Exhibited Press

Some updates!

There is now a shop sales history so the notification will go there from now on instead of to your bank transactions (I know you can get swamped with this, heehee!).

Incubators now show the egg's name and ID underneath the egg picture.

Dinosaurs will now have their cause of death recorded which can be viewed on the graveyard page. The messages you receive have also been changed to reflect this -- and also, automated messages no longer come from my account. ;)

There's a back to enclosure link on dinosaur pages.

Battle points and a level up button will now appear on the quick battle sidebar.

If you search for a stud now, it will only pull studs that can breed right now (have more than 75 hunger & health, are in an enclosure and have no time left for next breeding).

There's now a back to club link on the club battle page.

I realize there's some unfinished stuff left for me to do with clubs so I'll have a tweak of them next week and finish them all up. Then, once everything is all done, I can FINALLY work on new features.

I am also waiting to hear back from one of our potential new moderators before I unleash them all on you guys. ;D

P.S. Most bugs should be smashed - YAY!!!!!!!!

So, some updates..

The contests are over! The winner of both is the lovely Clara, who took home 80 scales in total. As well as this, everyone who was on the leaderboards (the top 10 winners) received a small scale prize too.

The trophies for the contests have been given out today as well.

Hopefully everyone had an awesome Halloween! The plushie and background are no longer available - so if you missed out, better luck next year!

And now down to some serious business..


To continue on the zombie theme from this year, the donation item has changed to a brand new Zombie Scarf, which will be available for all $20 or over scale purchases this month only. What does it do? Better find out....

As noted, I have set everyone to age per login and have changed the entire system to run like this. It should be a lot sweeter now for the nightly crons and hopefully easier for me to bug fix as well. If you were set to age per day before then any logins you make today won't age dinos until tomorrow.

Yay! Happy November everyone. Only one month to go until Christmas and our yearly Advent Calendar!! :D

(I will also be announcing our new moderators this week too.)

EDIT: voting is working again!

EX is getting a bit of an art revamp. Here are some of the new artpieces:


Friends page dinos :D

And the gallery has had some new doors and noticeboard put in place:




More to come. :)

Tomorrow, as suggested, I will be putting all of the site into age per login so that there's just one system that ages things. This will take the strain off the site at midnight (when cron runs) and will make it easier for me to fix bugs regarding it (as I won't have to keep flitting between the two systems).

Have a happy Halloween guys! To celebrate this day, the halloween plushie is now available in the store. :D

SO, there are a number of updates to bless you all with today:

From now until November the 1st, a gorgeously spooky Halloween background will restock along with other backgrounds in the store. You should get one just to try it out - it's amazing. ;D



The other Halloween game has started, and it's called ATTACK OF THE BRAINS. Basically, in line with our zombie theme this year, one of those pesky zombies has left behind a trail of brains he's harvested. Your job? Well, find as many as you can before November the 1st and win win win! You can get a trophy for this if you collect 25 or more and some fabulous prizes if you get the most!



(The relevant links for more info have been added to the sidebar. ;D)

And last but not least - you may or may not have noticed but the forums have been given an overhaul, and now appear slick, smooth and very very professional. Rykos cleverly designed these babies up so much, much love to him! The boards look so shiny now!

In regards to the last post - the additional markings are still in the works and not available yet. I'll keep everyone posted. :)

We're back, everything went smoothly, and the new server is up. Emails are still being configured (le'sigh) but everything else has gone well!

During downtime, I decided to put in hex codes. Everyone put in a good argument for and against these on the forums but in the end I decided that the pros outweighed the cons. From 816 possible combinations for dinosaurs we have leapt to over 256,000,000,000,000. Of course many of these may be unnoticably different to the naked eye but they are different.

What does this mean?
- All dinosaurs have their same colors and markings.
- All lab dinosaurs will still be generated from the original 51 colors and 16 markings.
- All color potions still work and produce the same color they would have done previously.
- Custom dinosaurs can be ANY color under the sun.
- Color and marking color genetics have been removed.
- Colors and marking colors are now determined through mixing the two hexes. However:
- All breedings have a 30% chance of a dad-similar color, a 30% chance of a mom-similar color, and a 40% chance of a mix of the two.
- All breedings will now display color and marking color on chick pages.

But.. I liked genetics! Why are you limiting them?
Well, it's not permenant that dinosaurs have a couple less lines of genetics. I am planning 16 new markings for every species that you can breed for through genetics.. The art is in process for these by the lovely Semisonicstar (;D) and a preview of one of the markings is here:


A heavy pinto marked atrociraptor.


A heavy panda marked atrociraptor.


A heavy tiger marked atrociraptor.


A heavy siamese marked deinonychus.



But I still have concerns, and they are:

- People will just breed for colors now. Thanks, Kitty. -.-
The color option was aways there, and people bred for color before. Seeing as gameplay on Exhibited is NOT restricted to breeding for color or markings, I don't see this as an issue.

