I can still very clearly remember the feeling as we marched closer and closer to finalizing SMS 2.0.  It was an exciting time as Nate and I coded furiously and all kinds of preparations were made to get SMS 2 ready for primetime.  It’s been a long time since a feeling like that has descended on Anodyne, but it’s here once again as we close out M5.  It seems like just yesterday we were talking about finishing up M1 and here we are, only 2 milestones away from a finished product!  I’ll save the recap and whatnot for another blog post when everything’s finished up, but for now, M5 is finished and we’re pressing on with M6.  (It’s now theoretically possible to run a sim with Nova with little to no issues.  Sure, you won’t be able to update it, upgrade from SMS or have reports, but everything else is there.)

August saw us finalize some of the character and user management features, so with no further delays, here is the full changelog from August, covering revs 1427 through 1580.

Added

• July archive file
• Start of the LOA report
• New helper for parsing dynamic messages
• Some new icons
• Accepting pending characters
• Rejecting pending characters
• All system users management
• NPC management
• Nominating for awards
• Approving pending awards
• Rejecting pending awards
• Adding an award to a character
• Removing an award from a character
• Uploaded file management
• Lazy loading jQuery plugin
• SMS config file for use by the upgrade controller

Fixed

• Error was thrown on sim/awards page
• If a player was logged in from multiple locations, their character name would be shown in the Who’s Online listing multiple times
• Admin Control Panel looked for pending players and not pending characters (we need the latter)
• [DS9 Genre] Position was inserted into the database twice

Updated

• Language files
• Database schema
• Genre files
• Docking request form with measures to help combat spam
• Some icon updates
• Model methods
• Bio, award, mission and tour management pages can now use uploaded images
• Moved headers from the database to be language files
• SimplePie updated to version 1.2
• File structure for the install directory
• All files now use UTF-8 character encoding and UNIX line breaks
• Reflection.js plugin updated to version 2.0
• Nova config file no longer has version information so we don’t have to touch the file for every update
• Site settings uses qTip plugin instead of modal windows for help options

The other day I stumbled across a new CSS syntax/program type thing called Sass and its accompanying framework Compass.  Sass is a new way of writing CSS files that eliminates a lot of the clutter and lets you just write the CSS as simply as possible then compiles it into the proper syntax through Ruby.  It’s actually a really awesome idea and I’ve switched over the CSS development for the new Anodyne site to Sass and I’m already loving it.

It takes a little getting used to having to compile the stylesheet when changes are made, but in the long run, it’s awesome.  One of the most powerful things about Sass is its ability to use mixins which are very much like PHP functions.  Instead of constantly writing code for rounded corners, I can create a mixin and then call that mixin from anywhere in the Sass file and it’ll pull in the proper code.  It’s awesome because it means if I want all corners to be 2 pixels more rounded, I just change it in one place and re-compile and it’s done.  You can do math, set variables and a ton of other stuff.  If you’re interested, definitely check it out!

http://sass-lang.com/