Release/all

Greetings, citizens of Whirled! As you will have already noticed, today we made a major change to the Whirled user interface.

First, a little background on this; I've wanted to overhaul the Whirled UI for a long time, not least as it's been mostly unchanged for over a year and a half. I personally found many of its aspects frustrating and felt that it was limiting our ability to bring in new folks. We have a lot of exciting new things coming for Whirled and this is setting the groundwork for those.

Secondly, it's obviously going to take some getting used to. Please give this a bit of time before deciding whether you like it or not. It took us a while to get comfortable with it in internal testing.

This thread is for sensible and calm discussion of the change -- hysterical or pointless posts will be edited or deleted, so please play nicely! I know it's been a while since we made major changes, and that's exciting and scary! Expect more fun stuff soon and remember, we're still in beta!

The three major changes you'll see today are:

• Whirled is white! We did this because I have long-felt that our black colour scheme is offputting. Browsing the web it's very rare you come across a black website. This is probably going to take the most getting used to, and there are some wrinkles that still need to be ironed out, but I hope you'll like the change once you've given it time.
• The Flash client and chat now always remain on the left of the screen, with the 'web' parts of Whirled (Me, Stuff, etc.) appearing on the right hand side of the screen. This gives the Flash part of Whirled primacy in the user interface and avoids a anomalies of the previous system (scrollbars side by side, flash client bouncing right and then left, etc.) It's a little weird with the Flash client closed, but we'll be doing some stuff to address that in the future.
• The Flash Client is always full-height, centering your room or game in the middle of the screen instead of scrunched up in the top-left (or right with a tab open!) before. We'll be giving you more control over the size of the room view in the future, but for now all rooms will be shown at 500 height. As a consequence, there's a lot of white space around the room on larger displays, and the need for the 'side bar' chat option has gone away.

Those are the big things, a list of details follows below:

Web changes:

• New color scheme, with white background
• New navigation tabs
• New subnavigation bar (the links under the tabs)
• Web content is now to the right of the Flash app
• The Flash app always fills all available space
• New Whirled logo

Flash app changes:

• Rooms are scaled to have their height set to 500
• The "zoom" functionality is temporarily suspended
• Rooms and games are centered and given margins
• "Side bar" chat has been removed
• Notifications popup list toggle is now on the far right

Known issues:

• Major glitches with some flash furni and videos in rooms will be fixed soon!
• The bottom of the status panel (coins|bars|level) goes behind the navigation tabs if the window is narrower than about 900 pixels.
• The notifications toggle doesn't line up right
• White Scrollbars in the flash client do not have a 'top' to them
• The highlight on 'chat waiting' is far too subtle, a new one will be along shortly.
• Playlist text is white on white. Oops!

Unknown issues:

• Maybe lots! Please post bug reports to <Bug Hunters>, be sure and read first to avoid duplicate posts.

Thanks again,

- Cleaver

An itty bitty release today:

• Bling pool distribution fixed!
• New contest page with a really awesome Halloweeny Whirled swirl in it.

Howdy folks,

We are once again pushing out some internal changes to more effectively debug and move towards our next features. Any wild speculations?

Good morning comrades,

This is not a very exciting update. We had a lot of internal changes that needed to get pushed out before we started our next round of work. There is, however a bug fix:

• When you are in a room with a puppet (clone) of your friend, you will not be prevented from visiting that friend by clicking their name in your friend's list.

That is all, Over and out

Hello Whirledelicious ones! Another small but juicy update:

• We found a likely cause for the deep-down bug that was causing Whirled Beat to fall over every couple of days, and would no doubt eventually have triggered for others games too. We even fixed the bug!
• Uploaded games that are not really games can now be identified as such by Agents, after which they receive no share of the bling pool.
• Fixed game invitation links in the lobby interface.

May all your eggs be hatched.

Howdy, we've got a few small changes for y'all today. In contrast to recent "mostly internal changes" updates, this one is "mostly little fixes":

• Group invitations now show the name of the group even when the group is exclusive.
• Group invitations now contain a link to the group so the recipient can more easily preview it.
• Game invitations now respect block lists, i.e. you will not get game invites from people you've blocked.
• The play button in game invitations now works.
• Group pages now display correctly when view by an unauthenticated (not logged in) user.
• All game editing pages are now located in a new area of the site, "edgames". Please let us know if any game-editing related links stop working.

That is all

We are working hard but have very little to show for it. Fiddlesticks!

• Mountains upon mountains of internal changes, mostly Facebook related
• Some tweaks to the group invite mail messages

Bye for now, have fun!

Not sure what that is supposed to mean, let's all think about it, shall we?

There are only a few internal changes in today's release, but they needed to get pushed out before the next round o' stuff.

Farewell and have a Happy Whirlin' Friday and Weekend!

Greetings all, just a few little things today:

• Fixed server booch that was breaking a lot of AVRGs, usually some time around midnight
• Your level may now increase while you are not logged in. Previously you had to log in to effect a level gain. An unfortunate side effect is that earnings made in games do not affect your level until later (approximately on game exit) rather than at the time of notification. There are some very exciting technical reasons for this.
• Shop paging no longer shows the total number of pages. This was major database harassment.
• A slew of internal changes

Thanks, keep on whirlin'

Friends,

Hopefully just a bugfix release (unless something else snuck through the interdimensional portal of doom) -- sorry about the lag introduced yesterday, this should squash it flat.

Hi everyone, today's release is not nearly as exciting as its date. Here are the changes:

• Searching the shop on tags should once again work for everyone
• Other internal changes

Enjoy and have a happy centennial 9/9/9.

A tiny bugfix release this morning -- just to turn back the reporting/flagging interface for everyone. It had accidentally been turned off whenever the tagging widget wasn't shown.

Peace!

Salutations! Just a few wee bits:

• Streamlined game item publishing:
  • The listing status is now displayed by each item (either "out of date", "up to date" or "not listed")
  • A "list" link is shown for the unlisted ones
  • An "update" link is shown for the out of date ones
• Items can now be tagged only by the items' creator or Club Whirled members
• More fixes to lag
• Fixed a bug that may have affected some AVR games

Enjoy.

PS Apologies for the long restart time, there were some problems with shutting down the servers, probably caused by people having too much fun.

Howdy,

Not much to report this time around, just a few wee tweaks:

• The notifications that appear along the tool bar while you are in a room are now greatly reduced.
• Internal improvements and fixes, including some more attempted lag reduction

Enjoy!

-The Whirled Dev Team

Hello friends of Whirled. Today's release features only one significant change; the contents of the Shop front-page is now only recalculated every 10 minutes, in the background.

This should save the database machine from having to do enormous calculations on megabyte after megabyte of data, several times a second, just to conclude each time that the result is the same as it was for the last 400 times.

What this means:

• Hopefully the lag is gone for now. Maybe.
• Favoriting or defavoriting an item is not going to noticeably affect its position in the list for a couple of minutes. Oh well!

Hello everyone! Today's is a small release:

• New shop front page! Apart from the benefit of not melting the database, we hope it will also provide you with enhanced shopping joy.
• New Whirled SDK - enhancements to some utility classes. No new API functionality.

Womble well.

Good afternoon,

We have a modest set of updatey goodness for you:

• The shop front page featured items are now selected from Club Whirled members' favorites. Join the club! Watch this space for more changes to the shop.
• Confirmation popups are now working again. For instance the sending of a gift was not triggering the warning about trades.
• Guest users accessing Whirled from an embed no longer lose their ability to login. This was only occurring after about 10 days of not logging in.
• Some other internal changes 'n' stuff.

Peace out

Howdy Whirled wranglers, here're the rip-roarin' notes:

• Fixed wee chat booch that blocked the ability to chat sometimes when starting an AVR game, until you changed rooms.
• Fixed AVRG launchers from moving you to the group home. Launchers will need to be removed and re-added to rooms as furniture for the fix to take effect.

Have a good weekend

PS I would not like them in a box, I would not like them with a fox

PPS sorry about the many changes to the reboot time, I was trying to not interfere with a background server task

Howdy folks, once again the Whirled has been updated. For your Whirling pleasure, I thus declare:

• Fixed bugs with chat and roomless AVR games
• Avatar activation buttons ("Wear Avatar" and "Remove Avatar") once again update when your avatar is changed in the Whirled
• When the server is experiencing an unusually high load, such as after a restart, you may see a "Server is busy" message when you try to login. This should help to address slowness as reported in this bug
• Some other small UI fixes
• A fair few internal changes behind ye olde kurtin

NOTE: the chat system has been partially torn down and rebuilt, please be on the lookout for bugs. (We are currently investigating missing chat during AVRG play, a good old-fashioned "howler")

Adieu and Whirl away

Howdy, folks, here are the release notes:

• Facebook integration for games now also requires the canvas name of the application
• A fair few internal changes, but nothing visible yet

Also more Whirled Games changes

• http://www.facebook.com/apps/application.php?id=6546537184

Note: there was an unannounced restart early Wednesday morning to incorporate some for recent Whirled Games changes.

Until next time, enjoy!

Today's release contains: Nothing. Absolutely nothing visible to you, the players.

So save the "great update" comments for next time. :)

Some behind-the-scenes stuff, as usual, and not much to share:

• Whirled SDK 0.62
• Fixed permalinks to messages after searching a thread.

Greetings citizens of the Whirled, today's update includes the following changes:

• Whirled SDK 0.61 - at long last
• Removed Facebook mode game invitations for the time being (we believe these were highly spammy and reducing the allocations for the fancy new Facebook stuff).
• Certain links (for example in the feed on /#me page) now display correctly and work on IE8
• Parlor game creators can now access the embed tab on the share dialog
• A few internal changes

I'm also starting a new tradition of putting the Whirled Games Facebook application release notes off-site, since the site features are mostly separate. Today's are here on the application profile page in the discussion topics.

Just a few little fixes today:

• Improved billing reliability (should reduce incidents of bars and subscriptions not going through automatically)
• More experiments with Whirled Games Facebook application
• Some changes to the way AVRGs are launched, there may be some side effects
• Some behind-the-scenes changes

Enjoy!

Greetings beloved members, I have here some release notes for you:

• Web toolkit upgrade - most notably we now fully support Microsoft Internet Exporer 8. If you're using IE8, please uncheck the "compatibility" box for Whirled and report any issues to the Bug Hunters group here. (Be sure and check whether someone has already reported it.)
• When publishing trophies from the Facebook application, include both the game thumbnail and the trophy icon in the story.
• Other Facebook integration improvements.

Enjoy!

Well, not really... but it's catchy. Look! No! Over there!

Here, have some release notes:

• Brand fixes and improvements
  • Listing dialog correctly shows the brand choices
  • When displaying a derived item based on a branded item, the brand group link is now shown
  • The display of brand group managers with no shares no longer shows the "0/N" tag line
  • Leftover coins and bling are now distributed to shareholders, in order of number of shares held (then by member id to break ties)
• Facebook application now shows a notifications area at the top of the main page. It reminds you to bookmark the application and publish recent trophies.
• Clicking the subscriber star in a flash name list now brings up the subscription page
• There are now 3 new flags available when reporting an item
  • "Needs Attribution" - the item is using some shared source and has not been annotated in the required way
  • "Scam" - the item (or its description) is attempting to dupe or otherwise maliciously engage potential buyers or users
  • "Broken" - the item doesn't do what it is supposed to do according to the description

At ease, carry on!

What a weird expression. Anyway without further ado:

• When creating a game, the min and max seats config values are now saved correctly
• Brands. These allow Whirled creators to collaborate more effectively, for more information see http://wiki.whirled.com/Brand
• New Facebook portal page including a friends bar along the bottom. http://apps.facebook.com/whirled

Until next time, fellow citizens! Enjoy!

There's not too much this time, but we like to release often.

• For game creators: changed 'thumbnail' to be called 'icon', and 'screenshot' to be called 'thumbnail'. Please upload a nice 175x125 picture that brands your game nicely instead of a microscopic screenshot.
• On Facebook, trophies are no longer published to your profile wall.

Look for some more excitement next week...

Greetings denizens of the Whirled! Today, as promised, we are launching the Club Whirled subscription plan.

This is an entirely optional subscription that for $4.95 each month gives you a host of benefits:

• 45 Bars every month
• A limited edition item only for Club Whirled members. These items will be created by Three Rings and commissioned from Whirled creators. The first is the very special Club Whirled Tofu made by ooo artist Nemo.
• Create parties for free
• Spread your message to the whole Whirled with /broadcast -- non-members will cease to have Broadcast available
• Your name listed at the top of all rooms and games
• A star next to your name
• Access certain new Whirled features before everyone else

You can sign up on the Club Whirled Page, and in addition to the subscription plan you can recieve the non-Bar benefits of Club Whirled by paying 20 bars.

As a small thank you we have given free Club Whirled memberships to alpha testers who are active as of this post, and creators who have sold over a certain threshold of bar-denominated items. Welcome to the Club!

That's about it for this release apart from some under-the-hood changes. For those of you in the US of A, Happy 4th of July! On a personal note, this is my 11th anniversary in the US. Hurrah!

- Cleaver

Greetings, a small spate of changes for our lovely Whirled community:

• Navigation bar now actually shows up when playing a game on Facebook.
• Title for "All Games" page shows correctly.
• Feed messages now have less duplication, including aggregation of forum replies.
• Some small improvements for Facebook account import and migration.
• Affiliates are now assigned when "Invite Friends" is used from the Whirled Games on Facebook nav bar.
• Attempted fix for Facebook trophy popup not appearing sometimes.

Enjoy!

Just a small update today, here are the notes:

• Playing a single-player scored game now generates a message in your news feed, up to 3 per day.
• Game plays and trophy earnings appear in the renamed feed category "Games & Trophies".
• As with trophy earnings, game plays also post to your Facebook wall if you are currently logged into Whirled Games.
• Fixed display of genres on Whirled Games.
• Some other changes under the hood.

Have at it, comrades!

