NationStates News

by Max Barry
Sat, 27 Oct 2012

Hello! There haven't been any news posts for a while. But there have been changes! I've just been so busy making those changes that I haven't had time to post about them. Either that or lazy. It's one of those.

• New forum hardware! Seriously, the forum doubles in size like every six months. It's a beast. Things were getting pretty slow, but a few weeks ago we completed a major move to new hardware, and now it's super-fast again. For at least the next few weeks.
  
• Rippling Flags! When you upload a custom image for your nation's flag, you can check a "Ripple" box, to make it look more like an actual rippling flag. Unless it's very dark. It doesn't work so well on very dark images. But everything else: beautiful! This feature uses a template designed by deviantArt user alxfa, who has kindly allowed us to use it here!
• Advanced Dossiers! Hardcore players who manage lists of hundreds or thousands of nations can now download and upload their dossiers for offline management.
• More API Shards! We have an API. You probably didn't know that. You probably don't even know what an API is. That is okay. You have a life instead. But for those of us who think life is meant for building web sites that automatically suck data from NationStates and display it in new and innovative ways, we have an API. Which now supports more data calls than ever!
• WA Vote Percentages! When you consider a World Assembly Resolution, you are shown numbers on how the rest of your region has voted. Some people argued that this would function as a kind of peer pressure, increasing the "lemming effect" of votes. I'm not sure if that actually happened. But you could figure it out with the API.
• Random Nations! When you create a new nation, you can set its starting government type as "Random." There used to be a "Psychotic" option, but that's gone, because frankly it was too psychotic. It didn't make sense even by our standards.
• Daily Update Speed Variance: The update time of regions (i.e. the time at which votes are tallied to determine the WA Delegate) has become a lot more predictable since we shifted to new hardware, and this means invaders can time their attacks to within a few seconds of perfection, making them near-impossible to stop. This isn't quite how things are supposed to be, so the update now has inbuilt cleverness to randomize its speed a little. There's more planned in this area, but that's what we have for now.

We also have a few major new features that have been in the works for a long time and are nearly ready to let loose. I can't tell you what they are! That would spoil the surprise. But one of them rhymes with "Bent Bitems Bolder bor Belegrams."

By the way, did you know that November 13, 2012 is our 10-year anniversary? It totally is. Expect something for that, too.