Work-in-Progress Update

[voodooc]

Hey everyone! We've gone dark the last couple of weeks, so I thought I'd give you all a taste of some of the stuff coming in the next release.

* New hooking animations! No, not the one where the head is bobbing up and down: a new animation that shows the character swinging from the hook on his left arm. No longer is it attached to his back! It looks really cool, seriously. When we first got this in I spent like half an hour in 'thirdperson' mode just swinging around.

* We've made some major adjustments to the lightning gun -- it now fires a constant beam, like the plasma lasso, instead of single shots. It doesn't track like the plasma rifle, however. The Fullback now has a vaguely useful second weapon.

* We've modified the locker room to make it more obvious to new players what they have to do. We'd found that some new players would immediately 'CLICK TO PLAY' and never join the game, because they hadn't selected a team or position.

* Also included are a number of other bugfixes, including fixes to the tutorial.

We'll be releasing a major rewrite of the web site, that includes a lot of major fixes and features:

* Page load times are significantly increased, usually between 100-1000x faster. Hooray for caching and better table indexing!

* Team roster management is fully working. You can now create a team, invite players to join, and promote and demote them amongst the different ranks. A team has seven different levels of access: applicant, invitee, reserve, member, captain, coach, and manager.

* We've added levels all the way up to 30, and we've fixed the problems different accounts had with updating their level.

* Player and team lists are now paginated and sortable, and can be filtered by a few different fields.

* A new 'wall' system lets registered users comment on teams, matches, and seasons.

The new updates should be rolling out soon, keep your eyes peeled!