Hello digital vampires! I’m referring, of course, to those among you who are undead, capable of turning into an adorable flying mammal, and who have had their blood states recently simplified. Trunk players probably know what I’m talking about, and soon, the rest of you will as well. We’ve been bad, greedy devs, binging on our source code and commits and template metaprogramming and querying the current scissors, but not giving you any Trunk Updates during the 0.24 cycle. I’ll try to make amends with a big Trunk Update post for all of 0.24 soon. It might take us a bit longer to write up those changes, so let’s get some important dates out there right now.

The 0.24 release will (tentatively) happen on Wednesday 23 October, and that the 0.24 tournament will (definitely) happen on 20:00 UTC Friday 25 October through 20:00 UTC Sunday 10 November. We’ll be getting a tournament page up and running very soon as this tournament date is only a week away! Watch out for a future post with the new tournament URL.

We’ve been in the feature freeze since 9 October, and the 0.24 stable branch is already available, soon to be hosted on servers. We’ll be making balance tweaks and bugfixes until release next Wednesday. Online players, please help us test the 0.24 beta by playing the 0.24 branch when that’s available or trunk until then.

Finally, let’s talk about a red dragon THAT TALKS LIKE THIS. As many of you know, the CXC server in France recently went offline after a recent server issue. Medar and Zkyp had graciously hosted CXC for many years, but no longer have time to do so. Thankfully, an admin who goes by Namanix has stepped up to host a new server using the current CXC domain. Namanix tells me that the replacement server is ready and the domain transfer should be complete by 8PM CET on 18 October. All data for logins, current and past games, morgues, ttyrecs, etc should eventually be transferred over to the new server, and games will be played at the same CXC Webtiles URL and SSH host as before. Once again, thanks to Medar and Zkyp for hosting CXC all those years, and thanks to Namanix for taking over the (dragon) reins.

See you all around the lava pit, tossing your blood potions into the fire!