Hi folks… good news this time: Yesterday (on Friday, 13th, 2009 - Friday, 13th of all days) I successfully defended my Ph.D. thesis. Now some few more formalities have to be finished and then I will be able to call myself a “doctor”.And best of all… I’m free FREE *FREE* Which means: JADE Finally… after so many years… YIPPPPPIIIIIEEEHHHH! No more bad conscience because I might be neglecting something.I’ll start work this weekend (at a leisurely speed). Next things I’d like to tackle are:

• Move my SVN repository to a server where I can access it from everywhere (right now it’s only local on one notebook). Jochen has offered support for that.
• Try to enable JADE as an applet in order to be at least able to provide a simple preview via this website. This won’t be a fully playable game but at least it should give you and me something to discuss. The next step then will be early access releases to (a still unplayable) game which then will move step by step to a full game - just like ADOM but only with even more early releases (the first version of ADOM actually was playable… mostly).
• Add Spring class path scanning support to JADE in order to simplify programming extensions. It might be nice to have an extension guide starting with the very first release to see if people are interested in adding items or monsters.
• Adding a Wiki to this website in order to gather tutorials, hints and whatever in one central place. Anyone interested in that?
• Migrating JADE development to my Macbook. I bought it at the beginning of the year due to my iPhone interests but plan to use it for all creative endeavors during the next years to come - maybe at some point I even will shell out the money for a nice and shiny Macbook Air at some point… for me the incredible design just gets my creative juices flowing… which is wonderful. We’ll see…

This means that my plan from the beginning of the year (JADE by christmas) probably doesn’t work (but we’ll see about an applet based evaluation demo) - but things *WILL* be progressing.I have also considered trying to give a talk about Java programming in games - particularly in JADE - at next years JAX 2010… anyone interested in that? I just might submit a late evening talk proposal to have some fun there… we’ll see what the advisory board thinks about it ;-)As for ADOM… there is one serious support offer including a decent amount of money of a nice person interested supporting the ADOM iPhone developments. So far I could not pursue that topic due to lack of time with the Ph.D. thesis… now might be time. Since this is a rather complex topic I will write another post in the next few days asking a lot of questions (and showing a few screenshots of the early alpha version implemented by Jochen which already is running on the iPhone… to some extent… the UI issues are quite challenging… and things like saving and restoring state at *any* point in the game which is something that so far definitely is not possible in ADOM).Ok, folks. Just wanted to give you a short update. More to come soon. BTW, I’m also trying to be more active on Twitter in order to give you short and simple updates inbetween. You can either follow me (thomas_biskup), the new ADOM list or the new JADE list. I’m looking forward to see you there!