- What about all the muddies and horrible colors that will be bred?
First up, you can test breed, see what colors eggs are and lastly, dinosaurs die at age 100. The game can effectively push them out if nobody wants them. They aren't immortal and aren't here forever, so it's down to breeding and personal preference to determine what the gene pools are like. And if color doesn't bother you - who CARES? :D

-I don't like the way this will change the way the community does things on EX.
I don't honestly think that it will. Like I said, as there's so many gameplay options here, I view color as just a sideline thing - something you can either make your primary focus or something extra to tack on, or something to ignore entirely.

-What about all colors turning dull eventually, as people breed?
Dinosaurs will still be generated by the original 51 colors and 16 markings, and customs are always available. Let's not forget about color potions either. ;D

-But the hex codes don't always look completely "true" on dinosaurs.
This is because every species has their base coloring/shading just that little bit different. The differences are hardly worth mentioning but they are there, because I simply don't want every dinosaur being the exact same. This also adds to the challenge, I feel, and makes things more interesting. It will be the same when I bring markings in (one set of marking genes will make one marking on one species of dinosaur, but another on a different species ;)).


I think this will make things even more exciting on Exhibited and I hope everyone can appreciate this new addition. :)

P.S. - you may or may not have noticed, but we have a Halloween banner up now. Points to everyone who notices the adorable pumpkin! XD

As a heads up, I will be closing Exhibited down for some downtime on Thursday 21st October 2010 at 10am server time..

We expect to be back up sometime on Saturday the 23rd. :)

There will be no rollbacks, no missing actions, no money returned and items missing, no dinos lost. Everything up to when I close will be saved, so don't panic.

:D

EDIT: As one more *small* update, moving crates have moved to the sidebar of your farm page. Enjoy.

EDIT II: We finally have the microraptor baby.

I am aware that there is an issue with cron at the moment and I think I know why. It's happening very sporadically and randomly, and affecting random parts in random areas of the cron script. When I run them manually, they're fine, so I'm going to assume the server cron times out at random times. I can't check my email reports because the mail server is corrupted, so what's looking likely is a complete fresh reinstall of the server soon, which would probably mean a day or two of downtime. Don't panic, there won't be any rollbacks - haha! But anyway - unless it's urgent, please don't report it anymore on the boards. If you have a dino that should be able to breed again, message me the id and I'll reset her breeding days. I'd also recommend switching to aging on login for now because that seems to run a lot better than aging per day. I'll keep you all posted on progress.

To clarify: Breeding days are not controlled via login, they decrement every day regardless of if you login or not. This is why this will probably be the only thing (short of HOF) that won't work if you swap to age on login while I investigate this.

On a much lighter note!

Dino pages have a new look. ;D

They show information in tabbed, easy-to-flick-between content, which means it looks a ton more organized and shiny, and I can pack lots and lots of detail and information onto a dinosaur's page - and now it won't look cramped or squished! And hopefully, it will kill anytimes where the page has overlapped onto the sidebar.

I hope you like!

UPDATE: Some of you complained about battling taking longer. I added a "quick battle" area to the sidebar. It should be even quicker for battling than before using this. :) (It will only appear if you own the dino and it is available for battling. It also has the tendency to stretch over onto the green if you have a healing item with a name that's veeeeeeery long.)

Just to keep everyone informed, there's a couple of slight updates:

- Battles now update health in live time, so there's no longer a delay and this should hopefully avoid those accident deaths. :)

- The inbreeding intelligence penalty has been lifted - it'll just count on the inbreeding % now.

I am still reading moderator applications and have not responded to anyone yet - just a FYI! I will respond to everyone as I get round to it, successful or not. :)

- edit: Due to testing cron, I fastforwarded a couple of people's accounts (most likely to affect you if you logged in today already). To rectify this I deaged all dinos by one day.

A couple of new updates:

- The dreamsheet has been taken down. I have about 20 left to do in my inbox so I'll get around to them shortly.

- If you have any unread messages, they will appear in the userinfo box at the top next to your messages link.

- Some additions/tweaks to the moderator panel.

- The facebook sidebar item has moved to the news page only to increase page speed.

- Random events have been changed. They should now be a little bit more rare.

- There is also a *new* random event. ;O You can get this awesome new plushie from it:



(If you get that random event, comment here for lulz!)

I also have some moderator positions open also as I've had to let go a couple of mods this weekend. If you are interested, please go here for more information. :)

And regarding the second Halloween game - I'm probably going to release this around the last week of October. ;)

AND ONE FINAL THING:
I am planning a revamp of the forums and dinosaur pages soon-ish, so if they go a bit.. Strange for a little while, just ignore it. :)

*wipes sweat and steps down from soapbox*

The dream sheet isn't your personal ordering form. ;) If I've already completed yours, do NOT send another one in with things you "might have had" or "would like" - these get immediately deleted and if repeated I will be forced to issue a warning.

You'll know if I've completed yours because you'll either get a message back with all the items, or the items (sometimes it's faster for me not to drop a message back) just magically appear in your inventory.

The vast majority of you have been very reasonable and I appreciate it. :)

Please also give love to Kitei, who has been manually sending items out for me as well. <3

I will be removing the dreamsheet sometime this weekend. Anyone who logs in after that and hasn't had a chance to take a look at the dreamsheet will need to message me and we'll work something out. :)