Blog

On the 2nd and 3rd october, Jade:DS was present at the game development festival DevMania in Mainz. Over one hundred private game developers presented their works and created games in the annual overnight contest. This years topic was "moonlight" and producted several small but great games. Jade:DS is proud to have sponsored the winners trophies this year and I'd like to thank the organization team for this nice weekend.
After the speech, held by Andreas Heldt an me, I announced the closed beta of Jade:DS to be straight ahead. Please revisit this page the next weeks for more information about that and how to participate in this beta run. I'm currently working on the official OGRE plugin to finish the components for the beta and wil prepare the beta after that.

The DevMania will be the first event, where a development version of the Jade:DS client will be shown. The client is nearly finished and we're going to show how the process works for mandators and customers. The presentation is going to cover basic principals as well as some insight into the technical structure as well as the used components. We are going to show details about the make or buy decision of each component and how the decision affected the development process.
We hope for some new contacts and a constructive dialog with the users. If you are interested in Jade:DS, you are welcome to join the event. See you at the DevMania 2010!

As the previous version was an improvised solution for the initial setup, we now have a nice looking rework of the original design. I hope you like it!

Due to customer demand, we extended the shopping system with shippable goods. This includes the management of shipping addresses for customers, handling pending shippings by administrators, notification mails to customers after sending a shipment and an overview over all invoices for the customer, which was limited to the bought products list yet. With these additions, a mandator can add physical goods, like the product on a cd, a collectors edition with gimmicks or merchandising articles. Like the existing types of products, these goods can be bound to the system to keep the high integration intact, e.g. an ordered club batch can allow access to a limited forum or a cd can unlock the corresponding product.
Another big extension has been made to the paypal integration, namely the paypal link. This link was a simple button yet, but now this is a comprehensive box, which covers all information, which will be sent to paypal. The link itself has been made much more clearer.
Finally, a lot of code cleanups have been made, including an improved error handling. Now failures in a page don't end up in unformated pages, but in a red box, describing the cause of the failure. The used templated remains intact. Regarding the template itself, a method to add custom tags to the template has been created, which allows localized sections within the template, too.

With this update, we extended the features of the discount ticket manager. Now, it is possible to delete unused and unreferenced spates and tickets, e.g. if there was a wrong setup. Spates and tickets can be locked against deletion. Too, new tickets can be added to existing spates, if needed.
Another major addition is the new newsletter editor. With this, a mandantor can create newsletters, based on his customers or the customers of a specific product. The newsletter can create new discount tickets, if wanted, and adds them to the newsletter and the specific customer.
Several minor and major bug fixes were done and we created a unit test suite for the web interface to improve the process of quality assurance.