As a result, my account password was reset, and then they sent the new password to... my kyodai.com e-mail, which needed the new password to be read. I've seen stupid things in my life, but that... Well ! They finally put online a workaround to get the password back, I did, and could access my e-mail, but I was still unable to access my FTP account to update the website. After three weeks like that, I started to feel frustrated, because I was still waiting for them to fix the problem. In the end, about two days ago, the server went down. In four years of service, they never had more than a few minutes downtime, but this time it was different. Actually, the server is STILL down. It was more than enough for me, and I decided to switch to another host. So, if you're reading this, your provider has updated its DNS information and everything should be okay by now. I'm still unable to access e-mails sent in the last two days, though. But eventually Kyodai.com will be fully back to business. Now, what's up with the game ? I did a big mistake. As stated in the previous news update, I was looking into switching the engine to OpenGL. Well, I actually contemplated what to do for that much time ! I only recently took my decision, after buying a couple of books about OpenGL and studying the pros and cons. So I've decided to stick to DirectX, because OpenGL has its advantages, but for now it has too many drawbacks as well, and it would take me a lot of time to convert the engine. I already made a big mistake (in my opinion) when I switched from DirectX 7 to DirectX 8, which made me lose nearly a year of work (because I had to rewrite the interface engine from scratch), I don't want to take any more chances right now. Another reason is that currently my beta version is working really well, and although it doesn't have a lot of new stuff in it, it's still an improvement over v19.99. I wanted to release it during this summer, but I got fooled by my own sense of humor : if you name a version 19.99, you can only name the later version 20.00. But that version number should be for a special event, a revolutionary jump in Kyodai Mahjongg's story. The current version is not. So, I've decided to stop worrying about it, and just name it v20.00. At least, now you're warned that it won't be a killer-app... Just a good old bug-fixing release. But I'll be taking a couple more weeks before I release it. I'm currently cleaning my source code, making it easier to maintain (hopefully). Then I'll see if I can add a couple of good features to the game. One of the main advantages of the server switch, for me, is that the new one has good database support. That should allow me to redesign the website and make it completely dynamic. See what I mean...? No..? I'll try to put up a bulletin board for registered users, as well as one of these cool "online world record" hall of fame pages. This is not going to be for the next update, though. But I do have a great deal of hope concerning the future of Kyodai Mahjongg. I just had a long time without much inspiration, and I feel that same inspiration is coming back. It's not because you have the best game of its kind, that you can't make it even better, isn't it ?