News Archive - Dec 2006

Just before the new year...

The Unofficial Patch v1.4 for Shadow Magic has been downloaded over 20 000 times now and is the most downloaded file on the entire AoWHeaven-site. Almost a year before it was uploaded, the counter passed 20 000. If you are one of those few that haven't already downloaded it, please do so, as you will be in for a nice treat: new units, structures, and you can play lots of cool mods that support these additions.

I noticed it even surpassed the official v1.36 patch for Age of Wonders-I.

2007 is coming closer and I want to thank everybody who made 2006 an interesting year for us, the Age of Wonders fans! We have seen a lot of beautiful maps, intelligent posts, and above all, incredible mods!

I hope that in 2007 we will see even more of that! I know that there are a number of projects running that look extremely interesting. The Groll has a new map in the making and I know some other talented mapmakers are having maps on hold as well... RosenMcStern has released a glimpse of what looks to be a revolutionary mod, and Awegust and Kirky are cooking up something Middle earthly that will likely push LotR-maps to the next level. The UPatchteam is getting up to steam as well, and although the best is saved for last, developments already look pretty interesting.
2006 has also been a good year for the community where we have seen many new faces come and old faces go! I am always very proud to be part of a site that has so few questions (if they are not too hard) or threads unanswered!


Anyway, a Happy 2007, and may your shopping be few and cheap,

~ Swolte

We've asked it before, but that was a long time ago. So, now we ask again in a new poll (to the right on the AoW2 Heaven main page): What type of game do you prefer?

* Single Player
* Hot-Seat
* PBEM (Email)
* Online

Our last poll was about map making. We asked: Are you working on a map at the moment?
It turns out that we have a lot of map makers here! About one third said that they are working on a map, and of them about two thirds are using the new patch.

If you're curios about our previous polls, they're available through the Other Polls link below the currently running poll.

As Swolte has mentioned in the Announcements forum, work continues on the AOWH site update but has been a bit delayed due to HG's limited programming resources being occupied elsewhere. That "elsewhere" includes long overdue updates to the underlying HG architecture which is shared by all Heavens (or will be - that's a major impetus for the current site redesign).

While we're not at liberty to disclose all the changes that are being worked on, a few have already gone into effect, and others soon will. Among the latter is an upcoming global change to the downloads section(s). A new option has been added to the User Profile to enable the sending of automatic email notifications to mapmakers when user comments are added. If you wish to receive such notifications, click on the "My Account" link at the top of any forum page, then enable the check box for "Yes, I wish to receive notifications from the downloads system" and save the changes. The default is Disabled, so if you do not wish to receive notifications, you need not do anything.