The winner of the free Driftmoon copy is Esa K. Congratulations! The free copy will be sent when the game is released. If you didn't know of the competition, you might want to join the Driftmoon mailing list. There may be some other competitions in the future.

First of all I want to kick off by saying thank you for voting! We got 30% of all votes in the 2BeeGames competition (a nice second place, in a competition that started out with 120 games!), and while we didn't win the poll, it goes to show that there's definite interest in roleplaying games. We're especially happy to have done so well with this preview version of Driftmoon, as the development of the game is still very much in progress. We also got featured in a lot of places, and are very thankful for all the support we received! We also want to congratulate all the other 2BeeGames-finalists for their success in the competition! And on to the show. It's technical, but I'll keep it short (just kidding!). As most of you know, I spent a couple of very nice weeks redeveloping our sound engine. Why? Because I chose a poorly supported library earlier, and it crashed the game at random now that the preview was being tested on more machines. The library was Audiere, a very easy and clean library. You could very nearly play a sound by calling play(filename). I chose it back in 2005, when it was still in active development. Since then, more and more computers have got at least two CPU cores, which seems to induce a threading bug in the library. Unfortunately Audiere hasn't been updated in years, so I had to look for a new library. I went with Microsoft's new XAct3. It looks easy enough, it has a really nice tool to set up all the sounds, supports both XBox 360 and Windows, and it's the newest from one of the most largest software companies out there. Also, Microsoft clearly states that their older DirectSound technology is deprecated, which usually means they're not supporting it, and that developers should use the newer libraries XAct3 or Xaudio2. I completely overhauled our sound engine to XAct3, now happy with this new technology. But as it turns out, new technologies often have bugs, and so did XAct3. It crashed at random when releasing finished sounds, and at random it would reuse a sound, resulting in the previous sound being played instead of the new sound. Since XAct3 was built as an easy to use wrapper around XAudio2, and the bugs were in the wrapper layer, I moved on to using XAudio2. Now I completely overhauled our sound engine to XAudio2. To its credit I can say that it worked, and didn't have any bugs that I could see. But it had one little flaw - it required the absolutely newest DirectX version. That's not going to be a problem in a few years time, and it's not a problem for any larger games where your average user is willing to upgrade his whole computer to play the game. But I couldn't just put in a message saying you need a new DirectX pronto, chop chop to Microsoft and install it, hope it runs on your outdated hardware, then if you still remember, try our game. So I completely overhauled our sound engine to DirectSound. I've been using it in all of my previous games, starting from the year 1999. It works just as perfectly as it ever did, and even though Microsoft says it's deprecated, I'm sure they don't really mean that. So that's what I was doing for the past two or three weeks. I'm really glad I can get to working on the actual game now...

One of the feedback we picked from the Driftmoon preview was that some players (me) didn't like the way the plot of the game started. I'm looking for a way to improve the beginning, and while we're at it, we could make the player character more interesting. If you have an idea for the plot, don't read any further before posting it to the comments, or you might forget your unspoiled idea. So now that you either don't have an idea or you've posted it already, I can tell you my ideas. Looking at the current setup, the player is just a general chap who's father was the baron of Driftmoon, and the player didn't know this. Someone said he'd preferred playing Paul the Librarian, and I would have preferred playing Bobby the Skeleton. Often RPG characters are weak nobodies who just happen to be at the right place, such as in all Fallouts and Oblivion. The argument there is that it's easier for the player to feel sympathy for characters similar to themselves. Also that allows character development, the player can mold the character as they will. Call me crazy, but I'd like a my character to be a little more interesting, perhaps even have a background of their own that I could learn while playing. My favourite example of RPG player characters is The Nameless One from Planescape: Torment. The protagonist was handed an ugly tattooed character with an unknown background, only the knowledge that he lived forever and had lived many different lives in the past now forgotten. You could develop him while playing by getting him to remember some of his past lives, and you learned quite a bit of his past. He was an interesting character from the start, it was cool playing him and you wanted to learn about him, but since he had no memory of his past the character itself didn't force your choices. Unfortunately the forgotten past is one of the most used game elements today, but this was ten years ago when it was still nearly new. So here's my initial ideas for the player character. I don't want to completely redo the starting levels, but I could for example start the player in Driftmoon and turn Samuel (the professor with the teleport) into some sort of a wizard or sage, and move his house there.

• The player is the baron himself, come to the past to stop himself.
• The player is a golem created by the wizard.
• The player is a dwarf trying to escape from the mines, mistakenly tunneled into the wizards house.
• The player is the king of Driftmoon from a thousand years ago, woken from his grave by the wizard to stop the Curse.

Or something like that. I'm very eager to hear your ideas so if you have none, make something up right now!

This is the final vote, so if you like Driftmoon, vote now and ask your friends to vote for us as well. If we win, it means I will have a chance to focus more on Driftmoon - and finish it sooner. (The poll closes 30.11 at 11:59 PM EST.) For those of you not familiar with Driftmoon yet, the preview version is available here. And for those who don't yet even know about the contest yet, here's a link to 2beegames.com. The contest organizers would appreciate it if you also registered there, though it is not obligatory at the moment.