Greetings Earthlings and citizens of the Whirled, we have the following exciting changes for you:

• Site navigation on Whirled Games (Facebook) is now simpler. You can either be playing a game or looking at a web page, not both.
• Accordingly, the navigation bar is shown on Whirled Games during a game session. Its only link is back to the main page.
• When playing a game on Whirled Games, the interface is much more like an embedded game (NOTE: the API method isEmbedded will now report true in this scenario, though this could be changed).
• During Whirled Games game session, notifications for sharing etc. are suppressed. These may be revived later if they make sense.
• Game integration detection is now working properly so new games will show up in the games pages provided they meet the integration requirements.
• Facebook users' feeds are no longer spammed by trophy winnings, only 3 per day are sent, like the Whirled feed.

Over and out

Hello and welcome to this installment of the Whirled Update Notes this 19th day of June two thousand and nine anno domini. Only a small thimblefull of changes today:

• Account registration no longer shows a box for Toto
• Facebook application now has "Invite Friends" link
• Some internal fixes

Have a great weekend.

Some of our team are on vacation and some are deeply engrossed in side projects and not working directly on Whirled at the moment. This update has:

• A smattering of under-the-hood changes, mostly related to Facebook integration
• Some small improvements to the Facebook user interface
• Fix for Facebook game invites

Let's see, how many times did I mention Facebook? Four, including that one.

Rest assured, crazy updates full of fun new stuff will return at some point.

Enjoy!

(Edited that last word, we need better foreign language support in these post editors)

That tofu with the far away look in its eyes, that's me

We gotz s'more updates fo y'all:

• The registration process is now much more streamlined and intuitive
• More small reductions to Whirled download footprint
• Some improvements to the behavior of /afk, also the addition of the synonym /dnd.
  • /afk and /away always set you away
  • /back, which always sets you back
  • /dnd with no arguments toggles whether you are away or not
  • When you are away, all private chats will auto-respond
  • By default, the auto-respond message is "I'm away from the keyboard."
  • With /afk, /away and /dnd you can set your auto-response with an argument, like "/dnd Gettin snax"
  • There is no difference between these commands (right, Gyre Guy?), we are preserving the old ones for the time being to avoid feature shock
• Editorial control of featured games

Peace. Out.

EDIT: PS, for all of you avid update readers, the June 12th restart only had some very inconsequential changes, no call for a brand new update thread.

Nothing much here except an important bug fix and a few things that slipped in.

• Fixed "stub" embeds for IE 7 and older.
• Games can be deleted.
• Some streamlining of new-user registration.

Whirl this curd up, enjoy!

• Game Shops now work again and include launchers
• Reordered and revamped player menus
• Pending games list now omits private tables but includes drop-in games with less than 3 players
• AVRG embeds no longer attempt to open a popup
• Reworked the SWF to reduce download size and make future releases just get the part that changed
• Group creation and joining now sent to player and friend feeds
• It is once again possible to view (public) groups without being logged in
• Links on Stuff pages now lead to correct wiki pages
• Some small improvements to Whirled Games on Facebook. Connect! Tell ur mom about ur trofeez!
• Lots of behind the scenes work for future updates. Watch this space!

Greeting Whirled Friends and Neighbors, for you update announcement pleasure, we present to you the following listing of changes:

• SWF embeds for AVR games now go into the room and game they were embedded from
• Pending games dialog improvements:
  • Only shows games that have not started yet and party games with only one player
  • Joining a game goes straight to the lobby (instead of the usual starting up in single player mode)
  • No longer closes after viewing a game's detail
  • Closes when a game starts
• Old favorited games should now show up as favorite launchers. NOTE we had to nuke launchers favorited since about May 20th. Please refavorite your favorites if they did not get migrated. Sorry about that.
• Facebook trophy publishing is now fixed (fingers crossed) and re-enabled. Link up those facebook accounts folks!
• Other behind-the-scenes changes, please do not attempt to look behind the scenes

Good morning, Whirlers. It's only been a day since our last release, so we have but one new bit:

• New interface for viewing game tables that are awaiting players - check it out in the Go menu.

We also have, however, some embarrassing bugs squashed:

• AVRG Agent property space is now properly initialized when the game starts up.
• Fix AVRG item/data pack loading... again.
• Fixed all the AVRGs we broke with the last release.

In other news, I has a sammich.

Nothing too awesome this time.

Fun for everyone:

• Added a handy dialog to get information for all the furniture in a room.
• Fixed searching your inventory for items that were renamed.
• AVRGs can now be embedded from the share dialog.
• Whirled SDK 0.60 released.

Some minor fixes:

• Further tweaks to how AFK works with games.
• Game detail display no longer piles up extra tabs when navigating between different games.
• Some fixes to feed formatting.

Some fixes for game creators:

• Fixed parameter editing for games.
• Fixed client loading of data packs
• Server logs for in-development games are now visible in a separate tab.

That's all folks.

Friday night releases, everyone's favourite.

Whirled:

• Fixed a number of bugs related to in-development games (especially AVRGs).
• The occupancy list will once more be alphabetically sorted.
• You should once more be able to comment on games. Oh joy.
• Parlor games should once more receive bling!
• Fixed some genre type links on the #games page.
• Thread titles can now be changed, through the 'Edit Thread' button at the bottom. Woot!
• The search box at the top of "My Discussions" now searches all posts in all groups to which you are a member, not just those which have new messages.

Techier bits:

• Published game code should actually update a lot more reliably now.
• Fixed AVRG launchers on embedded sites like Kongregate. Probably.
• The loadLevelPackData and loadItemPackData functions will now work for AVRG clients.
• We fixed getPartyId() for avrg.PlayerSubControlClient! Party time!

Drive safely.

Mainly just bug fixes today. And for those of you who think "fixing" is not the appropriate term for what we do to bugs, just ask your neighborhood dog how he feels about being "fixed".

• Fixed problem with AFK triggering avatar idle animations. AFK is now totally separate from idleness.
• Fixed problem with forum links taking you to a blank page.
• Made some improvements to derived catalog item handling. Enabled derived Image sales.
• The "Pictures of Me" link is no longer shown on the profile if the player has no Me gallery.
• Fixed link for buying Bars with an OOO card.
• Dialog that prompts to publish trophies is disabled because Facebook was being too flaky. You can still select "Trophies" from the game menu in the control bar and click "Publish" to publish trophies if you like. Oops I lied, we've totally disabled trophy publishing.
• Fixed problems with AVRG payouts.

Fixy fix!

Wow, it looks like we've been pretty busy for two days:

• "Newest" search on the games tab now works
• Games must be set to "hidden" prior to publishing
• Text referring to coin listings is now more accurate
• Improvements to the new game upload interface
• Paging through shop items no longer shuffles the list occasionally
• Spending bars from flash now looks more like the web page version
• The number of unread mail messages is now accurate and no longer shows -1
• Support for Whirled in Facebook, check it out
• Facebook trophy feed stories now link to the Whirled Facebook app
• When listing a new item, you can now attribute it to a previous listing; the creator of the based on item will receive a share of the payout.
• When you start up a party game, a link now appears to tweet to your friends to come join you
• Game players are now marked as idle if they are afk when entering a game
• Complete revamp of "My Groups" on the groups page
• Complete revamp of the main groups page for lightning fast loading time
• New game launchers now properly link to their games
• Invited affiliates must now reach level 10 in order to award a bar
• The complaint popup for comments and forum posts now shows how many more letters you have left to type

Enjoy!

We fixed a bunch of bugs and niggling bits:

• Added a link to the "Guide for Whirled Parents" to the help page
• Changed the way In-Whirled games are launched: when you click the Play button you are sent to the game's main room and the game is automatically started
• Games have been replaced with Launchers and game creators can create as many launchers as they like for their game
• Posts with no new messages in the last three weeks are no longer shown in the "My Discussions" list
• Removed meaningless configuration options from In-Whirled game editing UI
• Fixed some bugs with sorting on the Games page
• New users will no longer get a home named "???'s Room" now it will be called "Home" (sweet home)
• Fixed more problems with paging through results on the Groups page
• Fixed some problems with people lingering in parties
• Added "Edit..." links to the games on the "My Games" page
• Fixed some problems (hopefully) with publishing trophies to Facebook
• Spring cleaning (a bunch of code tidying up)

We made another rather important change. The coin exchange was an experiment that we thought would help the Whirled economy but it has proved confusing, problematic and continues to be the target of exploitation by less scrupulous players. As a result we have made the following changes:

• It is no longer possible to buy Bar items with Coins
• Coin items can still be purchased with Bars at a fixed exchange rate: 1 bar = 10,000 coins

We are obviously going to be evaluating the impact of this change and will work to ensure that creators are able to sell their items in the way they desire.

Thanks for being a part of Whirled and for being patient as we figure out the best way to make this whole crazy experiment work.

It's been over a week since we updated things, but we've fixed some good bugs and it's been worth the wait.

• Fixed the flash client to always regrow when a page is closed.
• Fixed the + button that toggles the client height.
• Fixed problem with some furni that was unreportable.
• Fixed up the "new mail" indicator, and improved some things with reading mail when you have many pages of conversations.
• Fixed paging through groups.
• IE8 users will be prodded to click "compatibility view".
• The way game creators manage their games has been totally overhauled. Visit #games and see "my games". To edit a game, go to the detail page and look for the link "Edit game...".
• You can now invite people using a URL and have them automatically send you a friend request once they register. Get your friend URL on link .
• When sharing a room or game, you can optionally use this.
• All affiliated joiners will now yield a bar when they reach level 5. Friendship is no longer required.

Enjoy!

Edit: known issues. We'll fix soon.

• There are still some problems reading many pages of mail.
• Sorting groups doesn't work.
• When you buy a room, it claims "Technical Difficulties," but you do actually get your room. To access it, go to the Me tab and click your "My Rooms" link.

Greetings fair Whirled members,

These updates are not the updates you are looking for. Please move along...

The update yesterday afternoon was to fix Facebook trophy publishing, but along with it came the seemingly innocuous removal of the flashing "Get Free Bars" text; it was concatenated with the "Invite Friends" text to form an extraordinarily unholy union; dastardly due to its lengthy length, causing the utmost dismay in the Internet Explorer user community, including those of both the 7 and 8 persuasions.

So this update has just returned that text to normal, but also includes some changes to the tweet copy. Cue sinister music. Just kidding that's not HTML so should be fine.

Enjoy the weekend, we sure will.

Welcome back!

• The green arrow is back by popular demand! Look for it in a flash client near you.
• Some small UI improvements
• Status update notifications are now delayed briefly
• You can now tweet (tm) rooms and games - use that share button people!
• Tweet (tm) an invitation to your table when you're kicking off a parlor game
• The status of a Whirled friend request is now saved
  • On someone's profile page, you can see which of the four states your relationship is in
    • Not friends (no requests sent)
    • Pending request by you
    • Pending request to you
    • Friends (request accepted)
  • Also on the profile page, you can retract or confirm friend requests
  • You cannot send a friend request if one is already pending
• If you invite someone to Whirled (see #people-invites), and they become your Whirled friend and they get to level 5 then you earn a Bar! No strings attached
• Plenty o' changes under the old kilt

PS We're very sorry about the long delay. There were just over 2 million friendships in Whirled that needed to be converted.

Today we have a few important bug fixes, and a bit of house cleaning.

• Rearranged the control bar icons and moved the "go" menu down there, and added more options to the go menu.
• Fixed a bug that caused the scores to not display in LOLcaptions, Tangleword, and other games that use the player's list to show scores.
• Fixed a bug with persisting player data for games.
• If a pet is configurable, the owner will see "configure this pet" on the pet's menu.

Thank you, drive through.

Not May Day, but rather mayday. Once again there are many bugs, we did a release to reduce their number (and hopefully not increase their number at the same time). Other items of note:

• Updated Whirled SDK with various new bits and fixes.
• Fixed problem with long survey responses. Now you can express yourself more fully.
• Fixed problem with coming to Whirled from an embed if you went straight into a game (also fixed Bang! Heroes problem where you'd lose your accomplishments when coming into Whirled, the fix for which necessitated the other fix).
• Fixed a few niggling problems with coin payouts.

Kthxbye.

No foolin', we've got some nice changes for you today.

• Parties now notify members when the leader changes. Parties can be set to auto-disband when the leader leaves, but remember that the leader can also reassign leadership at any time.
• The party button will be highlighted when you're in a party, even if you close the popup. Reminder: parties are on sale, and are integrated into all games now. Advertise your multiplayer game with a party!
• Parlor games will no longer list tables that are unjoinable anyway, making the lobby load more quickly. *cough Bang Heroes cough*
• Hey creators: parlor games now identify players by their memberId. An SDK release is coming soon that will shed more light on this exciting change.
• Fixed up the layout of the trophy panel that's viewable from in a game.
• Fixed the room names of the homes of newly-created guest users.
• An assortment of under-the-counter, behind-the-kimono, and rear-end-of-the-cat changes that are too small to report except as a whimsical postfix to the other bullet points.

That's all. This is beta, so watch out for the big hole.

Once again we present a release with very little in the way of shiny new features. Just these mere tidbits:

• Major bone chilling overhaul of the virtual machine for server-side games. We hope this will "just work".
• A fair few changes under the old kimono and fixes for admin features. Scammers beware!

(Please FTLOG don't reply to this post with complaints about paying for rooms and parties. It just discourages admins like me from reading the announce forum.)

More bug squishing with today's update. One interesting bug that was squished was that people playing games via embed clients were not being counted properly, so you'll probably see that there are a *lot* more than 40 people playing Bang! Heroes at any given moment. Same goes for the total number of people online.

We'll be spending more time battening down the hatches next week and working through some scaling problems, and then we'll return to our glorious habit of shipping new features every couple of days.

We've also got some temporary workarounds in place that will hopefully allow us to try enabling multiplayer for Bang! Heroes again today. Keep yer fingers crossed.

Just fixing some bugs in this release. Hopefully we'll be able to reenable Bang! Heroes multiplayer later today or tomorrow once we test the fixes that are in place now.

Also fixed some problems that caused problems with new player registration. Fun fun!

Good morning. It's a lovely morning, isn't it? A fine time to visit your friends and fix foulups.

• Fixed avatars that were incorrectly marked as "used".
• Added a "remove friend" to profile pages, fixed weird line-wrapping of "add friend".
• Item packs and level packs are no longer addable to rooms.
• Fixed mismatch of the number of unread friend threads on the #me page and the number displayed when reading the threads.
• Fixed-up remixing avatars before buying.
• Fixed a small problem with displaying times in the music/video player, sometimes a song would show as "1:60" long instead of "2:00".
• The "visit this friend" menu item has returned.

