A new service - SW:TOR News for Your Webpage - was activated at the SW:TOR portal "Dark Council vs. Galactic Senate".

Just select parameters you would like to use, copy the resulting HTML code, paste it into your webpage and you will have the latest news of Star Wars: The Old Republic displayed to your webpage's visitors as soon as the news is published.

No registration required.

The “Dark Council vs. Galactic Senate” portal dedicated to Star Wars: The Old Republic game goes on-line. The portal is the latest project built with the StrayBit engine and uses all its features. The aim was to create a place for developing, testing and distribution of various services & tools which would be helpful for all players and would enrich their gaming experience.

There are some services which could already be provided to guilds and information about them will be posted at the portal's forums.

The portal is accessible through different domains – darkcouncil.org / galacticsenate.org (with English set as the default UI language), and darkcouncil.ru / galacticsenate.ru (for Russian speaking players). Of course, it's also possible to switch between languages regardless of the domain.

Check it out! And let’s hear your comments.

It turned out that making the language switching to be domain dependable isn't quite convenient. From now on the engine portal will show news in a user's selected language regardless of which domain has been chosen - straybit.net or straybit.ru. (The domains will still display news in their default language if a user has no preferred language.)

More presentation options were added to the system. Along with the skins changing, a page can be modified by adding different 'frames' - such as 'last news', 'most discussed' & 'advertisement'. There's a plan to add a few more in order to utilize empty space at the news pages.

Also a new option is available for the news presentation. An example of it can be seen at blesseddarkness.org. Along with its own news the site displays the engine portal's news. So, there's no need to do posting at news pages of the portal's projects when new features become available - as soon as a system news is posted it appears at all pages.

The cloud concept has been successfully tested in a new version of the engine. Strictly speaking it’s not pure cloud computing as such (that’s if ‘pure’ could be applied to that rather fuzzy subject) but it’s close enough. All projects within the engine network will be able to utilize (completely or partially) not just programming functions but also various data resources as their own. One benefit of this feature would be the instant upgrade to the engine’s new versions for all projects. The other is that new sites/portals could be created with just a few lines of code.

The activation of the cloud effectively concludes the engine’s beta testing. All the main classes have been successfully tested and adjusted for a better efficiency. The new version of the engine has already been applied to a few online projects and as soon as it’s applied to a few more a new development cycle will start. The plan is to concentrate on creation of new features which will be useful to gaming communities and probably to add some more personal options.