At last, it’s the second weekend of October and here in Chile we’re already switching to DST-based schedules. But I didn’t come here to talk about how nice it is to have sunlight past 7 PM, or to announce any plans for summer.

Instead, I came here to announce the early arrival of codename “Dorset4”, the new revision of the site’s layout, now with more CSS 3! (Really.)

It’s not really as big an update as I expected because there’s really very little to fix overall — I feel quite happy with my work on Dorset3 and save for some minor things no big improvements appear to be necessary. Of course, I introduced a couple of bugs with this revision (notably, in the Projects section index), which will be fixed over the next days. The most notable changes are the introduction of a few icons in places where it made sense, and the tidying up of the sidebar and footer, all with the purpose of presenting the most important information more cleanly than ever.

But these aren’t all the changes. Besides the stylesheet revisions, there’s also a new project page for Rei 2 IRC bot and a new separate page with information on the website. The blog has also now acquired entry paging powers, which means that multi-page articles will be possible in the future — in fact, the forthcoming follow-up to Wesnoth Evolution: 0.1 may take advantage of this new feature.

I know people in the northern hemisphere are going to freeze very soon as winter approaches, but I know I’ll still envy them in a few weeks when local temperatures start going over 32°C.

Shikadibot 0314’s replacement, codenamed “Rei II” is slowly approaching completion and now the various SVN commands offered by shikadibot (dir, file, log, repo, and a couple more) are implemented and working. Thanks to my newly acquired handle of class inheritance with Object-Oriented Perl, it’s now also possible to write Git equivalents with minimal hassle, which may become useful in the future, especially once I implement a way to query arbitrary named repositories.

This time I’m going to try to make an IRC bot that can be more easily adapted for other people’s needs, something that was a goal for Shikadibot’s development as well, but quickly went to hell as the code became the nightmarish abomination that it is nowadays.

Now codename “Rei II” has an official name and source repository: Rei 2 IRC Bot at Gitorious.org.

All progress has taken place in a private repository at AI’s server, but from now on I’m mirroring history at Gitorious for those who might actually want to take a look at the code, and — in the future — use or contribute to Rei 2’s development. The source license is and will continue to be the ISC license to allow easier integration of the code in other suites without the load of problems created by the GNU General Public License.

A project page on this very site will be coming soon.

The Battle for Wesnoth forums have been working since quite a while as an authentication source for Multiplayer server users, who can register forum accounts to claim ownership of a username, making it unavailable in MP except to people who can provide the correct login credentials. phpBB 3.0.x, however, doesn’t help a lot in regards to user registration rules since it supports more stuff in usernames than what wesnothd (the Wesnoth MP server software) does.

To fill this gap, I wrote a quick hack long time ago, and enabled it in the forums, forbidding further registrations of incompatible usernames. Nowadays, all new accounts must comply with some simple rules which my mod implements.

Only this night I bothered to actually MODX-ify the hack, which had been previously circulating in the form of a Git commit in my source tree. Now I present to you the Wesnothd Usernames mod for phpBB 3.0.7-pl1.

• Version 1.0.0 (Zip, 33.4 KiB)
  SHA1 checksum: 1229f401eeac171887cfee8c0ccecd9aaa19dd4a

This might be useful only to very few people since the whole phpBB authentication support code is barely documented — but if you find a use for this mod in your phpBB+wesnothd installation, please feel free to drop me a comment so I can know your experience and fix any bugs that you may find. Of course, it’s unlikely that there are any bugs here since this modifications has been part of the official Wesnoth.org forums for more than a year.

Long ago, I wrote a (scarcely linked) Wesnoth fortune viewer that runs on this website, using an old copy of the fortunes file which can be found in Wesnoth’s SVN trunk under /misc/fortunes/wesnoth. I wanted to build an interface with more features from that ground, but never got to it, until now.

The fortunes database for Poison Ivy, codename “Asuka”, is in development since exactly 3 hours ago, and a test tree is already online at http://shadowm.rewound.net/asuka/. It is not very functional at the moment, and the visual design sucks, but I expect to improve that soon. For now it’s possible to get safe permalinks, select the previous/next quote in the database when viewing a single entry, or let the website pick a random quote for you.

Other planned features include:

• Short excerpts in the index page.
• Author/source detection.
• Full quote index.
• Published source code, under a BSD-style license.
• Anything else I come up with in the way to 1.0.

On a more personal note, it’s amazing how much time can be saved by coming up with completely modular code design. Implementing individual features becomes then as simple as adding a few lines of code here and there. With this, I’m slowly regaining my faith on my own ability to code.

It’s a tradition for the Battle for Wesnoth community to explain what our software version numbers mean to newcomers, since these often ask what’s the difference between the stable series, and the development series, and what happens when a new stable version is defined.

A simple answer addressing the difference between odd/even minor version numbers (i.e. Y in X.Y.Z) has usually sufficed, but now that we are producing releases for the 1.9 development series, misconceptions about the next major series (2.x) spread like the plague. I wrote a clarification post a couple of months ago, on the numbering scheme — since it’s getting lost in the depths of the Users’ Forum archive, I'll replicate it here for the few anonymous people who read this.

I’m also going to explain what’s the deal with this magic “2.0” version number, although that part is going to be a lot more subjective — in other words, I’ll address that subject from my own point of view instead of the development team’s.