Please keep your hands and feet inside the cookie jar at all times. Practice safe saxaphoning.

Monday morning release!

• The lag has been fixed! Err, again. Let's hope this doesn't turn into a weekly roller-coaster.
• The 'friends forum threads' display will no longer show a thread more than once.
• Require email confirmation for account deletion.

Mostly.

We've got mostly fixes this time, but there are some new creator features that will show their worth over time.

• Whirled SDK 0.58, with AVRG/party integration.
• Fixed a load of bugs with items: new items not showing up, usage indicators not updating, etc. Let us know if any of these problems persist.
• Improved forum read/unread indicators.
• The number of new posts from friends on the #me page and the #groups-friends page is now limited to those from the last 30 days.

Enjoy.

Greetings Whirlers (no, not *whirl*ers)!

Just a meager set of updates and fixes for you today:

• Links to your transactions now appear on the Me page.
• After searching in thread lists (unread or group), searching again now updates the list.
• After searching in thread lists and refreshing the page, the search text now reappears.
• Threads with posts from former members should now be viewable.
• Icons in the flash buy dialog no longer jump around.
• You can now view all threads that have unread posts by any of your friend with unread posts. A summary link appears on the Me page. Searching the list is not yet implemented.
• Whirled SDK 0.57 (Note: item pack consumption will not be supported on whirled.com until the next release).

A sunbeam is how you should always warm your fresh organic honey, no fooling!

Ok, now the big 3 heavenly bodies have been mentioned. This release was mainly for a bug fix, but we have a small crop of updates that have crept in too (Gyre is a very fast coder):

• It should now be possible again to start new forum threads (my school boy booch)
• Player status is filtered in the notification bar and the friends list panel (filtering can be changed in the chat preferences)
• Status updates from blocked players no longer show up in your notifications. (Of course one must wonder why you would be friends with someone you've blocked.)
• Clicking on a player's name in a notification shows the usual popup menu rather than going to their profile page

Fingers crossed we do not need to start mentioning planets.

A few improvements since last week:

• We found and eliminated some pretty nasty memory leaks. With any luck those leaks were the cause of the lag we've seen the past week or so. With further luck, the lag is now a thing of the past!
• The read/unread indicators on forum threads will once again update with alacrity.
• Rooms briefly pretended to cost 2 bars. They've been reminded of their station in life.

For developers:

• Game authors should find they no longer have to upload their games repeatedly nor sacrifice any further virgins under a full moon before their update takes.
• Line numbers, stack traces and friendlier error messages are back in server-side logs. Oops.

There'll be a new Whirled SDK on Wednesday with some nice goodies in it.

There are no actual waffles in this release.

Bug Fix:

• Trophy awarding was accidentally disabled in this morning's release. This release fixes it.

New bits that snuck in:

• It costs money to start a party now.
• If playing an in-whirled game with people in a party, you will get a coin bonus based on the size of the party. Larger parties playing together will earn more coins.
  • Everybody in the party receives the coin bonus, not just the party leader.

Nothing too exciting this time, just the march of progress, but in April.

• Parties now follow the leader into and out of In-Whirled games (AVRGs).
• After playing a game, if you publish your earned trophies to Facebook, the popup will disappear. This was causing confusion for people who select "Always do this for Whirled".
• Previously earned trophies may be published to Facebook using the "Trophies" popup, found in the game icon menu while playing a game.
• A button has been added to the mail reading interface to block the other player.
• Fixed a bug that should let old guests back in.
• The big avatar memory change has happened. Wyvern avatars should be updated, but other avatars may not. If you're seeing sketchy behavior with special game avatars, you may need to bug the creator to update them. Sorry again for this incompatible and inconvenient change.
• Updated Whirled SDK to 0.56

Enjoy.

Edit : Heinz 57: One more thing:

• Navigating threads in a group or in "My Discussions" works a bit better now. If you view a post, the back button takes you to the page you were previously looking at. (Though in the process the read/unread indicators broke).

Good afternoon Whirlers, we have some interesting changes for you today:

• Entities (avatars, pets, furniture, toys, & backdrops) will now have their memories loaded when you view them in your inventory. These will be the last-saved memories and may not reflect the latest changes if the item is currently in-use in a room somewhere. Any memory changes that take place while viewing your inventory are not saved.
• Memories may be configured while viewing an item in the shop, and if you purchase it those memories will carry over to your new item.
• The memories for backdrops were flaky at best, but should be fixed up now.
• There is an upcoming change to avatar memories that creators should be aware of: http://www.whirled.com/#groups-t_12126
• More improvements to searching the shop, and searching for people.
• There were some serious bugs with parties that should now all be fixed. Please give parties another try and report any feedback. We'll be adding new features to parties soon to make them much cooler.
• Bling cashouts are now limited to once per 30 days.
• Player-entered URLs in chat will now open in the same tab if they are links to somewhere on the Whirled web site.
• A link to your unread discussions is now on your "Me" page.

Additionally, here are some real release notes for the last release:

• Fixed the link to a friend's profile in the new friend notification.
• AVRG game icons are now half-size over people's heads.
• Fixed editing group rooms.

Enjoy!

Good morning loyal denizens. We've worked long and hard to bring you a slew of improvements to our services:

• Anything you say in chat now has a 0.01% chance of being turned into a broadcast for all of Whirled to see! Enjoy!
• You can now pay to warp Cleaver into your room. He may be asleep, but it'll still be Cleaver idling in your room and you can party down. If he gets warped more than five times in an hour, a bidding war starts. Bidding starts at 30 bars.
• Agents are now available on a for-pay basis to mediate divorces, breakups, discreet confirmation of "cheating," initial contact with your crush, and various other delicate personal matters. All decisions made by Agents in these matters are permanent and binding, and payment must be made up front.
• We are introducing a fourth and a fifth currency called the Shiny and the Static, respectively. We believe this will simplify things immensely. We further believe that half the fun will be for you all to discover the details about these new currencies yourselves, so go forth and explore!
• In order to help players locate high quality items, we will be adding 5 more stars to the shop rating system. The new ratings are: Extrordinary, Awesome, Neat-o, Cherub and Better-Than-Tofu with list prices of: 10k coins, 15k coins, 20k coins, 50k coins and 1 million dollars respectively.
• Following the popular Y!PP feature, we will be adding item decay to Whirled. One pixel will disappear each time an item is loaded, and rooms will get 1 pixel shorter.
• Instead of default tofu you will now have a choice of: tofu, tempeh, tofurkey, jambalaya or lentil.
• New Feature: Insta-stack. Will instantly sort avatars in the room by type, and arrange them in a eye-pleasing geometric arrangements.

Also:

• In the next release, your avatar's size will be tied directly to your Whirled level.
• We'll be having a Cleaver Rave at 12:00 p.m. Pacific time today! Put on your Cleaver and join us!

We've got another update for your weekend pleasure.

• A new chat command has been added: /broadcast, which lets you pay bars to broadcast to everyone on Whirled. As more people broadcast, the price escalates.
• Group searching has been improved.
• Your blocklist can now be reviewed from your Me page.
• Blocking a player will cause mail from them to not reach you.
• Various small bugfixes.
• Whirled SDK 0.55 is released.

I'm sure we'll end up tweaking the broadcast feature, but let's see how it works.

A new slew of fixes and featurettes for your Whirling pleasure on this fine Spring day (in the Northern hemisphere of course):

Blocking and Bleeping

• Muting shall henceforth be known as blocking
• Blocked players no longer appear in the batch friend request popup
• When a player is blocked, any pets that they own are also blocked (and bleeped)
• Bleeping is now persisted beyond the current session
• Blocked players are now persisted

Playlists

• The player who added a song to a room playlist is now displayed in the tooltip
• Long song names no longer create a funky scroll bar in the playlist
• Missing album or artist tags in songs will now show up as "unknown" instead of "null"
• Room playlist sizes are limited to 99
• Room music can now be bleeped
• Room playlist now shows song thumbnails
• There is now a link to the info for a song's menu in a room playlist

Batch Friend Request

• People in the batch friend request popup are now sorted alphabetically by name
• There is now a "Select All" tick box in the batch friend request popup

Other

• Thready summary layout is now cleaner and doesn't behave weirdly with long thread names
• Live place views now work again
• Reconnect button now works in embeds
• Improved compliance with Flash domain security model
• Some help text is now displayed when you do /bleepall
• Members who have deleted their accounts no longer show up in a couple of nooks and crannies in our gargantuan web site
• It should again be possible to publish earned game trophies to Facebook
• The trophy feed popup after a game should not show up at the same time as a batch friend request popup

We hope you enjoy this small collection of "more better" features.

Batch friend requests.
After hanging out in a room or playing a game, you may be asked if you want to befriend the people you were with.

Better searching.
Searching in the shop should give much more relevant results than previously.

Improved group discussions.
Going to your first unread post in a thread should be more reliable. The icon in front of the poster's name may be clicked to generate a permalink to that post.

Room music playlists.
Now you can add more than one song to a room. The ordering cannot yet be controlled. By default, all rooms have a public playlist, which allows anyone to add a song, but non-managers will have their songs removed when they leave.

Enjoy!

Edit (from Mikeness):
Hopefully no one reading this is excited about this feature, but we also added the ability for you to delete your Whirled account, should you want to do so. You can go to Me → Account and there's a section where you can delete your account. Don't do this if you don't mean it. It would delete everything that you've worked so hard to achieve!

A tiny update:

• A few more fixes to avatar memory.

That's it! Enjoy.

We've got just a few smallish updates for you today:

• Possibly fixed the bug that caused wyvern avatars to lose their memory and "reset".
• Generic "you earned coins" messages have been moved to notifications instead of chat. If a game still reports its own messages, they'll still be in chat.
• /bleepall added.
• The "clear all chat" menu item now clears all the chat (like it used to). Use /clear to clear just one tab.
• Rearranged the web page header to be more clear when you're not logged in.

Enjoy!

Mostly bug fixes today. Squishy squish!

• Fixed the bug where your friends didn't show up in the Flash friends list.
• Nixed the "Start Single Player" option in game configuration because all games do that now.
• Fixed a bug with converting logical to screen coordinates in AVRGs.
• Fixed a problem where /emote and other chat "modes" didn't work in chat channels.
• Fixed the error message reported if you try to gift your home room.
• Added some code to try to prevent chat spam.
• Made /clear in chat only clear the current tab, not all chat tabs.

That is all. Thank you, please drive through.

OMG, some new features snuck into this release:

• Added gifting rooms to friends: the button to do it is on the room detail page. Either click the comment/rate button in your room to get there or click My Rooms from the Me page and click the name of the room (not the picture, that will just take you into the room). Be careful: when you gift a room, everything in the room that you own: furniture, decor, music, pets that are let out in the room is gifted to the recipient.
• Streamlined the new player registration process a bit. Yay for new players.
• Added support for posting earned trophies to your Facebook feed. If you earn a trophy during a game, when you leave the game, we'll pop up a little window asking if you want to post your trophies to Facebook.
• Fixed a problem with game instructions that were longer than 5000 characters. You should be able to use up to 16k characters.
• Cleaned up the Invite Friends UI a bit. Go invite your friends to Whirled! :)
• De-Gyred our game sharing tips.

That is all for now. Reboot happening shortly. Beep, boop. Bing!

May the Whirled be with you:

• SDK 0.54. See the SDK page on the wiki
• Sending a gift must now be confirmed. Whirled does not support trades or loans between players. Please do not give away any item that you would regret losing permanently.
• New menu item for custom avatar configuration. This requires an avatar supporting custom configuration, get coding peeps!
• In mail and forum posts, a little caption appears below the sender's or poster's portrait showing either "User", "Support" or "Admin. This is to reduce confusion about who has the authority to do special stuff (e.g. deleting copyrighted items).
• New "Select All" and "Delete Selected" buttons in mail.
• When listing an item, a thumbnail is now required. This is to prevent having lots of items in the Shop that cannot be at least vaguely identified when browsing.
• Lots of changes under ye olde hood.

Ciao

Long time, no announce. Greetings, Whirledians! The following bullet points be posting for your gaming pleasure to be having:

• Notifications display should no longer close when clicked
• Subject line can, nay must, now be edited when sending invites
• The system reboot message will henceforth be shown in the notification display. Man that thing is useful.
• Users that log in just before a reboot will now be notified that a reboot cometh
• If you log in since the server has been updated, we give you a notification and link to the announcements forum where you can read these awesome release notes
• Name links in the chat are a darker color
• Players who have not logged in for 3 days will now be mailed their News feed (and again after seven more days and that's it)

Houston, take us home!

EDIT: March 8th mini-update: The News feed mails did not go through last night, they should go through tonight.

Update early, update often, that's how we roll here at OOO HQ. A couple of goodies for you today:

• Clicking on someone's name in chat messages will pop up a menu that you can use to invite them to be your friend, mute them, complain about them, etc.
• Added some friendly tips to encourage people to find out about all of Whirled's features, like sharing! (Caveat: these might be a little aggressive right now and we'll tone them back. Blame Gyre.)
• Moved the Active and Hot rooms back to the top of the Rooms page.
• Fixed some problems with formatting (mostly URLs) in chat messages.

Over and out!

Update:

• The Me page was broken, which we eventually fixed on the second attempt. Yay!
• A feature snuck in between the time we did the first release and the time we fixed the Me page bug: Whirled Announcements now shows up in everyone's My Discussions page

Just a few random bits here and there:

• Fixed various bugs with joining a friend's game.
• Streamlined the process of setting up one's account when an FB Connect user tries to buy bars.
• Made the server-side game logs pop up in a new browser window by default.
• The furni viewer should now take the furniture hotspot properly into account.
• More work on our game invite system
  • Added support for inviting Facebook friends to play a game.
  • Added support for inviting Whirled friends to play a game.
  • This will all make more sense when our new game that uses these systems comes out.
• Changed our default handling for entering games:
  • All games that support single player are started immediately in single player mode.
  • The game can then display a menu that includes a button to open up the multiplayer lobby.
  • Games that are multiplayer-only still go into the lobby first.
  • There are a few games that need to be updated to work properly in this new style. In the meanwhile, you can still get to the lobby by selecting Game Lobby from the game's menu in the toolbar once it starts in single player mode.
• Added the ability for game creators to download a stub for their game that they can upload to Mochi's network (the normal game stub needed extra enhancement to work with Mochi).
• Mute this player and Bleep this avatar are now at the top of the player menu to helpfully remind people to take responsibility for their Whirled experience instead of registering complaints about every little thing.

