There really hasn't been much happening as I *ahem* "we" have been busy with j0rbing and such. As far as Castopulence goes, not much has changed.
The Web server host has been changed twice since the last update. Originally, some online acquaintances offered to group together on a shared dedicated server, so I *ahem* "we" decided to opt into that. That meant cancelling the original VPS (virtual private server) package.
Unfortunately, my original-original VPS host ended up sucking hard and being a jerk about the whole thing. Basically, when I *ahem* "we" originally registered our domain names we had no hosting. Some experimentation was done from the local network using dynamic DNS services to map the domain names to the ever changing IP. Eventually, a VPS was ordered and hosting was moved to there. Some time later the domain names were transferred from the original registrar to the VPS host to make things simpler. Then when I wanted to cancel my VPS service my host told me that my domains were grouped into the same package as my VPS and cancelling my VPS would mean that I'd have to re-register my domains in order to keep them; even though they didn't expire for about a year! I don't know if that's even legal, but it was clear that the host sucked and that I *ahem* "we" didn't want to deal with them anymore. Since we'd have to pay anyway, we opted to transfer our domains to a new registrar. Once that was done, we cancelled our VPS package and moved to the shared dedicated server.
Though our share of the dedicated server was no more expensive than our original hosting, it became clear that it just wasn't worth the money (no offense to the group!). All we really need right now is a simple, static Web server. So we decided to stop hosting at all for a couple of months to save some money and evaluate things. Then we realized that we could get a plenty sufficient host for a reasonable rate and here we are again.
As far as software goes, it's hard to say just what has been done since the last update from Castopulence's point of view. There has been some minor contributions to some Allegro community projects. Brandon contributed some minor features to Cumulate, a collaborative project that is itself a game: a single developer at a time is scheduled to add any single feature that they choose to the project, the goal being that it incrementally gets more and more complete. It was somewhat of an experiment, I think, and it's unfortunately gone stale for the moment. Somebody go contribute!
The official repository for Cumulate is here.
Another Allegro community project, Monday, has been "revived" by being transferred from a private Subversion repository to GitHub. We never actually contributed anything originally, though a developer console was planned. Some minor work has been done to update the Allegro 5 bindings so it will compile with the stable release of Allegro 5 (the original project was started back in 2008 when Allegro 5 was still very unstable). It still needs some work in that regard. It seems a number of community members were happy to see it preserved so maybe somebody will find the time and motivation to continue work on it now that it's been dusted off.
Some contributions were also added to another collaborative Allegro community project. It is intended to be a platform independent clipboard library. It's code can also be found at GitHub. The official repository is here. It's not very far along and somewhat of a hack, but eventually it might lead to something good. Last I heard there was some effort being put into interfacing between Allegro bitmaps and the clipboard.
A little bit further back, a very simple animation library based on Allegro 4 was developed in response to a thread on allegro.cc. It's called "al4anim" and can be found on GitHub. A more complicated project has been started with initial Allegro 5 bindings. The code hasn't been fully released yet. It is a more abstract game framework that will hopefully make future game projects easier to organize and develop. Maybe it will even become something that the Allegro community can benefit from. It would be nice to give something more substantial back. With zero games in the depot it wouldn't hurt to have something to refer to. :P
I guess that's it for now. Maybe someday soon we will find time to make some progress on a more serious project. Wish us luck!
After a very long time sitting idle, the Web site is finally starting to take shape with some content. ^_^ The site is currently "static" and I'm debating whether or not to write scripts to modify the XML or to generate the XML from a database and then build a frontend for that. It seems the only data that currently can't exist in a static form is a friendly date representation, such as "Two hours ago", but a custom tag in the XML source data could provide the PHP "engine" with all it needs to preprocess the XML before passing it on to the XSL processor and ultimately the client. It's a WIP. We'll see what comes of it as I slowly get around to filling in the pages. >_> It would respond to client requests faster if the XSL output was cached, so that's another feature that might be implemented in the near future.
