GMTech Forum

The new forum look is upon us, we regularly look around and try to update the look and feel of the forum by setting up new themes and by installing new modifications. Following on from the winter theme we had for the last month, we opted to go for a theme that looked a lot like Microsoft Office and after asking the opinions of many members it was 50/50 on those who loved it and those who hated it. Well we hope that after seeing and using it for a few days that you will begin to like it more and appreciate how well it goes with the GMTech website and look of the GMTech issues. If not, then I will happily look around for another theme that will work better and keep you coming back.

Along with the new look we have also installed several modifications to allow for an even better feel to the forum, many of which were trialled on the winter theme and a few of which have just be installed along with the new theme. In the post area you will see a drop down menu for the colour, font face and font size, this allows you to select from several options to increase the appearance of your messages. You can now also write in the ‘Reason for edit’ box, if you are making an edit to your post and can change the ‘Message Icon’ a lot easier thanks to the new way it is laid out. The Advanced Visual Verification system has been upgraded to one that works, the previous would have went unnoticed by many of you, however a few members of the team were having troubles actually making posts and sending Private Messages – now that isn’t good. URL Popup and Increase/Decrease Postbox Size were two modifications added to allow you to make links to other websites/blogs etc a lot easier and increase the size of the postbox saving you from having to scroll down. Finally the latest modification that has been added is titled ‘OnOffAvatar’, quite simply it puts a green box around the posters avatar if they are online, and if they are offline it will display a gray ring. This way you can clearly see who is online and who is offline, not really needed – but it does add some colour to an otherwise ‘blue’ theme

Those are the changes to the forum and there are more to come over the next few months. We plan to change the website theme, however we are still struggling to find one that will top the current one.

This also marks the first of the GMTech’s weekly updates, so that is all until next week (or less if something really good happens).

I suggest that you all update your RSS feeds to http://gmtech.vlexo.net/feed/ or http://gamemakertech.info/feed/. Even though the same announcements will be posted on the forum and the website, the way the WordPress RSS feed is set up makes it more attractive to you. Also the website may contain some exclusive look at content, interviews with the team and other game creators. So it will be beneficial for you, to use the GMTech Website feed.

Forum Update

I am still in the process of retrieving the latest possible backups for the forum, mailing list and downloads section. However I hope that these pages will be online again in the next two weeks. The problem is that there is trouble contacting the main server provider, therefore they can’t pay the balance and thus the server won’t be turned on. Just keep checking the site, and you should be updated shortly.

Rating System Update

With YoYo Games announcing an update to their rating system, I can also reveal that we will also be changing our current system. We hope that the changes that we aim to make in a few issues time will lead to creators and gamers getting an even better understand of our thoughts towards their games.  Also with some news that there are 23,000 completed games on the YYG site – lets hope they don’t all submit them to us at once as we are a little low on reviewers and writers. If you want to apply, make your way to the submit page and find out how. With the forum being offline you can use the contact form to send through your questions.

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