Happy March!

Edit : for the curious the emergency second release was because I broke new account creation in the first release. Whoops!

The new accounts were being created, but the code was breaking trying to tell you "Thanks for creating your account!" So if you know anyone who had trouble creating their account, let them know that they can just log in and everything will be peachy keen.

Just a few fixes for some naughty bugs today:

• Unbooched sidebar chat, which was in a seriously bad way
• Fixed a problem with anonymous accounts not being saved in embeds
• Fixed a problem where creators weren't properly being charged the listing fee
• Changed the notification bar so that every notification will stay up for at least 2 seconds instead of being immediately blow away if a second notification comes in immediately after the first
• Fixed a rounding problem with the cents price display in the catalog
• Fixed a rendering problem with our shiny blue and orange buttons
• Worked around a (really annoying, thanks Adobe) incompatibility between Flash 9 and Flash 10

We are working on fun things too. Hopefully some of those will be released for your gaming pleasure soon!

More releasey goodness coming at you:

• Moved "<Player> has entered/exited" notifications out of chat and into the notification bar.
• Nixed the chat bubble versions of system notifications (they're still in the chat history).
• Changed chat (and other) preferences such that your preferences when using Whirled do not affect your preferences if you're playing via an embed, also embed preferences are not saved.
• Fixed problem with starting a party while in a game.
• Made changes to the item listing process which I'll describe below.

Item Pricing

We've instituted a policy of minimum pricing for items in the catalog and made some other changes as well to try to improve the quality of the items in the catalog and to improve consistency in pricing. The new listing process is as follows:

• Creators must rate their item when they list it.
• They cannot change that rating later. Of course other people can rate the item after it is listed and that will have the same influence as always on the item's actual rating, but the rating provided by the creator has a big impact on where the item shows up in the catalog to start.
• The initial rating determines the minimum price for the item. The prices vary depending on the type of item. We'll have a full chart of minimum prices in the wiki shortly, and the minimum price will be reported to you in the listing UI so you can see it immediately right where it matters.
• The creator has to pay the minimum price as a listing fee in order to list their item.
• Once the item has been listed, it will be rated as normal and if the creator ever wants to reprice the item, they cannot give the item a lower price than the minimum based on the item's rating at the time they do the repricing.
• All existing catalog listings that did not meet their minimum price requirements have had their prices adjusted to meet the requirements.

Item Pricing Examples

If you have a new avatar that you think is awesome and you want to rate it 5 stars so that it shows up at the top of the catalog in the New and Hot section, you will have to price your avatar at at least 1 bar or 5000 coins. You will also have to pay 5000 coins to list the item (whether or not you price it at 1 or more bars or 5000 or more coins). If the members of the Whirled disagree with your assessment and rate your avatar down to three stars and as a result you choose to reprice the avatar, you will be able to take advantage of the three star minimum price and you can lower the price to 500 coins.

Conversely, if you think your avatar is alright, but it's not loaded with awesome animations and likely to take the Whirled by storm, you can rate it 3 stars to start and you will have a 500 coin or 1 bar minimum price and will have to pay only 500 coins to list your item. If the members of the Whirled decide they love your avatar and rate it up to 4 stars, and you decide you want to reprice your item to take advantage of this new found popularity, you will have to abide the 4 star minimum price of 1500 coins.

Mostly behind the scenes stuff today, but there are a few user serviceable parts in today's release:

• When you close a Group chat tab, it now stays closed for the remainder of your session. You have to select that Group from the chat menu (in the lower left corner) to reopen the tab during that session. It will not be automatically reopened.
• Fixed some of the URLs we use in emails sent to users to hopefully be less confusing to mail readers.
• Tightened up some anonymous account bits: they can't friend someone until they register, they can't submit support requests, they can't create or list items, they can't send Whirled mail.
• Anonymous accounts once again use the Ghost as their default avatar instead of the Tofu. Note: permaguests can buy and wear avatars, so don't assume all guests are going to be Ghosts.
• Added a "Go to your new room" link to the UI when you buy a new room.
• Nixed the door that was automatically added to new rooms. There's no particular style of door or place we can sensibly link in every single room.
• We now display "Connecting..." while the Flash client is connecting to the servers instead of 0% so that you can tell when we're connecting versus when we're downloading the room's decor.
• The "reconnect" button is not longer incorrectly displayed while you're moving between rooms (indeed, now it says "Connecting..." since that's what's going on).
• Fixed a problem with MOBs (only used right now by Ghosthunters).
• Fixed some layout issues in the game lobby when people's names are uberlong.
• Fixed a problem with anonymous accounts saying "You just made it to Level 0!"
• Added a link to Whirled while we're loading the client in an embed: more users == more fun!
• Fixed some problems in links in the Flash client that had member names in them with funny characters.

That's all for now. Please enjoy this small raft of tweaky changes.

[Edit: One other thing, we're also trying to resurrect our tradition of giving our releases mildly amusing names. Please feel free to humiliate any Whirled engineer that does a release and fails to give it a clever and amusing name. That doesn't mean you can humiliate them if you don't think the name is amusing enough, only if they forget to name it entirely. We are only engineers after all, we're trying hard enough just to overcome our nerdiness. Being funny is a whole new challenge.]

Just some bug fixes:

• Fixed a bug with guests entering directly into games.
• Fixed a bug which required email validation to ignore thread, validation is not required for that.
• Fixed a problem with the genre counts on the Games page.
• Added a link to "Share Whirled" to the Me page. It's full of cool images you can add to your blog or website if you want to link to Whirled and earn Coins, Bars and Bling by being an affiliate.

We now return you to your regularly scheduled Whirling.

More juicy bits and kibbles for you:

• Introduced a new system for guest players:
  • When a new player arrives at Whirled, they automatically have an anonymous account created for them so that they can start earning coins and winning trophies immediately. They can then register to associate a username and password with their account so that they don't lose their progress if their cookies expire.
  • A similar system is used to allow embeded players to start with an anonymous account and then make use of that account if and when they eventually join the full Whirled.
  • Anonymous users are restricted in some ways: they cannot create items, and they are like unvalidated users in that they cannot rate items, post comments, create or join groups or post to group forums.
• Facebook Connect is still broken and we apologize to Facebook Connect users. Facebook changed their backend API in subtle and breaking ways and we're still trying to figure out why things aren't working even though they should. All is not honey and roses in the world of social networking integration.
• Guests and Facebook Connect users are directed to first provide a username and password for their account if they click any of the Buy Bars buttons.
• We now display a game's description when sharing it on Facebook and MySpace.
• Nixed the == at the end of the email validation link which was confusing some people's mail readers.
• Games that are not integrated with the Whirled API are no longer shown on the Games page. They are still accessible from the catalog and still work, but we're not going to promote them. Integrate your games with Whirled, award coins and trophies and your users will love your games ten times more.
• Made the button for sharing games to Facebook/MySpace/Digg/etc. prettier. Added support for sharing items in the catalog.
• Forming tables in multiplayer game lobbies now have a small "Info" button that shows the configuration options for the forming table. This information was previously available by hovering the mouse over the number of players label.
• If a client becomes disconnected from the server, there is now a "Reconnect" button that allows you to easily return to where you were (if possible). Similarly, clicking on your Home icon or a room from the room page will automatically restart a disconnected client before trying to enter the room in question.
• Players must affirm that they have read our Comment Guidelines before posting a comment.
• Players must affirm that they own the copyright to all materials or have express permission for their use before creating or editing any item.
• Updated the Whirled SDK to version 0.53.

It's been an eventful past two days in the code base. Hopefully there won't be too many new bugs. :)

A couple of fixes and bits today:

• All users are now requested to validate their email address. To encourage this validation, the Me page is not available until you've done that, nor are you allowed to comment on or rate things, or post to the forums. We strongly believe that having validated email addresses makes our users behave more nicely toward one another which is the primary reason we're making this change.
• Banned users should now see the reason they were banned when the try to log in. Hopefully this feature doesn't apply to you, dear reader!
• Room embeds were broken by yesterday's release. Now they're fixed again. Sorry about that.
• Fixed a problem with sharing games to Facebook. You should now see a nice screenshot and the game's description when sharing.

That's about it for now. Happy Tuesday!

NOTE: If you do not receive the validation email when you try to validate your email address with Whirled, please check your email account's spam folder.

Major behind the scenes changes but not much out in front of the curtain:

• Shop page now reports US dollar equivalent more succinctly.
• Fixed a problem with games periodically freaking out and ceasing to work.
• Added the ability to share games via Facebook and MySpace as well as the previously supported Digg.
• Added Digg to the in-world share dialog.

That's it for now. Until next time...

Happy Friday the 13th everyone! I hope this update doesn't have bad luck.

• Support for sharing items on Facebook and MySpace (from the <> button in rooms and games). You may need to enable popups for whirled.com for this to work.
• By the way, check out Whirled's MySpace page
• Fix: some games (seated multiplayer) sometimes not starting up properly
• Fix: chat sometimes stops working after playing a game

Enjoy!

Today we've got a few bug fixes and a few other things...

• New rooms cost money now.
• Starting a group costs money now.
• Chat is fixed in embedded rooms.
• We have a work-around for the bug where space doesn't get entered if you are holding shift. However, if you were previously unaffected, you'll now get two spaces.
• Bugfix: room entrances will not be snapshotted if the editor is open.
• Games that have focus will no longer lose focus if the mouse drifts out of the game area.
• Better idle detection, hopefully no more idling out while playing a game.

Enjoy! ;)

Mostly bug fixes since yesterday's dubious release:

• Seriously toned down the caching. Stuff should work better.
• Fixed the previous fix to awarding medals to group members.
• Rearranged the buy buttons a little bit in our shop interface.
• Trophy and prize awards should appear properly in the notification interface now.
• Cleaned up embeds so our games look more like standard Flash games on external sites.

Sorry for kicking y'all off the game to do the release. We'll try not to do these on Friday afternoons unless we absolutely have to.

Enjoy:

• Less window clutter when playing a single player game
• More performance improvements in various areas
• Improved support for Flash 10
• For Flash 10 users, improved stability and speed. Y'all upgrade now, y'hear!
• Game shop revamp
• Design Your Whirled contest winners
• Fix for parameters not being visible when editing backdrops
• Fixed group chat tabs getting confused with room chat
• Group chat channels now sorted by name in chat settings popup
• Fix for trophies not getting awarded close to the start of a game. Wyvern and potentially other games may be affected

NOTE: If you are hosting a room or game using a stub SWF (downloaded from the share dialog), please re-download and replace the stub SWF so that Flash 10 users will be able to access Whirled. This is due to limitations of Flash version interoperability.

NOTE: If you embed Whirled (using the Embed HTML from the share dialog), Internet Explorer users will now be required to upgrade to Flash 10, which is very painless under IE

A day without a release is a day half-lived!

• The games page should now sort things correctly.
• The shop fronts should now freak out less over New & Hot sorting.
• The servers now communicate better about what data they're modifying. In the end this means, hopefully, that you see outdated information less often and it may squash some weird bugs here and there too.

The rest of the changes are internal. Carry on!

After a bumpy start bringing Whirled back online during the release, everything is up and running again.

• A couple bugs found in the new token-passing share page API method have been squashed.
• Outspoken badges no longer show up on your passport page.
• Players are no longer pulled out of a room to display a splash screen for a game.

To answer some questions about the new share page ability in the Whirled SDK, players who join Whirled via an invitation from the share page will become affiliated with the player who sent the invite, not the game developer. Also, when you share an AVRG, the room the invitees join will be the same room as the player who sent the invite was in when they opened the share page.

See? How can we do two releases in one day unless I accidentally get the date wrong for the first release notes? There's a plan behind everything we do.

So, this release exists for one significant reason: the very irritating bug where games would not properly award you trophies as you won them has been squished, eliminated, defeated, wiped out. Fixed!

I wish we could retroactively award the lost trophies, but we don't have that data. Alas.

From here on, though, everything should work correctly. May the stream of trophy goodness flow unto you yea like syrup in summer.

Good morning! Today's release features mostly under-the-hood performance-related items, but a few things should be visible to you all:

• The Outspoken stamp has been stamped out. It caused more trouble than it was worth.
• Staff picks in the shop are now accurately labeled as such.

There's also a new SDK, version 0.52:

• Added a new API call to display the Invite Friends page. This allows games to include a custom token in the URL sent to a player's friends. If another player starts a game from that URL, the game can use the token to put the game into a different starting state than usual.
• Added a new API call to display the game lobby while in a multiplayer game.

Now it's time for tea.

Hi folks,

This evening's release is mostly just January 22nd 's release all over again, after we had to rollback to earlier code last night. We have some hopes that we've found a reasonably solid place, performance-wise, but we'll be watching the logs like highly caffeinated hawks looking for trouble.

I also wanted to apologize for yesterday's unannounced reboots and general malaise. Many vague problems combined to form a vast nebulous cloud of technical inefficiency, and you, dear players, suffered the emotional toll.

Well, we did too, but at least we get paid.

On the plus side, we got way more intimate with the database server than I ever wanted to be, and we learned many new things. We shall be coddling that machine like a Disney princess, mark my words.

Oh - I also published SDK 0.51. I'll compile a brief change log and update the Wiki, but the main reason for including it was for the CS4 fix to remixable items.

Our office took yesterday off in recognition of Martin Luther Plumber day (the office was having repairs done), so only one enhancement squeaked in between our usual Tuesday and Thursday releases:

When starting a multiplayer game, you get a snantzy loader animation now, and instead of going to the game's group room you'll see a splash page determined by the game. Faster gaming for all!

During today's release we also made some changes to the deep dark heart of Whirled that should help things run more smoothly from now on with all our recent new visitors. We'll be watching closely to see if it worked!

Greetings citizens of the Whirled, we hereby inaugurate this new release.

