The Driftmoon soundtrack has just become available for $5! This is a great way to support our musician Gareth Meek, so get it straight away!
"I really hope that everyone enjoys both the game and the music." says Gareth Meek. "I highly appreciate the support of anyone who takes the time to purchase and listen to the soundtrack and would like to thank them in advance for allowing me to continue to write music. Finally I would like to say a HUGE thank you to both Ville and Anne for giving me the opportunity to work on Driftmoon, I have enjoyed every minute of it and the support they have given me is so much more than I could have expected. Many thanks and I hope that everyone enjoys Driftmoon!"
I got to thinking about the end of the game, and what would happen if there was a massive battle you took part in. Here's a short test:
The sounds are obviously ridiculous, the combatants shouldn't talk about the weather while they're fighting, and it all happened too fast. Technically it worked flawlessly for our 500 combatants (many of them are outside the screen), but this test made me glad I'm not making a realtime strategy. 
Come to think of it, it might be an interesting mod, a realtime strategy using the Driftmoon engine. It would be easiest to make one where you control a single character, but if you wanted to have an all-seeing eye, you could make the player invisible and able to fly. You'd still need a way to tell other characters where to move, but I don't think that'd be too difficult to make...
Did you spot it? We've finally joined the facebook age, with our brand new Like-button! Better late than... even later! Since You are one of our valued readers - possibly also one of the clever commentors or even a higly respected Driftmoon-preorderer - I'm pretty confident we like You. Should you happen to return the sentiment, you are welcome to like us back!
Ps. Work on the Modding System is progressing very nicely. More on that a bit later.
Our old server was a virtual server from Amazon. At first I enjoyed running my Ubuntu Linux that hosted the whole affair. But soon I realized I had to install security updates every week, and every now and then bang it with a screwdriver just to run Wordpress. And it wasn't powerful enough, oh no! The server was barely adequate to serve our small userbase, being sometimes sluggish, sometimes refusing to answer outright. And yes, I had to shout at it. It could never run with the additional traffic that our new modding system would generate.
My first instinct was to rent a bigger server, but they're prohibitively expensive. What I really wanted was to make sure our webpages load fast, and that we have room for expansion if we get a sudden surge of visitors. Had you linked to us from your own Facebook page, our server would probably have crashed! That is, assuming you have a lot of friends, of course.
App Engine promises to upscale our website gracefully by adding more servers when needed, and they provide the first instance for free (at least for the moment). My language of choice was Java coupled with Eclipse, and I have plenty of experience with both. I rewrote most parts of Wordpress in Java over the past couple of days, and now I'm turning my attention to the server side of the Driftmoon modding system.
The website can now scale up to thousands of visitors per second, so feel free to tell all your friends about Driftmoon! 
PS: Did you know Driftmoon probably exists?
It's quite simply a way of showing you the currently open quests, and the tasks you need to do to complete them. You can mark a single quest as active, and the game can show you the current status of that quest. In addition to just acting as a reminder of what you should be doing, the quest log seems to be very useful in spotting new quests. Previously you had no way of knowing whether something interesting you found was part of a quest, but now you see a message that a new quest has been started.
From a modders standpoint the new system is very easy to use. The quest description and the status messages are all written to a single file. There are three script commands to change the quest status: advance quest status, force quest status, and close quest.
Using the advance command means that the status cannot go backwards. It's useful when it's possible to complete part 1 of the quest after already completing part 2, in that case you wouldn't want the quest to go backwards to state 1. The force quest status command has no such restriction. I literally spent half an hour to script in all of the current quests, so it should be very simple to use.
And yes, this handy new questlog was the most requested new feature I had you guessing at previously.
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