From the Programmer
Written by Invisible

After running into several issues while creating the library, I have decided to finish the input core and GUI system before continuing. I have also decided to scratch the event system I described in one of my previous articles. There would not be much gain from it, and would only complicate the code.

Yesterday I decided to fix a few bugs with HAL (an SAO bot used for moderating the chat) and was reacquainted with some fun things like ruby hashes, arrays, strings, and regexps everywhere. Once you get used to it, ruby isn't that bad of a language, especially for small projects like HAL which rely on text manipulation.


Community Spotlight
Written by pifreak and Invisible

The bot HAL might just be a program, but thanks to InvisibleMan and Acaceol, the game community benefits a lot from it. HAL has become a big part of the game because it is a connection between IRC and SAO, allowing people to read the in-game chat without needing to be logged in. It also greatly helps moderators enforce the rules. Two especially cool features are the .help and .mods public commands; if any player types them into the chat, HAL sees them and will respond with basic game help and a list of the game moderators. Helping new players is a great thing and I hope fixing up HAL will make the community nice and more newb-friendly.

There has not been much activity in Loradon except a bit of discussion in the Loradon Legends post. I hope they get something more developed and the Legends chosen, since it seems like a fun idea.

Loradon 3.0's progress is crawling along, but if you read InvisibleMan's Twitter you will see that he is working on some impressive ideas and implementing very difficult concepts into the game. I think the community will be very impressed with Loradon 3.0.