These changes actually slipped into an unannounced update on Friday:

• Minor UI changes on the shop page
• Bug fix for remixable range values
• Affiliate (/welcome/...) links to rooms in forum posts now correctly show up as snapshots
• Invite friends link on top right so you can always get to it. Y'all go now, invite those friends!
• Replies to discussion posts now appear in news feed, yay!
• Game contest deadline moved due to March 31st, lots of time for polish :)
• My discussions are now searchable
• Group managers can now delete discussion posts

Changes exclusive to this update

• Items may now be flagged from within the Whirled and not just in the shop
• A new "Stolen" item flag is also available only from within Whirled
• Fix for rare bug preventing forum RSS feeds from working
• New and improved layout for the status header in the top right of the me page
• Status header no longer gets hosed when you update your profile

Not much in the way of excitement with today's release:

• More loading animations for you to watch in anticipation.
• Fixed the group search by category.
• Search on the main shop page.
• Minor UI improvements for parties and media editing
• Moved the name and logoff | help links in the header

Hark ye well, Fiends of the Whirled:

• Parties have been torn to shreds and lovingly reassembled with angel tears.
• Idle AVRG players no longer rack up time for future coin payouts.
• In the SDK, user cookies are now stored at a different location for each game that the developer is working on. See Wiki for even more technical information.

Many more lovely things to come, no doubt, although I'll be on vacation.

Another small bug fix update today:

• General server stability improvements.
• Fixed a crash in the trophy panel for AVRGs.
• Fixed an issue with volume in external media players.
• Other minor bug fixes.

Enjoy!

Hello dears -- a small but juicy update today:

• Performance - we have some hope that in-Whirled responsiveness will be improved with this release. We found some oopses and stomped them.
• Scene updates - especially reclaiming items from room - should behave in a more predictable and sensible fashion now.

Feature Newness:

• The game menu on the control bar now includes a trophy viewer in Flash.
• Said game menu is now displayed for all games, not just AVRGs.
• Digging games has been added, on the game detail page. So Digg away on your favorites!

Minor Touchups:

• Feed messages for Medal awards now include the Group name, with a link.
• Medal messages in the feed are now properly aggregated.
• Notifications are cleared after 60 seconds
• Viewing a room detail page and transitioning to a new room loads the new detail page automatically.

Bug Fixes:

• More Avatar memory fiddling.
• Room background music will no longer be displayed twice in the notification area when entering a new room.
• As always, background fiddling goodness.

For your Whirledly enjoyment in this our 2009 Anno Domini:

• Send postcards of your room to friends! Use the Publish button in the room editor or the snapshot button in the room toolbar
• Speed improvements to the me and shop pages (one of which was removed in a follow up release)
• Tweaks to comments display (in games, shop and groups)
• Fixed trophy upload page to use the same ordering as the trophy display page
• Yet another fix for avatar memories failing, let's hope this is squashed for good!
• A healthy smattering of changes under ye olde hood

Being that most of us are on a hard-earned holiday break after a long and fruitful year of Whirled building, there are not a lot of changes for this update, but these are they:

• Support for linking your Whirled account to your Facebook account
• Fixes to volume settings when previewing audio and video media
• Pause in-room music when previewing audio and video media
• Highly rated comments get a special highlight
• Fix for avatars losing memories when entering a new room
• Some jiggery pokery under the old bonnet, cheerio!

Enjoy and Happy New Year from everyone at Three Rings!

Update to the update: The Facebook account linkage should now be working, many thanks to Mikeness!

To link your Whirled account to your Facebook account:

1. Log into Whirled
2. Go to the Me tab and select the "Account" link on the right in the blue bar
3. At the very bottom of the page, click the Facebook button. This will explain what's happening and I believe you will have to confirm the linkage.

Once you're linked, you can log into Whirled using your Facebook account. Just go to the logon page and click the Facebook button.

Anyone reading this is probably not a new user, but if you don't have a Whirled account yet, you can simply click the Facebook button on the logon page and create a Whirled account using your Facebook credentials.

Here's what's new and exciting in this pre-holiday release:

• Added medal awards to the player's feed, profile.
• Click on an earned Passport Stamp or Group Medal to show it at the top of your profile.
• Nice "loading" animation while pages are loading (me, shop, etc)
• More work on some new, mysterious features. ;)

Enjoy!

What better way to prepare for the winter break than to do daily releases? We fixed a few things that were broken yesterday and a few new things came along for the ride.

The snazzy shinies

• 10% of shop sales now go to charity
• buying a coin-listed item with bars will now give you change in coins

The little fixies

• Managers can now enter medals. Medals will show on profiles. Feed updates coming soon.
• Comments are not hidden until they get a score of -5.
• Fixed some bugs with the friends list.
• cleaned up the party board somewhat
• when editing your room, dragging furniture to the front should not cause the furniture to jump to the back when the mouse leaves the bottom of the room.

Enjoy.

A few solid new bits for you this time:

• Group managers can now create and award Medals to their members, which then display on those members' Passport pages.
• You can can now rate comments: a hearty thumbs-up to the ones you think are lovely, and disapproving thumbs-down for the mediocre and redundant. Negatively comments are shuffled out of view.
• We've enabled a beta version of Parties: you can throw a party and wander the whirled together. Parties will eventually be tightly integrated with games, and they still need work, but we want to test early and get your feedback, so have at it.
• Shortly we will also be enabling Charities, where 10% of everything you purchase goes to a charity of your choice.

No SDK this time. Enjoy! Be kind, rewind.

Just a few bug fixes today:

• Fixed layout of the Whirled Tour.
• Fixed an issue where the bling pool awards were not distributing properly. Game creators should receive their missing awards at the normal time along with today's award.
• Fixed comboboxes, like the furni list in the room editor.

Whirled SDK (0.48):

• Minor fixes.

Hello Whirledlings, a few changes for your consumption:

• More friendly people in the friends box on /#me page
• Fix for occasional weirdness when changing rooms a lot (like the whirled tour suddenly stopping)
• No more "top tags" on the groups page. Instead a horizontal list of official category tags
• Introduction of official whirled groups, now shown underneath "My Groups" where the "top tags" was
• Prevent a scroll bar from appearing on the shop page (due to items with a long URL)
• Game creators can now see all their "buckets" on the metrics tab
• Lots more embeddable graphics for sharing whirled !
• Don't tell users they can visit newly-added friends that are offline
• Fixed remixing when using images from your inventory
• The music dialog pops up close to the control bar
• Whirled SDK 0.47

More contests for everybody:

• Design Your Whirled will be run again!
• Added a contests page with a list of all official Whirled contests past and present.

Bugs to fix and things to make pretty:

• Fixed display of game furnis in the shop
• Fixed bug with Easy-Image pets
• Speed enhancement on the News Feed for people trying to win the 1,000,000 friends badge
• Item and Avatar memories should be more reliable now
• Minor prettying on the Groups page
• Button cleanup on the mail conversations pages

We're back from the Thanksgiving holiday here in the States, and we brought some delicious, delicious features and fixes with us!

• New feature: friendly people page!
• We've fixed a bug with how scores and rankings were calculated for new games. Thank you for alerting us, for your bug reports - and patience! :)
• You can select whether the 3x3 Whirled Places window will be displayed when you enter Whirled (there's a new checkbox on the window itself)
• Fix for a bleeped avatar scaling bug
• Fix for how Unicode names appear in invitations
• More work on the remixer editor
• More UI fixes and server-side tweaks, as always.

Enjoy!

Welcome to another batch of fun updates:

Upgraded item creation/editing ala Gyre

• A lovely progress bar will now show you how your media upload is, well, progressing.
• Image editing tools integrated right into the uploader.
• You can now use an image as the media for avatars and pets, and it'll be automatically wrapped up as remixable Flash.

General Whirled

• Don't always pop up the 'publish room' panel. There's new buttons at the bottom of the room editor. Woot.
• Added a new page to help you embed a pretty-looking affiliate link to Whirled in your blogs and on your websites. When players sign up through your link, you earn 30% of everything they spend in the shop! See the Wiki page for more information.

SDK

• Change the timing when we dispatch property events for entity arrival and departure.
• AVRGs can now enumerate entities in a room, and query them for entity properties.
• Entities now always have a controlling client. The requestControl() method has been abolished.
• Asking for PROP_MEMBER_ID on a pet will return the owner id

Without further ado, I give you... the release notes:

• Lots of niggly gnarls degnarled in an under-the-hood stylie
• Improved group page performance
• Fail gracefully during server restart on requests to start certain games
• Improved playback for youtube videos
• Better fallback for FLVs that have no duration metadata
• Estimate total mp3 duration during download
• A number of fixes and robustification for ths Invite Friends page; also, a new link to this from the Me page
• Improvements to the Whirled Tour dialog, including in-room rating
• Better TLC for new joiners
• Promo links on the Me page
• On whirled.com, logging in no longer clears the flash client
• Only a random selection of 10 Friendly People are now listed on the me page. Who knew so many were so friendly?
• SDK 0.45

Little bit of this, little bit of that in today's update:

• happier error messages when you need to refresh your browser after a release
• better handling of AVRGs on the home grid
• pets can now be muted
• more game info on the games page
• sorting on the groups page
• (possibly) a fix for the stoned tofu problem
• see what song is playing in a room

Howdy Whirlers,

Just a few small fixes for you today since we had to take down the Deviant Art contest links. Hope you all got your awesome entries in on time!

• Added a primitive audio player for previewing songs in the Shop.
• Changed the main Groups page to show new and popular groups. More fancy sorting options coming soon there.
• Fixed a problem with links to Groups' halls from the main Groups page.
• Changed the forums to display as many threads as will fit on your screen instead of just ten.
• Fixed a problem with buying remixes using Flash Player 10.

That's about the size of it.

Happy 13th! I was a little hesitant to push out an update on such an ominously-numbered day, but what had to be done, had to be done. :)

In this update:

• New feature: Friendly People. Be a friend to new players!
  • Check out your profile options for details (under My Profile > Edit)
• Cool new video player UI
• Updated groups pages, now display more information about the group hall and discussion threads
• A number of aesthetic changes
• Fix for an occasional bug with awarding guests their coins after registration

Enjoy!

SDK

• AVRGs can now send and receive room signals.

Whirled:

• Built-in Youtube support, v0.5! Go try the video uploader. Fancier UI in next release.
• Creators can now purchase copies from their own shop, for free.
• Player following robustified. Hapless followers should no longer be left behind by leaders who blaze from room to room.
• Fixed some checkboxes in the Remixer.
• Brought back rotation to the room editor, oops.
• Further work on making AVRGs behave well under the hood. No more losing progress when you close your browser/tab, is our hope.

Ever forward.

This update features some improvements to the News feed on the Me page and fixes an issue using the Whirled SDK on Windows. Enjoy!

• "Whirleds" are now called "Groups".
• Fixed Disable Perspective checkbox.
• Decreased file size for the Whirled client download.
• Fixed a bug where removing furniture from a room would not remove it from the drop-down list of furniture in the room.
• Chat scrollbar is no longer included in snapshots.
• Changes to the news feed contents: display comments on your shop items, show snapshots of rooms in room creation and room comment items, show profile pictures on friendings, and only display the most recent 5 trophies/badges/etc when aggregating for each member.
• The default chat font size is larger. If you never adjusted your chat font size, you will get the new default. You may change your chat settings by clicking the button to the left of the chat entry box.

This update is neither the biggest nor the smallest... everything in moderation as the saying goes.

• Various bug fixes and minor changes
• Changes to the News Feed
• Many under the hood changes
• Game creators should now correctly automatically own premimum level packs instead of non-premium ones.
• Room names limited to 80 characters
• Lots of reliability improvements for AVR games and other games with server side code. A side effect is that games that experience certain errors on the server will terminate immediately instead of the previous behavior of becoming non-functional. Please be gentle :)
• SDK 0.42

It's a wonderful whirled. Have fun!

Hello again so soon! Mainly just a few bug fixes in this update:

• Fixed some problems going into games if you didn't already have the world client open.
• Subtitle chat is now rendered above in-Whirled games, so you should be able to read it even when you have the lantern on in Ghost Hunters.
• Room snapshots should now correctly include in-Whirled game graphics.
• Fixed some problems with game lobbies being split onto different servers and people not seeing one another's tables in split lobbies.
• Prettied up the account editing page a bit.
• Removed "Mail" from the Me subnavigation; you can always click on the Mail icon in the header now to get to your mail.
• Fixed the Whirled Tour.
• Fixed a problem with clicking on room preview images on the Whirleds page and the landing page.
• Increased the size of the profile photo image when editing your profile.
• Improved following: you can click anyone and choose to follow them, they will be notified that you are following them. Followees can remove all followers by clicking their own avatar or individual followers by clicking the follower's avatar. You can also prevent people from following you by changing your availability to Unavailable or Available to friends.

That's about the size of it. Happy Halloween, by the way. It's like Halloween every day here on Whirled!

Quite a few new bits for you in today's release:

Rooms Page and Whirled Tour

• Rooms Page: this shows all of the active rooms in Whirled as well as recently updated and highly rated rooms
• When you update your room, you will now be presented with an option to Publish it. When you publish it, the room's snapshot is updated and your room is considered update for the New and Hot section of the Rooms page (note that only public rooms are shown on the Rooms page).
• Whirled Tour: if you feel like checking out some of the awesome rooms in Whirled and talking to other people about them, try the Whirled Tour. It takes you on a tour of highly rated rooms and tries to group people together as they move from room to room on the tour so that they can share and enjoy whatever experiences the rooms have to offer. Be sure to rate and comment on the rooms you see in the tour.
• Explorer Badge: as you move from room to room on the Whirled Tour, you'll level up the new Explorer Badge.
• Only when you Publish your room will it show up in your friends' feeds as having been updated.

My Whirled Places

• When you first arrive in Whirled and whenever you click the little Whirled icon in the control bar, we'll show you your Whirled Places which displays three rows of things to do and places to go. This includes rooms you frequently visit, games you frequently play, as well as other things we think you might find interesting.
• We'll be working on being smarter about what we show you in your Whirled Places display so that we can get you to the things you like quickly and easily as well as things we think you might like.

