Happy New Year, it's Santa tracking time...

Welcome to the end of 2024, as the UFD prepares to boldly march its way into the new year with another major Cogmind release! Soon enough they'll be ready to show you what they can really do...

Looking back, though, as mentioned in my annual review over on the dev blog this week it's been a great year, and in no small part due to your support.

In specifically Beta 15 progress this month I was adding a ton more items, already 63 more than the X1 prerelease last month xD

Many of these belong to a whole new category of items called Concept parts, with a new Cep. prefix. Not quite all, however, for example this Jetlance I'm sure some will enjoy stabbing things with.

Then more recently came a few new robots to tangle with... And with that all the pieces should be in place to put together the Protoforge itself. Can't wait!

Of course as if on cue to ruin my December plans, my website server updated to a major new PHP version, breaking my blog earlier this month. So yeah I had to troubleshoot and update some of the PHP to keep it operational, being the rather important source of information that it is!

Given the underlying cause of those issues I was kinda surprised to see the forums appeared to be mostly working as expected (aside from still generally failing to send out notification emails, and having suddenly stopped processing new accounts this week, which I'd look into later...). It turns out that no, I definitely did not dodge that bullet, either. Later on the forums probably ran some maintenance, triggering more scripts which blew the whole thing up. Yay (not yay), more web work!

This was even more serious, since I could no longer continue to use my theme of ten years, so had to find a replacement. I don't want to spend a ton of time editing it to my liking, but the new one is at least decent after minor edits. Also had to update all my mods, and change a bunch of settings, but it's operational again and works even better than before, so that's nice! I wrote a summary on the forums here.

Oh yeah over the weekend I also added realtime streaming of combat log data to an external file, which has been asked for a few times so far--not sure what aoemica will do with that but hey it's a new feature :)

As usual around holiday periods I contemplate taking advantage of the opportunity to put out something special (and struggle with the desire to instead get on with the main show :P), but website issues really ate up a lot of extra time coming into the end of 2024...

Not going to leave you hanging, though! I bring news of another potential distraction making its way into Complex 0b10...

Ho ho beep!

Once upon a winter, there was a time when the deadliest of Haulers would make their way through the corridors, spreading destruction and gifts alike to anyone brave enough to face them in battle.

They are not shy and will announce their presence, though you may need to track them down. Having a Transport Network Coupler is helpful in this regard, though if you're like me in my test run earlier today you'll just get lucky and walk out a door only to come face to face with one of these deadly abominations.

Do you dare poke the Sauler? They're not alone. And they poke back.

If you dare, you can activate Cogmind's Sauler mode using the normal special mode access methods as described in the manual, in this case the command line option is specifically "-forceMode:Sauler"

You don't need to download anything new to do this--it's in Beta 14 and Beta 15 X1 ;)