Bryon, our graphics artist, has produced a graphic of our mascot for the "Hatchling" release. It is posted in the Graphics Pot under Splash Screens in the Wiki. Please take a look and comment. If you hate it, love it, think something should be different, please give us feedback. Also, it would be nice to have a name for the mascot, but I don't have any bright ideas, so I'm looking for suggestions. Just nothing with "zilla" in it, please. :)

Zyrca has made some significant progress on her Combat Manager module. Yesterday she had two creatures engage each other in combat for the first time. Her eventual aim is to create Artificial Intelligence agents that can be used to run NPC's for the Game Master. At first the Combat Manager will interact with the players and the GM through the Chat interface but we expect to integrate it with the Mapper module later on. I expect that the Combat Manager will speed up combat greatly and take a great deal of work off the hands of the Game Master. -- Ray

Andrew Carey is leading the work Mapper, so I sent him the code I have developed for an application called SVG Illuminator. Illuminator is a drawing application that saves the drawings as SVG code. Right now it's incomplete, since it can only save SVG; it can't read it back in and recreate the drawing from it. I've been considering setting it up as a separate project, since it could probably be complete in fairly short order and then we could use the code in the Mapper and any other place we need SVG editing and display. -- Ray

I've posted some of the GUI code that I've been working on. Andrew Carey has expressed an interest in working on the GUI and I felt that it would be good to post the code even though it is very far from complete or even functional. The code was written using NetBeans and the *.form files are used by NetBeans to coordinate work in the GUI Editor on the classes that are primarily GUI classes like JFrames and JPanels. If you change the code so that it won't work with the *.form files, please remove those files from CVS so no one will be confused.

I recently received an email from one of the people over at World Forge expressing interest in sharing ideas and resources with our project. You can check out their project at www.worldforge.org. I think both projects will benefit from an exchange of ideas and probably other things, perhaps even code, artwork and more. -- Ray

Robert Wei today submited the first parts of the JXAT Communications Layer. Robert took over development of a design for the communications layer and built the first pieces of code after the previous JXTA Lead found himself to busy at work to devote time to the project. Robert will be out of town until December 1st, but said that he would try to keep tabs on the project. It's now up to the rest of us to finish what Robert started so we can finish the "Hatchling" release. -- Ray

Since Harsh is unable to work on the project for the time being due to work pressures, we are scrambling to put together the JXTA Communications Layer. I'm working on design of the layer and both Robert Wei and Paulo Mouat have volunteered to work on the code. I've also put up a new ad for someone experienced in JXTA and sent requests for help to the JXTA User and Developer mailing lists. Anyone wishing to help out should let me know. -- Ray

I asked Bryon to create some images of a mascot for the project. He sent me the first one, "Hatchling" today. It's really good. He'll be doing some more polishing of it and we hope to have it ready to display by December 1st. Afterwards, our mascot will grow with each release until we get to our first production/stable release.

The updated message handler code has been checked in. Please take a look and comment!

Paulo Mouat has taken over as the MessageHandler Lead. Roland Yu has found that he has to concentrate on work for the time being and won't have enough time to devote to the project to work on the MessageHandler code right now.