A Bevy of Other Bits

• We reorganized the Me page a bit, removing the Passport information (you can get to the Passport page by clicking the Star in the header or the Passport link at the top of the Me page).
• We improved the UI of the Share dialog for rooms and games.
• The Help page can now be accessed with the Help link to the right of the Logoff button in the header.
• We added a Buy Again button when you buy something in the shop, in case you want multiple copies.
• We fixed a bunch of bugs (and probably introduced a few new ones, just to keep things interesting).

Hope you like all the fun new stuff. Happy Whirling,

Just a quick bug fix for some AVRG, server-side game and landing page issues introduced in Sunday's release.

Howdy all! Just a few small fixes in today's update:

• Fixed a problem with switching from room to room when playing Ghosthunters
• Upped the limit of room occupants to 20, after which we start turning people into stone tofus
• Various behind the scenes bug fixes that on one will notice but will help me sleep better at night :)

Happy Whirling.

Announcing the DeviantART Design Your Whirled contest! Go here to find out more and get started - good luck!

Also various bug fixes:

• Wonky long names in shop & stuff
• Everyone turning to "stoned" tofu over time in popular rooms: only people over the 10th (this includes pets) should have their avatars "stoned".
• Some IE 7 style fixes
• Snapshots work in Flash 10 now
• Multi-room AVRG issues

A bunch of minor updates today:

• When you return to Whirled you'll be sent to your room instead of the Me page
• Fixed an AVRG bug that occurred when leaving then returning to the room
• Added sub-links to Transactions and Buy Bars under the Shop tab
• Prevent delisting games with listed level packs or other sub-items
• Stuff and shop sidebars style updated
• Gift system cleanup - unopened gifts from 7+ months ago are bye bye
• Ability to save SWF stubs of rooms to your harddrive from the Embed <> menu. This is for putting your room on 3rd party sites that don't let you enter the embed code.
• Room comments appear on your feed (this was actually in the last release)

[edit]:

• Also, when 10 or more people are in a room avatars become a grey static tofu to reduce lag

A few small updates today:

• Fixed an issue when selecting a filter for items displayed in the Stuff page.
• The current bling worth is displayed on the Transactions page.
• New backdrop type: bird's eye view.
• Room snapshots can be downloaded directly to your computer.
• Remixing fixed in Flash Player 10.
• Snapshots still broken in Flash Player 10.
• Other tweaks and bug fixes.

Enjoy!

Whirled has officially entered the Era Of Bars!

Today we launched the Whirled billing server, to allow you wonderful and dedicated fans to finally show your appreciation by trading in your hard earned real life money for marvelous Whirled Bars. These Bars can be used in place of Coins to purchase anything in the shop, at a ratio that will automatically adjust for inflation. Read more about it on the wiki, then get your Bars today!

For creators, you can now choose to list your creations in Bars instead of Coins in the shop. Players can pay in either currency, but if you list in Bars you will be rewarded with a percentage of each sale in magical Bling, our third currency. Bling can be exchanged for Bars at any time, and if you amass 500 or more Bling you can cash out for real USD. Click on the Bar icon at the top to see your sales and transactions history, then start making da monies!

To advise you on all these changes and goings-on, we have updated the Help page to include a larger FAQ, and a system for sending Support Requests to our agents which you can find under "Contact Us" on the Help tab.

And if that wasn't enough, we've finally released the AVRG API for game developers! You can now create your own in-room games like Bella Bingo and Pookah Rainbow. Go snatch the newest version of the Whirled SDK (0.40) and get started.

There are also a host of other changes:

• Backdrops now have a separate furniture scale factor
• Fixed a bug with SWF backdrop editing when you first create a backdrop
• Up/Down arrow keys scroll through chat history
• New looks for the Stuff, Upload and Edit pages with more information for creators
• Display whether items are in use in your Stuff even when not in a room
• Volume button now indicates current volume
• Fixed a bug when calculating the longest amount of time you can play a game and receive coins for
• Fixed bug on profile pages with ratings on delisted games

• Galleries! Check 'em out on your and your friends' profile pages under "Pictues of me" or lower down in the galleries section.
• Searchable stuff page. Go on, don't be shy, horde up loads of stuff and find it easily.
• Fixes for a couple of bugs to do with listing and unlisting games
• A healthy smattering of other bug fixes
• Performance improvements to catalog searches

Just a quick update to fix some bugs (and introduce new ones, oops!):

• Fixed the problem with thumbnail images not being properly scaled.
• Fixed problems with live views of Whirleds
• Made the game editor disallow upload of invalid server code files
• Fixed broken images in the email you received when you receive a Whirled mail
• Changed around the way remixing before buying works; more prettification coming on that front
• Snuck out one new feature: the Friends page is no more and is replaced with a Stuff page which will in the near future evolve to be even more useful

I also broke item and level pack management which will be fixed in the next release. Right now when you edit a game with item or level packs, you won't see them in the tabs on the item detail page. Sorry!

In the meanwhile game developers can use these links to see all of their game metadata items:

• Level packs
• Item packs
• Trophy sources
• Prize sources

You can use this to edit your existing stuff but you can't upload new items using this interface. It won't work. You'll probably get a server error. :)

Zoom zip!

Bugs bugs bugs bugs bugs:

• Fixed a bug that was causing static Backdrop and Furni images to be scaled down when uploaded. If you were affected, please re-upload your items now.
• Fixed a bug that was preventing your coin readout from being updated on the fly.
• Added an unsupported browser warning for Safari users because of a bug that causes tabs and links to become unresponsive. Sorry Safari, this one might be out of our hands for now...

New features

• New backdrop editor! Check it out!
• Backdrops now have an extra scale parameter - make the people visiting your room HUGE by comparison, or make them itty-bitty critters.

Bugfixes

• Inviting friends should work once again.

We've got a few new goodies for you, but as usual most of the team is working hard on future goodies.

• The lobby / game creation interface has been revamped.
• When clicking on a game icon over someone's head, you'll join them at their table.
• Game categories have been reordered.
• Auto-generated icons for uploaded images should be nicer now.
• Bugfix: sometimes you'd be notified that you leveled-down!
• Bugfix: game occupant lists should always show up now.

See you next week!

• With today's release, we improved support (and some might say fixed some bugs) for games like Pookah Rainbow and Bella Bingo.
• We have polished up the game and room sharing. Broken links have been corrected and feedback improved.
• Various other small beautifications were made to the profile page and error dialogs. (Think of this as scraping the gum off of the sidewalks of the Whirled).
• We also made the usual menagerie of mysterious behind-the-scenes changes that will pave the way for other fabulous new features.

Game shops

• Creators can now sell level packs and item packs to extend their games. These show up in the "Game Shop" page. Additionally, games in progress can redirect players to the shop and be notified when a player buys something. Mmmm, delicious. Of course no games are using it yet but we're looking forward to when they do.

Completely revamped chat

• In the process, fixed that pesky bug where room chat would eventually stop working. Besides the new code being fuzzy like an alpaca, you'll notice that room chat is no longer "sticky", e.g. it doesn't stay active when you start playing a game. Also, each whirled has its own chat channel, so if you are a member then you will automatically get a new chat tab when a message is posted. Occupant lists for group chat channels have gone away too.

AVR Games

• More support for AVR games (games you play while in a room) (AVR = Alternate Virtual Reality, teehee). See Bella Bingo and Pookah Rainbow for examples. More to come.

Today's upgrade is a behind the scenes release, paving the way for a number of features that are in the works. Apologies for the longer than usual upgrade outage. This upgrade proved a little more delicate to get released than normal, but all systems should be go now.

• You can now delete conversations with unread messages if you like. We still let you know if you try to delete a conversation but a message has arrived since you refreshed your mail page.
• We cleaned up the UI of the item detail page a bit to organize the buttons better.
• We're starting to clean up the "My Stuff" UI a bit and the new stuff navigation bar is an experimental foray in that direction.
• There is now an "Avatars", "Toys", etc. link in the subnavigation when you are viewing an item in the Shop that you can use to easily get back to all listings in that category.
• We added an option to sort the catalog by how many times the listing was favorited.
• We switched to a new smart date formatting routine, so you'll see things like "Today" and "Yesterday" in places.
• We modified the "Top Rankings" list to filter out players who haven't played a ranked game in at least two weeks. If you want to stay on top, you have to stay on your game.
• We made the link to the discussions for a game more prominent on a game's detail page.
• We added some useful feedback to help developers debug if their game tries to award an invalid trophy or prize.
• We fixed a bunch of bugs, notably: using images from your inventory in remixes and clicking on links in your feed from IE.

• Aside from the usual assortment of bugfixes and under-the-hood improvements, the big excitement in today's release is the addition of "Favorites." Clicking the "Favorite Heart" on a shop item's detail page will add that item to your Favorites list, which is visible on your Profile page. Let the Whirled know about your impeccable taste!
• Also, you can now view someone's rooms by click "View Rooms" on their profile! Exciting stuff.

• The buttons on the control bar can slide up to show all if some are obscured.
• Fixed embedded clients so they have their special header again.
• Some menu improvements: friends are always in the chat menu, clicking a name in the room occupant list will bring up the same menu as clicking an avatar.

Inching ever closer to the New Whirled Order:

• Passports: Unlock and earn stamps on your Whirledly travels. Some stamps were able to be awarded from old data, you can collect the ones you already qualify for by visiting a room.
• Snapshots: Take pictures of your room to share and display them on your Whirled.
• Tons of UI changes: Shiny!
• Game-Whirled linking: Connect your game to a Whirled group, more to this soon.

For developers:

• SDK 0.35 contains bug fixes and API changes.

Enjoy! Please continue reporting any bugs to Bug Hunters.

• Avatars, pets, games and toys must now be flash SWF files (whoo! no more static images!)
• More visual love for the Flash interface (sexy ne?)
• Getting set up for some exciting new motivational functionality (coming soon!)
• And the usual miscellaneous bug fixes

• There's a fancy new "What is Whirled" animation on the landing page: written, produced and directed by Brittney
• New game over dialog (prettification coming)
• Game invitation notifications are differently colored
• You can now boot people from tables that you create
• A bunch of UI prettification (and a bunch of uglification because some prettification is still in progress)
• Improvements to the header shown when a Whirled or Game is embedded on a web page
• Back button in upper left corner of client is fancy new back menu
• Various improvements in the Share popup:
  • You can share Games and Whirleds now, not just Whirleds
  • You can enter friends' email addresses and we'll mail them a link
  • We also just show you the link you can use to Share a Game or Whirled however you like
• Fixed the "full height" button
• And a whole heap of other bug fixes (and probably some new bugs introduced, no doubt)

As usual we are very busy. There are a lot of things going on "under the hood", but here are a few outwardly visible things of note. Enjoy and let us know what you think:

• SDK 0.34
• Chat panel is on the left during games
• Other smaller changes to chat
• Friends sorted alphabetically when sending mail
• Some small guest view improvements
• More web page load time improvements
• Added the creator field to the ones checked when searching the catalog

• Fixed a bug where multiple notifications were being sent for a single location change.
• Fixed some issues with null guest names in games.
• Other behind-the-scenes improvements.

• Single player games and other full game tables will now be now hidden in the game lobbies. This should make it easier to find open game tables. This also has the benefit of making the lobby window load faster.
• Fixed reboot broadcasts. Everyone in Whirled, including players in games, will receive a friendly warning message a few minutes before we do our next release.

• Massive internal upheaval geared toward making new web page features easier (sadly this seems to have the side effect of breaking the tabs on the game detail page, which we are looking into)
• Improved web page download time by zipping JavaScript content (requires browser support)
• Many more not-yet-visible changes working toward support for server side code, AVRGs, snapshots and favorites

Nothing much, except for some behind-the-scenes goodness. Thank you, drive through.

• New button to maximize the room view inside the browser (in the upper right)
• Bug fix when uploading item images.
• UI tweaks
• More behind-the-scenes changes. Nobody will even notice them just yet. But they're there. :)

• SDK 0.32
• Game pages now have a single "Play" button and will ask you single/multiplayer, as applicable, when you enter the lobby.
• Various graphical and usability tweaks to the friends list.
• Tweaked remixer image editor layout so that the buttons should be more visible on windows and linux.
• Some behind-the-scenes fixes.

• New popup friends list! Check it out, with the big fat "friends" button in the lower right of the flash client.
• The headline in your profile has been changed to "status". That status gets shown in your friends list, and when you update it, your friends will see your new status. You can also edit your status from the friends list, by clicking on it at the bottom
• When you change your display name and your status, your friends will get notifications about the update
• Permanames are now required to be all lower case. We've gone in and lower-cased all of the current permanames. As a reminder: you can create a permaname (if you haven't done so already) on your account page.
• Fixed some layout issues that were making the web pages take up too much horizontal space.
• Fixed clicking on the floor in the front of the remixer viewer.

• Remix before you buy
• Pretty back button
• Bug fix when purchasing an item whose price changed at the same time
• Viewer and UI improvements
• SDK fix for entities

• Fixed overflow of room names in side panel
• Better reporting when a session is expired
• New colors for the room backdrops
• Improvements in studio viewer appearance and behavior
• Fixed some untranslated chat text
• Fixed incorrect score reporting in party games with one player
• Visual improvements to the "All Games" and game genre pages
• Minor changes to landing page
• Studio viewer is now also used for furniture and toys
• Minor change to "My Whirleds" page
• /afk is no longer modal, use /back to reverse it
• Search for empty string in catalog now clears filters
• Better usability of volume and zoom sliders
• Popup friends list (see reply)
• Removed notifications of friend logoffs
• Player notifications now link to profile page
• Fixed notification scroll bar
• Fixed intermittent problem with blank landing page
• SDK 0.30

• There is a new viewer for viewing avatars, pets, and backdrops.
• New notifications were added when someone comments on your profile or anything you've made.
• Various small UI tweaks with the notification displayer.
• Game chat now appears against a black background.

• Fixed feeds.
• Placement of the chat and notification popup menus has been fixed.

