Posted: July 06, 2008, 06:40:24 AM by Roph

Everybody welcome Anski and Dr_Swordopolis as moderators, and congratulate Modern Algebra on moving up from a regular moderator position to being a super moderator

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Posted: May 10, 2008, 07:38:48 AM by Roph

This has been in a so-called prototype stage for quite a long time. I'd been talking about a new crankeye.com for ages, and many people thought the previous site (which is quite similar to the RMRKthree forum theme) was the result of it, but the truth is that it was merely temporary.

Today, after much writing, scripting and yelling at lesser browsers, *cough* IE , I'm happy to announce the new site is finally ready

If you're not reading this via the site already, give this link some love and check it out. Things that are different and / or improved over before are as follows:




Hope you enjoy the new look and features! .

Of course, I've tested every angle, scenario and browser I can think of, (it turns out, I made it Valid XHTML without even trying), and I already know of one small error with the "top" link in Internet explorer, but if you notice anything possibly wrong, it's more likely to be looked at if you report it in this thread.

Any comments, praise, complaining or discussion on anything purple is also encouraged 

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Posted: May 02, 2008, 06:58:33 AM by Roph

For those of you who are not already reading this from the main site, you'll now see a featured project listed above the main news, as well as a special Featured Projects Page. We are aiming to provide a pick of some of the best finished (or well underway with playable demos available) projects.

For now, these are chosen by staff, but we may open it up for members to participate with voting or some other system in the future. Congratulations to hima, whose U.S.G. ~ A New Beginning ~ project is the first! 

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Posted: April 30, 2008, 01:52:24 AM by Roph

After we polled you on it and the result came back as 100% in favour, we got to work on an application system.

Now we're proud to announce the avialability of Project Subforums for RMRK Users!.

When a team is working on a serious project, if often becomes cumbersome for it to live in a single thread.  We're sure older members will remember the Final Fantasy Crankeye project. Searching through the thousands of posts was definitely not the most effective way to keep track of progress.

Project Subforums from RMRK intend to fix that - with your own Project Subforum, it is easy for members of a team to collaborate together while seperating certain topics out into different threads. Not every team would like their discussion out in open view either, and hence your forum is by default protected by a password that only your team knows.

To help with managing your subforum, you as the team leader will have moderation powers over it, though you can also assign additional trusted members with the same powers.


If you're interested in applying for a subforum for your project, simply go through our application process.

This is a new feature and for now, it is restricted to older members. The application page will tell you if you qualify to try it out. And of course, this being RMRK, our subforum feature is and will always be entirely FREE

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Posted: April 14, 2008, 11:04:25 PM by Roph

Fellow game creation site Gaming World have just announced a contest beginning from now until April 28th, open to any person (or group) to create a short, up to roughly one hour or so game.

The top prize is $300, 2nd place will receive $100, and a third place winner will take home $50.

Any method or maker may be used to create the game, and there are some guidelines that entries must follow in order to be eligible.

For more information on the requirements and how to participate, view Gaming World's announcement. Good luck to any entrants!~ 

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Posted: April 10, 2008, 07:54:49 AM by Roph

 

1) RMRKPlayer has been redone, now with 60% more purple:


get the new version here. It's been rebuilt optimised for flash 9, not sure if it'll run more efficiently or whatever though =o

2) I've been working on this secret little function for a while now, and it's gotten to a stage where it's working pretty well, so it's time to make it not so secret If you check this url: http://rmrk.net/?action=radio, you'll see RMRK's radio status page. If the radio is up, it'll display nifty stats such as this:


3) Accessible from that page is an entirely online player which will run in a new little browser window, no need to install anything =). This is probably the most experimental part:


Comments welcome 

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Posted: April 06, 2008, 04:49:41 AM by HaloOfTheSun

We've brought the guilds back. 

If you don't know what I'm talking about, the guilds are two teams competing to make the better RPG Maker game in a time limit of 3 months. More info on the past (and only) attempt at this can be found in the Wiki.

Everyone is invited to join. All those interested just need to post here.

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Posted: April 03, 2008, 09:31:22 PM by Roph

This will work in reverse order, starting at the bottom and working up to the top. Each additional level of power will have the new abilities listed. Sound confusing? Don't worry, read on 

Single Board Moderators
Outside of their assigned boards, these look and have the powers of any regular members, though inside their assigned boards they are able to move or delete posts, split threads and lock topics. They are noticeable either from having their names listed in the forum description, or by the green dots () in their postbits. If you have a problem with something in a certain board and their powers cover it, you should probably try contacting one of them first 

RMRK Mod -

Powers identical to single board moderators, though their power applies to the whole of RMRK. They can also see and access the private mod forum.

RMRK Mods in alphabetical order:

Falcon
GilgameshRO
Jalkson
modern algebra
Tsunokiette
Zeriab


RMRK Super Moderator -

All the powers of RMRK Mods and in addition can manage forum bans and have limited account editing functions. They can help you with username changes or give out / edit custom titles. They're also not restricted by adding or subtracting rep.

