Third time's a charm. For once I have updater news that doesn't involve the phrase "it's broken". :-)

In fact, there are two pieces of good news related to the updater. First, some improvements were made to the updater UI to provide better information on the download status, specifically showing progress of each individual file since some of the larger ones can take a significant amount of time to download. Additionally, it is possible to cancel the update now, so if it is taking too long you don't necessarily have to wait. Do be aware that cancelling an update may result in incompatibilities with other players who have updated.

The other big updater news is that the updater should now work on Windows Vista and 7. I hadn't tested on them yet because my development system is still XP and I suspected they wouldn't work because of some of the security changes, but it turned out there was actually an unexpected problem too. That has now been fixed, so in many cases the updater will work. I fear there may still be some issues waiting to rear their ugly heads, but the cases I have tested seem to be working fine.

Finally, I'm working on getting registered with Freenode so I can create an officially official Coldest IRC channel for coordinating testing. Which also means that I'm planning on doing some playtesting in the near future. I'm not sure how long it will take to get the registration taken care of and next week is going to be a bit crazy for me, but I should be ready to go in the near future. I'll try to plan on a specific night for everyone who is interested to get together, and I expect to be available at other times as well. Keep an eye on the site for details.