• There's a new notification widget on the control bar, which displays just the last notification (instead of listing them all in the main display). You can click on it to see a notification history.
• Guests that earn coins will now correctly get them transfered when they register
• Upgraded our Javascript code, which should make pages load a little faster
• Some fixes for in-development games: better stat recalculation, and better handling of guest accounts
• Some more server-side changes, nothing really player-visible ;)

• Discussions page improvements
• Whirleds page improvements
• My Whirleds page improvements
• Improved Kongregate integration
• Threads can now be ignored in "My Discussions"
• Remixer improvements and bug fixes (some issues remain)
• The coin award panel that is shown when a guest plays a game automatically dismisses
• Extended the cache time limit on media files
• Decors have been renamed backdrops
• Photos have been renamed images
• SDK 0.29

• Fixed some big bugs with game scoring and coin awards
• Game award display improvements (should correct the issue with trophy panels getting stuck down)
• Whirled Detail page revamp
• Fixed the decor editor
• Fixed some issues with the remixer

• Latest discussions now show up on main Whirled pages
• When remixing, photos may be selected from your inventory
• Uploading large files has been fixed on Macs and for anyone else that had a problem with it before
• Remixable avatars, decor, furniture, items and pets
• Chat messages emitted by games now show up in gray, to differentiate them from messages emitted by whirled
• Other UI improvements
• SDK 0.28

• New look for menus.
• Updated the SDK to version 0.27.
• All games now report coin awards by default. Old games that reported a custom message may now report twice, but this can be fixed by the game creator.
• Fixed some issues with embedded clients.
• Fixed the bug where chat history jumped to the top after switching tabs.

The team's been hard at work on many different things and some are ready to show:

• Fancy new front page for new users and when you're logged out.
• Room managers may boot people from their room.
• Room managers may send pets in their room to sleep.
• The room occupant list will highlight the corresponding avatar when a name is hovered.
• New look for scrollbars.
• Fixed a bug that let gifted items be listed by the recipient.
• Fixed chat scrollback so that you can read old chat without it jumping to the bottom.
• Fixed some issues with attaching trophies to games.
• Updated the SDK with a few new things.
• A lot of behind-the-scenes stuff.

Enjoy, and remember: you're the dream operator.

• The upper-left corner of the Whirled client now contains the back button, which brings up a list of recent rooms.
• Fixed a bug that prevented joining games from the lobby panel.
• Fixed the "add item" button on the room editor.
• The occupant list in rooms should now really not block mousing to room elements behind it.
• Fixed some issues with the new pet behavior. More is still coming.

We've got lots of fixes and behind the scene stuff this time, but there are a few notable features.

• Pets will now follow you around as their default behavior. You may then instruct them to stay in a room if you have permission in that room or send them home. Sending them to your own home does not work right now.
• The number of individual ratings that have gone into an item's star rating is now shown, along with handy tips as to what each level of rating means.
• New & Hot has been fixed to not filter, but rather take newness and rating both into account and sort all the items.
• Groups can now change their home room.
• In the shop's detail view for an item, you can now click a tag and search the catalog on that tag.
• Trophy uploading has been fixed.
• You can once again click on things in the upper-left if the occupant list is being shown.
• Fixed a bug that caused the client to needlessly reload sometimes.
• Fixed a bug that caused remixable items to incorrectly inform you that a new version was available. Remixables that were affected will continue to be for a bit, but new items will be fixed.
• Fixed a bunch of bugs related to embedding whirled on other sites.
• Experimental feature: you can toggle your client into full-height mode.

Enjoy!

• Added a nice header to the client when embedded on another page.
• Fixed up some embedding issues.
• New SDK release fixes a small bug and adds Pet.getName().

Just a few small fixes following yesterday's excitement.

• When browsing the catalog for a creator's items, will default to sorting by rating, instead of by new & hot (which is actually a filter).
• Correctly show names in italics when people are still downloading game media.
• New help page.

Hello, it's time for another exciting update.

• Purchased items can now be renamed. The primary point of this is to rename pets, but you can also use it to differentiate between 5 copies of a remixed avatar, for example.
• The room occupant list has returned, with many improvements.
• A new page has been added where you can compare your trophies against another player's.
• Game icons are now full-sized over people's heads.
• Room entities (furni, toys, etc) can now use the getInstanceId() method to grab the memberId of the person viewing it. 0 means invalid memberId, greater than 0 are ids for permanent members, and ids less than 0 are guests.
• Decor is now a fully-fledged room entity.
• Little icons are shown by remixable items in the shop and your inventory.
• The shop now defaults to "New and Hot" as the filter/sort option.

Just a few small things:

• Fixed the erase bug inside the remixer.
• Now in the item detail view, the name of the room where an item is used is shown.
• Most item previews are now viewed inside a flash app.

• Added support for remixable avatars.
• Now you can see which items are in use in other rooms from your inventory.
• Changed game payout calibration.
• Removed level 5 requirement for uploading certain item types.

Mostly just bug fixes this time, but there are a couple of notes to report:

• We created the Whirled Announcements (name will probably change) discussion group which is where official announcements will now go instead of Brave New Whirled. Announcements posted here go to everyone's feed without them having to have joined the Whirled because we want everyone to hear about announcements. Also only we can start threads in this group but anyone can reply to them. You can put this group in your blog reader (click the little button at the top of the threads page for the URL) and not worry about hearing anything except Whirled announcements.
• Friendships that result from the acceptance of a Whirled invitation will now properly show up in your feed.
• You now get 1000 coins for every friend that you invite to Whirled that signs up. Yay coins!
• We made the coin icon in the header shinier. Mmm... shiny!
• We added a "Browse Items" link to the profile page so that you can easily go to the catalog and see items created by that player (excuse the wacky icon, we'll make a better one soon).
• We added two My Stuff filters: "In use" and "Not in use" so that you can more easily see items that are in rooms or are not in rooms.
• Fixed some problems with the CAPTCHA stuff on the account creation page. Hopefully people who were having trouble signing up will be able to do so.

That's all for now. Happy Whirling!

• When importing addresses from your webmail accounts, we now let you know first which of your friends are already on Whirled (and let you add them as Whirled friends) and then allow you to choose who you want to invite after that.
• Various behind the scenes chat reworking to hopefully fix bugs and make our life easier when enhancing chat in the future. This means the room occupant list is temporarily disabled. It will be back soon (and will be new and improved).
• Added "About Me" section to the profile page where you can share your interests and favorite stuff with other players. Clicking on things in those lists will show you all other players who have the same things in their interests and searching for players will now search their interests as well as their name.
• Added a "Comment Wall" to the profile page so your friends can comment on your profile.
• Added a "Player News" section to the profile page that shows a mini-feed with things that player has been up to.
• Added a notification to your news feed when other players comment on your rooms (more comment-related notifications coming soon).
• Made the "View item info" menu in the world take you to the catalog page if an item is listed in the catalog so that you can buy the item yourself easily.
• Modified forums to allow fine-grained control over who can start threads and who can reply. Now you can configure those however you like for your Whirled.
• Improved friend searching, it should now find people even if you only type part of their name (not partial words, but you can just type one word of a multi-word name and they will show up).
• Added a link in "My Stuff" on the Item Detail Page to the room in which an item is used if the item is in use.
• We no longer close the "Shop" page or "My Stuff" when you wear an avatar or add an item to your room. This means you have to do it yourself, but it makes it a lot easier to add multiple things to your room at once.
• Various other bug fixes and small tweaks.

Mostly bug fixes in this here update:

• When reading discussions in a Whirled, the Whirled's name is now displayed in the page title so that you know where you are, particularly if you go to start a new thread.
• Added a way to register a complaint about a discussions post or an item/room/etc. comment.
• Reinstated real-email delivery when you receive a Whirled email (for those people that don't have it turned off in their account settings).
• Fixed feed link to items listed by your friends (the name worked the image was broken).
• Fixed problem with lobby layout not wrapping nicely.

Another wee update with a few bits and bobs:

• Added RSS feeds for Whirled discussions. Put your favorite Whirleds in your RSS reader. Note: currently we only provide first post feeds. Soon we'll add feeds that contain all posts for all threads.
• Added the ability to search Whirled discussions. Currently you can search a particular Whirled's discussions and you can search within a particular thread. We'll be improving this further in the future but the basic searching is working which is a big help.
• Your messages and new threads are now marked as read for you automatically instead of showing up in My Discussions as new.
• Fixed some problems with in-Whirled URL links. Links to Whirled URLs should work more nicely.
• Prettied up the "Invite Friends" page and improved the address book importing. It will now offer to send Whirled friend requests to people in your address book that already have Whirled accounts.
• You can also remove pending invitations for those cheeky friends that didn't take you up on your invitation.
• Added CAPTCHA to the account creation page to help stave off spammers.
• Added a popup menu to players' names in games. You can now start a private chat with them, send them a friend request, and complain about them if they are being naughty.
• Turned off transparency for chat bubbles in slide chat mode so that they stand out better against their black background.
• A few other bug fixes here and there, LOLcaptions should be working again. Yay!

A few niggling fixes following up on yesterday's release:

• Fixed mail text centering on IE
• Reinstated group invitations; go to the "Members" tab of a group and there's a button in the bottom left for inviting someone to join that group; like item gifts it is currently restricted to your friends, but soon that will be fixed to allow you to invite/gift to anyone
• Added ability for people to import their Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo, etc. address books on the invite friends. page; this will all become prettier and more usable soon
• Fixed kooky asdf,asdfa,sdf,asdfasdf names in party game lobbies
• Fixed problem with forums where they would not scroll to the top of the message list when moving from page to page
• Fixed problem with forums where they were a smidgen too wide and caused a horizontal scrollbar
• Modified the forums so that super wide messages have their own horizontal scrollbar instead of screwing up the whole page of messages
• Fixed a problem where the walking hotspot was shown over the black background of slide chat
• Added support for "ignoring" threads which makes them no longer show up in your "My Discussions" list even when they have new messages
• Fixed problem where guests who went straight into games had the name "null"
• Made furniture that links to URLs outside of Whirled open them in a new tab or window

• Finally added an intro movie to the landing page (no more "coming soon").
• Changed the flow icon to something that looks like coins; we'll probably tweak this more later.
• Moved the avatar viewer controls to the bottom so that tall avatars don't block them.
• Added support for complaining about other players (along with a whole raft of customer support tools that hopefully no one will have to experience because their customer experience will be a shining example of awesomeness). We'll be adding more sophisticated ways to deal with annoying people in the future.
• Added a loading progress display when games are loading.
• Changed the chat keyboard shortcuts: F7/F8 switch tabs and F9 toggles history.
• Disabled "click anywhere in the client to go back to world." Now you have to click the close box to go back to the world, but you can move around and do things in the skinny little world while you're looking at the catalog or doing something else.
• Various other bug fixes and tiny tweaks that are too technical or minuscule to mention.

• Prettied up the main Whirleds page
• Added various fine print to the bottom of the landing page
• Added a welcome page which is shown to users when they register
• Modified world client to not download MP3s at all if your Whirled volume is set to 0
• Nixed first item free policy, modified the tutorial to tell the user to go play games if they don't have the funds to continue
• Made the tutorial (yet) more robust in the face of users clicking the wrong thing, veering off the trodden path or otherwise coloring outside the lines
• A bunch of CSS and HTML fixes to hopefully make things work better on IE and Safari
• Fixed a problem with pet memories not being saved
• Added icons for the various forum message actions so that they don't take up oodles of horizontal space
• Added a fancy dialog shown to guests who earn flow suggesting that they register so that they can keep that flow
• Removed the "Featured Game" banner on IE since it cause more trouble than it's worth
• Added a percentage complete display to the decor loading indicator
• Changed the name of the currency: flow is now coins; welcome to the new Whirled order
• Pets should now remember where they've been let out and return there when the server reboots
• Broke the new "Type here to chat" display; I'll fix it again in an update later today

• Updates to the Whirled SDK see the release notes on the Wiki for details
• My Stuff navigation is shown at the top of the Me page and the My Stuff pages
• The Whirled detail page is a work in progress, apologies for the temporarily missing functionality
• The main Shop page now shows featured items
• Added an "All Games" link in the Games section
• Redesigned the game lobbies as a set of popup windows
• Redesigned the item detail pages show in My Stuff and in the Catalog
• Added ability to specify the tooltip when making furniture into a web link
• Moved the chat controls to the lower left, put the preferences in that unified chat menu
• Added an issue tracking system (a work in progress, more on this in the next release)

• Our graphic redesign is still in progress, so bear with us as things continue to evolve into their new form.
• Fixed problem with invitees not being able to create an account after following their invitation link.
• (Hopefully) fixed the problem where players were being denied entrance to their own rooms.
• Reinstated the "Remove friend" button, added an "Add friend" button when looking at other member's friends (please excuse the temporary icon, it will be changing).
• Fixed problem where page would not properly refresh if you logged off while on the Me page.
• Reinstated the ability to upload images directly when asked to choose an image from your photos.
• Implemented an access control policy for pets (which we meant to do all along, oops): you cannot put a pet in a room that you do not have editing privileges for (ie. you own the room or you are a manager of the Whirled that owns the room).
  • We will eventually add the ability to have your pet follow you around the Whirled. This will allow you to take pets into others' rooms, but the pets will leave when you leave.
• Added a count of people currently online in Whirleds. That is now used to select the Featured Whirled.
• Various other small fixes and usability tweaks.
• Added "My Rooms" page that shows you all of your rooms.
• Modified forum reply UI such that it only shows the post to which you are replying and the message authoring interface; it should also scroll that into view properly now.
• Fixed some layout issues on IE.
• Updated the Whirled SDK.
• A few other niggling bits here and there.

• Fixed some bugs with Me -> My Discussions; new threads that you've never read before should now properly show up.
• Added support for Announcement Threads which, when posted, will result in a message being added to the feed of all member's of the group. Only group managers can post announcement threads.
• Note that only one announcement feed entry per group per day is allowed, so any announcements after the first in a single day will not result in an additional feed entry being added.
• Added support for following: click on someone's avatar and select Invite to follow and they'll be asked if they want to follow you. If they agree, then when you move to a new room, they'll automatically move to a new room as well. You can clear your followers by clicking on your avatar and selecting Clear followers and they can stop following by clicking on theirs and selecting Stop following.
• Added (primitve) support for changing the foreground and background colors of your game instructions.
• Removed the requirement that mail messages have a non-empty body.
• Various UI refinements and minor bug fixes.

