While completing M1 was a big accomplishment for the progress of Nova, completing M2 is even bigger.  We’re now only a couple of days away from completing the second major development milestone for Nova.  M1 was big because it laid the groundwork.  M2 is bigger because it represents real progress on the system as a whole.  It’s allowed us to go back and fix some thing from SMS that always bugged us (and probably you too).  From here, we start on the big chunks, but there will be more on that later.

Today, I checked in some of the last development pieces for M2 (the other things on the todo list are house cleaning type of things).  The first was a docking request form.  Because of how much secondary rosters would play a part for a base, we’ve decided not to put docking request stuff in the database right now.  We have some ideas for things we can do for bases and want to have the chance to fully explore those options and make sure we’re doing them right in a future update (likely 1.1).  In the meantime, we’re providing a basic form (actually the same one from SMS) that people will be able to fill out.  The game masters will be emailed the application and will be able to email the sim CO who applied back.

The other piece is a new feature on the player bio page: character rank history.  Whenever a character tied to a player has their rank changed, the database will track it, so you’ll be able to see your promotion (and demotion) history and the date that it happened.  At this stage, we’re not allowing a reason to be added, but we may add that in a future release.

Those were the last two things to land and from here it’s just patching up some documentation and some other odds and ends before we declare M2 complete and move on to M3.  Also, keep your eyes peeled for a major announcement later this week.

SMS is getting some love these days with a slew of updates coming in the next couple of weeks.  The first one is something that’s bugged me for a while, namely the translucent HUD display for doing many of the actions found throughout the admin control panel.  It’s a great feature, but the biggest issue was that my use of the HUD was limited to testing and not in a real environment.  Now that my own sim is using SMS 2.6, I can see how annoying the translucency really is.  Plus, over the last few months, people have reported issues with some of the images not loading (especially in IE) and other various display issues.  On top of that, it’s hard to distinguish the modal pop-up from what’s behind it.  That’s a lot of things and there are a bunch of fixes coming:

• We’re updating Facebox from version 1.0 to 1.2.  Originally, I’d thought the API was too different, but after doing a bunch of research, it turns out it’s exactly the same.  Not sure where I had the idea in the first place, but regardless, it’s coming in 2.6.8.
• To make sure your focus is entirely on the modal pop-up, we’re using a new feature from Facebox 1.2 that puts a dark overlay over everything but the modal window, thus ensuring that you’re not losing your focus.
• There are now 3 ways to close the modal pop-ups: 1) clicking the close button, 2) hitting Escape, and 3) clicking outside of the modal window.
• Finally, we’ve flushed out all the images in the modal window and gone to a completely CSS layout.  That means no more crazy translucency issues.  It should be a lot cleaner now.  Also, if you’re using Firefox or Safari, you’ll notice rounded corner courtesy of the CSS3 border-radius property.  If you’re using IE, the corners will be square since IE doesn’t support the property yet.

Another change that’s coming is some fixes to bio editing.  People have been reporting more and more issues with going to edit an NPC and the NPCs rank isn’t the same color as their own.  When they get to the edit bio page, it automatically changes the rank to the color of their own rank instead of keeping the one that already exists.  To counter this, we’re doing some logic to make sure rank classes line up.  If they don’t, we’ll just display the rank and a link to an explanation about why they can’t edit the rank.

On top of those two changes, there are some minor bug fixes coming as well.  Finally, starting with SMS 2.6.8, we’re officially requiring that PHP’s short tags are turned on.  The verification script has been changed to reflect that and we’ll be changing all our documentation as well.  Not sure when we’ll get this out, but there will definitely be a soft release period because of the big changes to modal windows, so keep your eyes on the forum for more info.

2008 comes to a close and we’re another month closer to having Nova finished up and out the door.  (Mind you, it’s still a long ways away, but it’s closer than it was a month ago.)  While there may be enough work going on to warrant weekly checkin updates, I’ll admit to being a tad lazy, so for now, I’m sticking with monthly.  December was a busy month for Nova development and we’re proud to say that we’re quickly approaching the end of the second development milestone.  With that being said, here’s a list of things we accomplished on Nova in December (covers revs 156 through 240):

• Added next/previous links to viewing of posts, logs, and news items
• The join form, in its entirety, driven completely out of the database
• Lots of installation updates (test data as well as schema updates)
• Added a Firefly genre (still waiting on rank images from the Kuro-RPG forums)
• Added the reflection Javascript plugin as well as the Lightbox plugin
• Added sub departments to the manifest
• Lots of work on finding out the best way to handle fonts so they look the same across browsers and operating systems (and it isn’t easy!)
• The specs and tour items are now driven out of the database, giving admins a lot more control over them
• Updating the models with new methods
• Bug fixes
• Email templates
• Started to work on the update controller
• Added the ability to toggle news items on and off like the manifest
• Added the ability for multiple images to be associated with missions, meaning that a gallery can be created for each mission
• Updated the system to send out emails when it’s supposed to
• Combadge images are now generic with the option to use seamless substitution from 2 locations instead of just 1 (assets/common/GENRE/images or each skin)
• Lots of documentation work

That pretty much glosses over what’s been keeping us busy over the month of December.  We did crunch the number the other night and for those who think work is stagnating, here are 2 numbers to crunch:

• 150+ – the number of files we’ve added to Nova since the beginning of October
• 27,000+ – the number of lines of code that have been added to Nova since the beginning of October.

We’ve moving in the right direction and in 2 short weeks will start moving in to the third development milestone.  There will be lots more on that from the Nova preview site when it happens.  Also, people should be keeping an eye out for a major announcement in the next few weeks.  Hope everyone had a fantastic holiday season and here’s to some kick-ass work on Nova in the coming months!