RMRK Super Moderators in alphabetical order:

Arlen
Arrow-1
Malson
Nouman


RMRK Admin -

Of course, all powers as per the previous groups, but also board administration. Can directly manage the forums themselves, post news items such as this, edit membergroups (such as promoting people to Extra Access or RMRK+ and so on.

There's currently only one RMRK Admin:

HaloOfTheSun


Super Administrator -

Super admins can do absolutely everything. Every last corner of the forums is available to us, as is the server itself. We handle the domains, servers, main site (News works through the forums), finances and the like.

There's 2 Super admins, though I seem to be the only one ever around  :

Crankeye
Roph

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So there it is, a nice up to date list of everyone that makes RMRK possible . If you need help with anything that isn't private, remember to use the board support forum, but otherwise, try and use some common sense in who you PM 

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Posted: March 26, 2008, 08:35:30 PM by Roph

Seeing what comes in and what goes out involving running RMRK is easy, since the only money received online is from Google AdSense and the donations, and likewise the only money that goes out online is towards the machine that's serving you this very page and things that run on or related to it.

One such thing is domain names, a bunch of which were renewed and are now good till well into next year.

As for the server itself, RMRK runs on a VPS/VDS from the fine folks at ServInt, and you may remember this news post back in january where we moved up to a more powerful one.

This fixed the occasional speed problems cropping up every now and then, but is also what bumped up our running costs to the $100/mo mark. For a site that makes as little as RMRK, that's not so pleasant, and it quickly became obvious that donations would have to play a bigger part in survival. You guys definitely came through, we sailed through the January & February $89/mo bills as well as renewing domains, which sucked up all the donations and also most of the cash we had left.

Moving from our old VPS into the larger one could possibly best be described as moving from a small appartment into a mansion. While we were sometimes getting cramped in the apartment, we could octuple our guests in the mansion and still hear echoes down the hallways:

Granted, that is a snapshot of right now, and is a little quiet in comparison to normal, but it's still showing underuse.

We tried various different experiments to see how we could become more efficient, and weren't without a few bumps in the road, though it's largely a success. RMRK is now running stable on a reconfigured database as well as freshly tweaked software. It's the same optimisations that will now give you search results quickly, taking a few seconds at max (even for queries that return more than a thousand results, try "maker") instead of sometimes over a minute.

Now you're up to date on what's been happening, here's what is going to happen now.

Again to mention our host, ServInt, they recently boosted every VPS offering, increasing exactly what was causing us trouble. So, increased resources, as well as optimisations to reduce our resource usage also. Do you see where this is going? =)

For a few days earlier this week, we were actually back on our old plan in order to test, and things have been peachy. I put in a request, and starting next cycle, we wil be back home in our comfy appartment. This will lower our running costs again, shaving off $40.

So what now? You may remember, if you check the RMRK, Its finances, and you post, that we were expecting google to next fill our wallet in April, or possibly May. We hit the magic balance with google too late in february, so it will indeed come in April and cover RMRK's (newly lowered) bills for both April and May. This just leaves us with this month's (March) bill, which is the plain old $89. Our reserve is $40 and a few cents.  .

For the tl;dr crowd: We need one last wave of support.

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Posted: March 24, 2008, 07:08:57 PM by Roph

RMRK's #crankeye IRC chat channel is moving from AcidChat to the newly merged Slacked/Staticbox.

RMRK does not actually host its own IRC network as it may seem at a glance, the "irc.rmrk.net" that people are instructed to connect to is merely a forward for whatever network the channel is currently on. This makes it easy for users, since if they configure their clients to connect simply to "irc.rmrk.net", they'll automatically always end up at the right locaiton. RMRK's Java chat has already been setup.

A news post is still needed though, to let people know who connect directly (if you were connecting to irc.acidchat.net, you should now connect to either irc.slacked.org or irc.staticbox.net. Ideally, use irc.rmrk.net), and to let people know that they will need to re-register their nicknames.

Why move?

- Niche. Slacked/Staticbox is more gaming orientated, they already support various game dev sites out there, and they were happy at the proposition to accept us
- More feature rich. Now we will finally have a decent auto-voice solution, logging, statistics, and also bots. None of these are ran by users, they run on the network itself.
- Stability

Do I need to change anything?

If you join chat and connect to irc.rmrk.net and still find yourself in the old channel on the old network, you could wait for your DNS to update with the new location (you don't need to do anything, just wait and try later), or for now connect directly to irc.slacked.org or irc.staticbox.net.

Since it will come up

Yes, slacked is the home of #rmxp and RMXP.org. We're aware there was possible conflict in the past, but the entire site has both been revamped and had a change of management, and now both sides' administration shares a friendly relationship. You are advised to read more on our RMXP.org article.

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