Sodaplay Blog

Sorry about the disruption to sodaplay over the course of the last eight hours or so – we ran out of disk space on our main partition – this was caused by our new backup process being a bit too enthusiastic and saving too many previous versions of all the models (combine this with a migration of models from the database to the filesystem, and there’s a recipe for problems). We’re in the process of adjusting this. Read the rest of this entry »

Server is happier and a change (which some may have noticed already) is that the models should be loaded faster (because the application is loading a gzipped version of the xml, rather than the xml itself).

Many apologies for some bumpiness just now – this was initiated by our otherwise lovely hosting company mistakenly rebooting our server the hard way (by knocking against the power cable) and then our server (which hadn’t rebooted for a few months) being slightly disconcerted for having been rebooted. All sorted out now, sorry for the interruption.

We’ve still got problems with migration – the good news is that our problems are now just that it’s happening so slowly. The bad news before was that we couldn’t get it started… So I suppose that counts as limited “good news”. We’re hoping to get logins turned on for existing users that have migrated across before the weekend.More good news is that we’ve done a few updates to the site, which mean that you can now see a list of the models that a user has published (e.g. http://sodaplay.com/creators/kevino).

We asked the Sodarace forum to help us choose new forum software and the power and simplicity of phpBB3 proved popular. You can now join the Sodaplay conversation in our fresh new forum at sodaplay.dailyforum.net.

Our old forum at sodarace.net/forum have enjoyed a long, productive and sometimes turbulent history since they were created way back in 2002. The forum software there is getting too old to maintain or upgrade so we’re looking for a new forum for the new sodaplay.We’re testing two very different styles of forum using Tangler and phpBB…Tangler: http://www.tangler.com/group/11032phpBB: http://sodaplay.hostingdelivered.comOver the coming weeks the old forum will be converted into a read-only archive so now is the time to explore the new forums or suggest/create your own. I look forward to seeing you post in the new forums and finding out which you prefer.

Newtoon is a game-creator that makes stacks of small physics-based games to be played online or on mobile phones. It’s not finished yet, but we’re getting ready to take it into some classrooms in Bristol with our partners at Futurelab to see if some real users can make games with it already. If all goes well they might learn some physics while exploring Newtoon, and we’ll learn how to make Newtoon better ready for more testing after the Summer holiday. See www.futurelab.org.uk/projects/newtoon for more Newtoon news.