• Groups now have discussion forums, thereby transforming them from questionable statements of affiliation into useful social and communication tools
• Check out the Me -> My Discussions interface which shows you all unread threads in all groups of which you are a member
• Game lobby UI has been redesigned to make it easier to see what's going on
• The ability to invite your online friends to join you in a game has also been added to the lobby; we are looking into allowing you to invite your offline friends as well
• We're experimenting with not underlining our links; let us know if you find it more aesthetically pleasing or annoying that you don't know what you can click on
• We've added a bunch of stuff to the Whirled SDK
• Fixed problem where photos and other items did not have thumbnail images autogenerated when uploaded
• We now display a "Locating game..." panel when we're connecting to a game server to let you know that we're doing something after you clicked a button to open a game lobby or enter a game
• Added the ability to play unrated games which do not affect your ranking
• We now display buttons in all games that allow you to return to the Whirled or request a rematch
• Games now use profile photos instead of avatar headshots as the player's image
• Various bug fixes and behind the scene enhancements

• Various game detail page enhancements:
  • You can now post a screenshot for your game which is shown on the detail page
  • There are now three ways to get into a quick game:
    • play a single player game
    • play a multiplayer game against only your friends
    • play a multiplayer game against anyone
  • You can also choose to play a custom game which puts you in the game lobby and allows you to choose the game you want to join or to create a new game.
• The game creation interface is not shown by default unless there are no tables to join
  • The lobby is undergoing further redesign, so things will change a bit more in coming releases
• Reduced the size of the game icon in the Profile Rating section
• Enhanced item description entry; it now properly limits your description and tells you about it
• Further improved feed message aggregation
• Your new mail count is now displayed in the header next to the new mail indicator
  • The new mail indicator is properly cleared if you read mail when not also in a room
• Fixed handling of gifted items

• Switched to the new new new chat world order wherein chat is all on the left hand side of the display and tabs overlay the room. They're not done yet though:
  • We're going to change the way history works
  • We're going to blink the tabs when they have new messages
• Finished and deployed the new tutorial system; yay for fancy tutorials!
• Enhanced the feeds
  • Certain messages are aggregated
  • When someone edits a room, we now tell you the name of the room
  • When a friend levels up, we let you know about it
• We've made some improvements to the sliding of the client from left to right when you open and close other parts of Whirled
• Changed room editing so that you can click and drag furniture immediately rather than having to click, release, then click again, then drag
• Added a preview picture to the profile editing UI
• Modified catalog searches to include tags
• Made the navigation menus at the top of the page behave like normal menus: if you click one to open it, you can slide the mouse over others and they'll automatically open it and you can click the menu again to close it
• Fixed various problems with IE6; still more to come no doubt
• Made the logon UI slide down from the header instead of being a popup
• Updated the Whirled SDK and added the ability for games to award prizes
• Modified photo and audio uploading to automatically configure the item name from the filename of the uploaded file

• Added "Places -> Whirledwide" menu when logged on
• Added a "Metrics" display to the game detail page for game creators to show them their game's score distribution and allow it to be reset
• Modified the catalog ratings display to show your own rating in blue and the average rating in black; we don't like this and are going to change it again, but you can see what you think while it's up
• Fixed problem with trophy awarding (should now show up in friends' feeds when you earn a trophy)
• Made it possible to upload an image on the fly when selecting an image for your profile page or in the game instructions editor
• Fixed problem with games resizing wildly and weirdly (sort of)

• Feeds! You now get a list of stuff that your friends have been up to on the My Whirled page.
• Game Instructions page has been added, with a nifty rich text editor.
• When going to a web page such as the Catalog, Inventory or My Whirled, the flash client is animated in a slide to the right
  • Click the vertical divider to slide it back, but preserve the page you were on.
  • When in the flash view, if the divider is there on the left, you can click it to bring back the page you were last on.
• Chat bubble work:
  • Bubbles now follow you around the room.
  • Say and Think bubble rendering is improved.
• Image chooser popup is improved. This is used in editing Game Instructions and for selecting your profile pic.
• Style improvements to the comments and trophy pages.
• Whirled SDK
  • WhirledGameControl.getStageBounds() is nixed in favor of EZGameControl.getSize(), with an added SizeChangedEvent so that games can resize themselves if the browser size changes.

• Improved the "About Me" section of the profile; fixed up layout, added "Level", "Member since" and (optional) "Age", "Sex" and "Location"
• Fancied up the comments UI which now displays profile pictures
• Improved readability on the game detail trophies tab
• Improved readability on the game detail rankings tabs and switch to showing the actual ranking instead of stars
• Added a player list to the sidebar for games; this will be improved and made prettier in the next release
• Standardized the game display to 700x500 at minimum, with the potential to be wider if a player has a wide browser, but never skinnier (if we can help it) nor taller
• Added total number of friends to profile page (See All N Friends)
• Made all thumbnails half thumbnail size and nixed the old full thumbnail size so that thumbnail images look better and we don't have to rely on browsers scaling
  • If you have items with images that seem to be too big, you can reupload the thumbnail image for those items and they will be properly scaled
• Made a whole bunch of progress on AVR Games and the new Tutorial, both of which are still not yet ready for prime time
• Fixed the problem with the world being tiny after shrinking and restoring it

• Changed the way chat bubbles work; we'll be doing more experimentation with this so bear with us if our experiments go at times awry.
• Playing games from the Game Detail page has been streamlined:
  • Click "Play!" to go right into a game (creating a new game if necessary or joining an existing party game if it's a party game)
  • Click "Multiplayer" to go into the game lobby where you can browse, create and join tables
• The table display in the lobby has been consolidated into one list for forming and running tables
• Various Friend improvements:
  • There's now a full page list of all of a player's friends
  • When you look at your own full friends list you can remove friends (yay!)
  • Soon you'll be able to select which six friends show up on your profile page; they will be your "Featured Friends"
• There's now a close box in the upper right when you're in the World and in a Game
  • Clicking close in a Game will take you back to the World
  • Clicking close in the World will close the Flash client and take you to "My Whirled"
• Chat in games has been revamped; it now always appears in a tab on the right instead of drawing over the game and strangely disappearing sometimes
• The Game Detail page now displays "Top Rankings" and "My Rankings" lists which show the top-ranked players in the whole Whirled and among you and your friends respectively

• Improved the game detail page; click "about" from a game's lobby or click "More information..." from a game in My Stuff or in the Catalog
  • All trophies awarded by a game are displayed on the game detail page along with information on which trophies you have earned
• A full Trophy Case page has been created that displays all trophies that a player has earned in all games; it is available from the "Trophies" section of a player's profile page (which is only visible if they've earned at least one trophy)
• Item creation has been streamlined; it's no longer necessary to select a file for upload and then click upload; we do that automatically for you now
• Mail reading has been fixed
• Profile searching has been fixed
• Friends are now sorted alphabetically in the People -> Places and Places -> Friend's Homes menus and if you're like Cleaver and have a jillion friends, we now break them up into submenus for easier navigation
• When updating a Catalog listing, the system now replaces all existing purchases with the updated version instead of requiring existing purchasers to buy a new copy
  • If you don't want to update existing items but want people to have to buy a new copy, you should create a new item with your updated content and list that new item in the catalog
  • Then go to the Catalog page for the old version of the item and click "Delist Item"
• Other tiny bugs were fixed and improvements were made; the wheels of progress are always rolling away here at OOO HQ

• Added Trophies which can be awarded by games; the SDK updates to go along with it are not published yet but we'll get that out in a day or two
• More work on level and item pages which are pretty much entirely working now
• Added a Game Detail page (which can only currently be accessed by clicking on a trophy on someone's profile, more links to it coming soon) which currently doesn't show much other than what's on a game's catalog page but will some day show more useful things
• My Stuff now shows original items (those that you made) in italics and purchased items in normal text
• Added support for furniture hotspots when creating the furniture item; this is in addition to FurnitureControl.setHotSpot() (which overrides the hotspot set in the furniture item); this means you can set a hotspot on simple image furniture which is very handy; we'll create a better UI for setting the hotspot in the future, but for now you have to enter the pixel offset from the upper left corner of the furniture image
• Made a whole heap of progress on AVR Games which we'll eventually document and provide samples
• Bug Fixes:
  • Sounds in the Featured Place view are now muted
  • Featured Places: the most populous places are now shown first.
  • Flow and Level numbers in the upper right are no longer reset when Whirledwide is viewed.

• Revamped catalog pricing; creators set the price for their items by hand and then have the following choices:
  • manual - the price is never automatically adjusted
  • escalate - the creator sets a sales target (say 100 items) and then the price is increased 25% when it hits that target, and 25% again when it hits it a second time, and so on
  • limited edition - the creator sets a sales target and when it is met, the listing is hidden
• In all cases, the creator can adjust the current price any time they like.
• The beginnings of support for game level and item packs are in place. More details forthcoming when the feature is completely done.
• Further progress on "Whirledwide" and fixes to "My Whirled" (clicking on your friend's name in the games section will now take you to their pending table or into their game if possible).
• Updates to the game development SDK

• Brought the new My Whirled/Whirledwide dichotomy to the fore. Whirledwide is currently in progress. Both pages should be more informative than the previous green landscape that they replaced. If you simply cannot be without your green-pasturey goodness, you can still visit that page at http://first.whirled.com/#world-p.
• Catalog searches are now case-insensitive, and will do a better job at partial matches.
• Catalog detail pages now show the total number of purchases for that item.
• A new Catalog sorting option has been added: Sort by number of purchases.
• Catalog Item Commenting! There is now a comment area at the bottom of every catalog item, hopefully lending some context to the item's rating.
• Distinguished single and multi-player game ratings.
• Fixed leveling up/down weirdness.

• TBD

• We've gotten the new room editing to the point where we now know that we want the new new room editing; but this time it's going to be awesome, we promise
• More progress on the game development SDK; we're making it easier for Flash Authoring Tool users to create games without ever having to touch a smelly command line
• Cleaned up the catalog and inventory pages a bit; more work coming on the inventory
• Added profile searching and the ability to specify your real name (which we never show to anyone) so that your friends can find you when they show up in Whirled
• Added the ability to start a private chat with another player by clicking on their avatar and selecting "Start private chat..."
• Fancied up the "Friends" display on the Profile; more improvements to come on that front, it's a bit wonky still
• Stuffed the wiki and forums into an iframe so that you don't have to leave the Whirled when you use them
• Fixed a problem with classifying the size of thumbnail images; if you have an image in your inventory that is too big and not scaling properly, reupload the thumbnail image and it should fix itself
• Doors now highlight green rather than red; we think that's a better color
• Various other behind the scenes improvements, bug fixes, and progress on cool new stuff that we'll release as soon as it's ready

• Yet more progress on the new room editing interface
• A bunch of progress on the Flash (and Java) game development SDK
• Made Java games work (GG developers, you can upload your games to Whirled, look for a post on the GG forums with more details soon)
• Avatars are now chosen by opening your inventory and clicking the avatar you want to wear and clicking a "Use this avatar" button
• Room decor is configured in the same way; and new furniture is added to a room in the same way; this interface will be improved upon in coming releases
• We are debuting our invitation system whereby players can invite their friends into the Whirled; we are starting with a single invitation for everyone just to test the system but soon we'll be giving out more invites

• More progress on the new room editing interface
• Various and sundry bug fixes which were the main motivation for this release

• The new room editor is fully in use. There are still a few rough edges, but overall we're much happier with it. Try it and let us know what you think on the forums.
• Items are now sorted by most-recently used.
• Zzz's are shown over people who are idle.
• /state and /action commands can be used to alter your avatar from the chat box.
• Updates to Dance Battle.

• Revamped the way we map logical coordinates to screen coordinates to be properly perspective correct; this unfortunately means that for deep rooms objects will have moved around again and you will have to adjust their Z-coordinate to get them back to where they used to be
• Further progress on the new room editing interface, much more to be done; also the old room interface is somewhat broken and we'll endeavor to fix that and/or make the new interface more usable ASAP
• The room view is shrunk to a small size when moved to the sidebar
• More Swiftly progress; some UI rearranging, fixed some broken bits
• We're all deep in the bowels of various backend bits, so not a lot of other visible changes

• Made chat channel UI look a little better; it now reports who is in the channel when you enter and when someone enters or leaves a chat channel
• Fixed the Neighborhood display
• Broke Friend to Friend chat channels, they'll be fixed in the next release
• A tiny bit more progress on room editing; still much more to come
• Started versioning the Whirled SDK, the first version is 0.2, such a lovely number; we also have release notes for the SDK on its fancy new download page: Whirled SDK
• Fixed Swiftly building, though there are some upload problems with it right now; also started rearranging its UI a bit

• We're halfway through revamping the way you layout your rooms. The old interface still exists (you get it by clicking on the hammer) but the new interface is also available by right clicking on objects in your room. This is still in progress and you can't do things like add new items to your room from the new interface yet, but let us know if anything seriously bakes your noodle.
• We've added chat channels and person to person chat, which you can access by clicking on the little head on the right of the control bar. Right now you can chat to your friends and you can chat with members of your groups. We'll also be adding private chat channels that you can invite other people into and we'll be improving the UI in various ways (telling you who's in a chat channel and when people enter and leave).
• We've added an icon over someone's head when they're in a pending table in a game lobby; you can click on the icon to enter the same lobby
• We've added "browse by creator" to the catalog, right now you can only access it from an item detail page (click an item in the catalog then click the creator's name on the item detail view) but eventually you'll be able to access it from the preview section and from that person's profile page
• We've added the ability to scale your avatar when you select it; you can be teeny or huuuge
• We've added the ability to fly! Move your mouse to where you would stand, hold down the shift key and raise your mouse and watch the pretty wings; click there and you'll levitate up to that position; avatars can detect whether or not they are flying by looking at their y value (>0 means you're flying) and they can do a flying animation when that is the case
• We added the ability for entities (avatars and pets) to move the location of their name label rather than having it always default to the top of their bounding box
• We've done some more work on pets, but unless you're working on a pet, you probably won't notice
• We've fixed various bugs and no doubt introduced some new ones

Note

We fixed the bug introduced in the previous release that caused some furniture to render in the wrong position. This means that if you "fixed" your furniture after the last release, it might look wrong again. Feel free to move it again and we'll do everything in our power to avoid breaking it again.