It was tight, but we made it to the final round of voting at 2BeeGames. The next voting will start tomorrow, so check back to vote for Driftmoon. Thanks for all of your votes this far!

The competition is really tough! If you like Driftmoon, please vote and ask your friends to vote for us at http://www.2beegames.com/. UPDATE: This is the most critical moment this week, if you haven't voted yet, please vote!

Edit: New preview version is here. If you haven't tried the game yet, that's a good place to start.

First of all, if you haven't voted for Driftmoon yet, please vote! The last vote next week is the most important, that determines the winner! I actually came here to talk about download statistics. Those are often well kept secrets, you wouldn't want your competitors to know you're doing bad! The reason I wanted to reveal my statistics is that one of my games is keeping me up at night. It's weird. A bit of background. Most of my games are from way back. I actually started making games in 1998, and the oldest one available here is The Forge released in 2000. The newest actual release, if you don't count Driftmoon, would be Notrium from 2003. Now six or more years is a lot of time to get downloads. Too bad I've only got statistics from 2004 upwards, so we can only guess at what numbers these games have started with. And I'm only talking about downloads directly from monkkonen.net. I honestly have no idea what the numbers would be from other sites that offer my games. Should I double these or what? I said I didn't have statistics from before 2004. Well I lied there. I tracked Notrium in 2003. To a young man just starting game development it was a huge success, with well over 300 000 downloads in the first couple of months alone. After that the downloads settled into about 5000 per month, gradually declining to 2000 per month that I now see. So that's in the range of 600 000 - 700 000 total downloads up until now. Before Notrium there was Magebane 2, and after a rough start it soon settled into 5000, declining to current 2000 per month. The total numbers for Magebane are pretty similar to Notrium. The difference between the games is that Notrium took two years to build, and Magebane about half a year. Wazzal and The Forge have always been pretty regular with 500-1500 downloads per month. I think they're both at about 100 000 total for their lifetime. So what was the fuss about?  It's about the fact that Bikez II has netted well over 2,5 million downloads! I think about 80 percent of the downloads are from Brazil. If you're reading this from São Paulo, here's hello to you. If I got a dollar from each of you, I'd get a decent income. The download numbers for Bikez II are actually continually increasing due to more people getting an Internet connection in Brazil. The counter at one of the bigger sites Baixaki is going at 1.2 million. So what do you make of it? My statistics software claims it doesn't count robots and download accelerators, so the number cannot be that far off. Did the game just get lucky in Brazil, such that it has nothing to do with the actual game? Maybe there's potential for making money out of these growing economies? Is there a huge demand for games like Bikez II, enough to warrant an eight year old game to continue succeeding? Is it riding on the success of Grand Theft Auto, with the difference that it works on really old computers? Or is it just the girl in the menu? I'm at a loss with this one, I really am. Who wants to see Bikez 3? If one million comment, I'm going to start right now.

The 2BeeGames.com voting continues. Last week we got 17% of all votes which means we reached first place out of 120 games!  Thank you everyone! This was only about 170 votes, so don't think your vote doesn't matter! There are two votings left, so please vote for us this week and the next, and get all of your friends to help (we are following the instructions of the contest organizers, and advertising a bit ourselves )! You can vote at 2BeeGames.com. In other news, I've been hard at work replacing our sound engine with a brand new custom made engine. We used to use Audiere, which turned out to crash at random due to threading bugs. So now I'm implementing a new sound engine from scratch. This is good old low level coding with threads and getting my hands greasy with bytes and char arrays. My first choise was to use Microsoft's new XAct interface, but turns out it has horrible bugs if you don't use their own sound bank generation tools. Since I want to encourage open formats such as OGG, I'm going to use a lower level API called XAudio2. Unfortunately this means I have to write my own streaming routines and a lot of low level code. But it also means I have complete control over it, and it means our modders won't have to use any proprietary tools to create their audio. It's a bit more work for me, but hopefully rewarding in the end!

Driftmoon got into the finals! But we'll get eliminated if we don't get enough votes, so please help us! There are two places I need you to vote. The poll on the right side of the 2BeeGames site is the most important, so cast your vote there. The other is the star rating on the 2BeeGames Driftmoon page. Let's do it people! I know we can win this!

Here's something for anyone interested in making maps for Driftmoon. It's the editor interface for AI paths. Some of you may remember that Driftmoon's predecessor Notrium didn't have any path finding abilities, and as such the AI was really idiotic in closed areas. In Driftmoon the map maker can define paths that the AI can take if it wants to get from one room to another. The reason we need to have a good pathfinding system is not just enemies, but also your companions. They need to be able to follow you intelligently, and not get stuck somewhere. My original pathfinding system was based on a very thick grid, and the game would check which points were accessible from which. Unfortunately that wasn't good for open areas, as there could be up to hundreds of points within a very short path, and it wasn't good for dungeons, as the automatic points tended to be too sparse for thin corridors - the game thought they were solid rock. So now we have to place the points manually, and the paths between the points are made automatically. It only takes a few minutes time, and the AI behaves much better, so I think it's worth the time spent.