December 1, 2011 at 6:35 am
December's update suffers from a rather disruptive development month and some planning errors. As such, there are no new features. However, progress has been made on our installer and system requirements. Also, we now have a wiki at: http://wiki.synekism.com. It's currently in read-only mode and does not contain much information but this will soon change.
We have a brand new installer. You won't notice much, but let's just say that patches starting with "our installer was confused again..." will be a thing of the past. In addition, we used to have two different executables. One would only work on Windows Vista and above and used DirectX 10.0 while the other could work on either Windows XP, Vista, or 7, and used DirectX 9.0c. We have eliminated this distinction in 0.4.3 and now have a single executable which will try to use DirectX 10.0 and if that's not supported automagically switch to DirectX 9.0c. Finally, we now store all external files like UI textures and cursors inside the executable which means all you will see when Synekism installs is an executable, Synekism.exe, plus the readme and clientspecs files. The above two modifications make it possible to move Synekism.exe to anywhere on your computer and it will still work.
As for the disruption, we lost a member of our team this month, leaving the team size at just two. As this project was somewhat formal we had to deal with the matter in more official terms (legally speaking) which took some time. Nevertheless, the project still lives on. Though, to better focus on the game itself, we will no longer maintain our MSN Messenger account nor our Skype account. We check our email and the forums daily, however, so we can still be reached relatively quickly.
There is not much reason to upgrade this month, other than staying up to date. Next month should be more promising.
WARNING: Our new installer is much more reliable but also more aggressive in its cleanup. The new installer will delete everything in the install directory of the previous Synekism installation and similarly for the current installation upon uninstall. You should not have anything in this directory but if you do please kindly relocate it.