Been a while since my last update due to university studies, as well as another project I've started working on in my spare time. The main piece of general site news is that I've been working hard to fight off a spambot infestation. Thankfully I seem to have gotten on top of it for now, although the odd one may slip through every now and then.

I've also posted a big update on the progress of Air Transport Manger, which can be seen here:

http://www.thermalsoarer.com/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=387

Right now its safe to say Air Transport manager is on hold. With studies for the final year of my degree well underway and providing a larger workload then I expected I have barely any free time right now. This hasn't however, stopped me from beginning the planning phase for the next major upgrade to the website, which this time will be mostly behind-the-scenes stuff to improve performance and usability (mainly through increased HTML5 usage) as the overall look and feel of the site I'm happy with for the time being.

At the same time as this though I am also thinking about my plans for Air Transport Manager, namely what platforms to target first and whether to make it 2D or 3D (since I'm now learning 3D modelling in 3DS Max as part of my degree).

Development of Air Transport Manager has continued to be non-existent recently, but now I am getting back into again. I've posted a full update on the ATM page.

http://thermalsoarer.com/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=13

In site news, I'm currently looking at a few more mods to add. The main one is one which allows PhpBB to accept registration/log-in requests from other sites like Facebook and Google, meaning new users won't have to register for yet another account in order to use this site. I haven't had a chance to test it yet so it won't be added soon, but hopefully it'll be ready for when I have some real ATM content to show off.

I don't know exactly how much time I'm going to be putting in here over the next few months as my job has taken a huge chunk of my free time away and I've gotten into costuming recently with a Star Wars costume well underway so I've been devoting a lot of time to that as well. On top of that I'll be starting my final year at university in September so that'll eat away pretty much all my time until around this time next year.

Development of Air Transport Manager has slowed right down to a halt recently as I've been busy focusing on other things, like my full-time placement volunteering for a local charity refurbishing computers. However, I did get lucky with this placement and managed to get hold of a great condition early Intel-based iMac so I now have a Mac environment in which to program meaning I can support the platform later on in development.

I'm hoping to get back into development of ATM soon, especially as I still intend to keep my deadline of having some form of playable content by the end of the year, even if it isn't a releasable version.

Welcome to the brand new version of my site. I've been working on this for around a year now and have made many changes to the functionality of this site. In fact, its the largest upgrade I've performed on it to date.

The first thing you'll notice is the news feed. The content comes directly from the new PHPBB forum I've added and allows me to put news items on the front page whilst still having the discussion capability the forum provides.

Also added is the new profile bar in the top-right corner of the page. This again uses PHPBB as a back-end and allows everyone to maintain one account across both the main site and the forum. Through the profile bar you can log-in/register and once logged in you can view/edit your profile, see how many private messages you have and log-out.

The navigation bar has also been given an overhaul. It now uses a different Javascript flyout menu system which allows you to choose between click to open and hover to open. The button images have been changed as well, and there is a new navigation tree below it to help quickly tell you where you are on the site and let you go back to a certain page without the need to hit the back button.

One of the biggest changes to the site though is the upgrade from XHTML1/CSS2 to HTML5/CSS3. Both the profile bar and the footer utilise CSS3 for their borders and HTML5 has been used to replace the previous Java video player. This means that the video player now instantly supports more platforms and should load quicker as there is no more need to load an external video player, instead it uses what the browser has pre-installed (although some Javascript is used to modify the controls and provide a Flash fall-back for non-HTML 5 browsers).

I've been really excited about this update for a while, and have been anxiously waiting to show it off with a public release. I still have many more upgrades planned for the site as I progress work on my game, Air Transport Manager, and browsers add support for more and more HTML 5 features.

I am also planning to create 2 more versions of the site, a stripped-down mobile version and a dedicated smartphone version, to help provide extra compatibility for the site and enhance the overall viewing experience.