Topic: Yes, I'm Alive (and almost ready with the new character builder)
Pretty much just what the title says. I got pulled away from the game mostly for a couple of weeks with various real-life things happening, but I'm working today. The new character builder is almost ready to go, and I may upload it tomorrow.
After that, I'm going to finish up Meers (the new region). While that's being done, there are times when I can work a little but don't have the necessary access to work on content (IE: Meers). During that, I'm working on the new client engine that uses MooTools 1.2 (upgrading from 1.1). The new engine also implements Mocha UI, which from a technical standpoint is really quite neat.
I'm also bringing in a variant of Sessionvars to let the chat window run from chat.atomicmonks.com instead of the normal site. This will let the game itself continue to use the game domain, but let that frame talk to the chat window to print out game messages (like stat changes and combat results). Right now both the game and chat have to share two connections for everything they do, which is a bottleneck. With this, the game will have two of its own, and chat will have two of its own (and images are already on their own pair as well). This should remove the occasional short pause while something waits for a connection, which should make a lot of you guys happier. 
Another minor side thing I want to "bring back" from version 1.0 is the Uber Store, or something like it. I'm going to take the Uber perks out of the regular perks window and give Ubers their own thing. That really helped with donations before, as the Uber Store button was always there, tempting you. People would look at it and actually pick the specific things they wanted, then go donate exactly that much. I may even do a pseudo-shopping cart thing to help that, so you could pick the things you really want and see how much you'd have to donate to get them. If I do this, the Uber Store button will be pretty small and live next to the donate button in the game.
Ok, time for dinner in this time zone!
