Final changes for the v7i3 articles, after feedback from authors.

templates/volume07_issue03/a-text-mud-with-a-working-ecology-system/index.html

@@ -32,7 +32,7 @@
       If I were to start a MUD from scratch today, with the knowledge I've gained over the years, I’d go about it in a very different way. I’d create a dynamic world that changes with the time of day and year, the weather and the seasons, with a working ecology system, where all plants and animals have a life cycle of their own, and where players also could affect the ecological balance with their actions — for better or worse.
     </p>
     <p>
-      The players should be able to utilize all natural assets – minerals, plants and animals – and also cultivate the soil, to increase the crops. They should be able to hunt and kill the wild animals for their meat and hides, but also domesticate herds of cattle, horses and sheep, fence them in for protection and drive them to the market to be sold. They should be able to develop most of the most of the raw materials into more advanced and usable products by crafting. There should be a market where they could trade their products, and get a higher price the more developed they are. Above all there should be a balanced ecology system, so that the MUD would be alive and changing in yearly cycles, even if not a single player were logged on to it.
+      The players should be able to utilize all natural assets – minerals, plants and animals – and also cultivate the soil, to increase the crops. They should be able to hunt and kill the wild animals for their meat and hides, but also to domesticise herds of cattle, horses and sheep, fence them in for protection and drive them to the market to be sold. They should be able to develop most of the raw materials into more advanced and usable products by crafting. There should be a market where they could trade their products, and get a higher price the more developed they were. Above all there should be a balanced ecology system, so that the MUD would be alive and changing in yearly cycles, even if not a single player were logged on to it.
     </p>
     <p>
       I don’t know if such a MUD already exists somewhere. I’ve never come across one myself. Yet almost all the elements needed already exist in my own home MUD, which is run on modified Circle code and the DG_scripts. If anyone knows of something like this already existing, I’d appreciate a link, so I could visit and watch for myself. Otherwise, this is how I’d go about it, if I were starting from scratch today:
@@ -58,7 +58,7 @@
       I am inclined to think that the room descriptions in the basic grid won’t be very important, because all the interesting and dynamic things in the game would happen with the mobs and objects. So the grid descriptions would be short and concise, set by the code, and based on the terrain of each room.
     </p>
     <p>
-      This is where the fun starts — because what would also be set by the code, based on the terrain on each grid square, would be a “fertility” value which would determine how much vegetation the square could sustain, and how fast it would grow. This value would be the basis for the entire ecology system. There should be a lot more terrains than the usual stock list, and naturally terrains like “field” or “prairie” would have a much higher fertility value than “mountain” or “desert”.
+      This is where the fun starts — because what would also be set by the code, based on the terrain on each grid square, would be a “fertility” value which would determine how much vegetation the square could sustain, and how fast it would grow. This value would be the basis for the entire ecology system. There should be a lot more terrain sectors than the usual stock list, and naturally terrains like “field” or “prairie” would have a much higher fertility value than “mountain” or “desert”.
     </p>
     <h3>Time, seasons and weather</h3>
     <p>
@@ -93,7 +93,7 @@
       <li>Fertility: The basic factor, set on each grid square, but also on each species, both plants and animals.</li>
       <li>Food chains: Plants → herbivores → smaller and larger carnivores.</li>
       <li>Life cycles: Birth → youth → mating → propagating → old age → death.</li>
-      <li>Time: Most life cycles would equal a year’s time, but some are much longer.</li>
+      <li>Seasons: Most life cycles would equal a year’s time, but some are much longer.</li>
       <li>Supply and demand: The amount of food available determines the size of a population.</li>
     </ul>
     <p>

templates/volume07_issue03/dispelling-the-gloom/index.html

@@ -2,7 +2,7 @@
 {% block page_title %}
 	Dispelling the gloom
 {% endblock %}
-{% block article_authors %}Tomasz <span class="author-nick">Akeley</span> Gruca{% endblock %}
+{% block article_authors %}Tomasz Gruca{% endblock %}
 {% block article_date %}2nd June 2015{% endblock %}
 {% block article_byline %}
 	{{ super() }}
@@ -126,5 +126,5 @@ I only have one regret — that I would love for others, especially the new ge
     </p>
 {% endblock %}
 {% block article_bio_content %}
-    Akeley (Tomasz Gruca) is currently slaving away as a bicycle courier, hoping to complete his transition into a wuxia swordsman sometime next year. More of his video game adventures can be found on <a class="publicationtitle" href="http://arkhammanor.com">arkhammanor.com</a>.
+    Tomasz Gruca is currently slaving away as a bicycle courier, hoping to complete his transition into a wuxia swordsman sometime next year. More of his video game adventures can be found on <a class="publicationtitle" href="http://arkhammanor.com">arkhammanor.com</a>.
 {% endblock %}

templates/volume07_issue03/legend-and-the-lore/index.html

@@ -103,5 +103,5 @@
     </p>
 {% endblock %}
 {% block article_bio_content %}
-	Hugo Zombiestalker is a developer on <a class="gametitle" href="http://drakkos.co.uk">Epitaph</a>.
+	Hugo Zombiestalker is a senior developer on <a class="gametitle" href="http://drakkos.co.uk">Epitaph</a>.
 {% endblock %}

templates/volume07_issue03/the-bonds-of-mudding/index.html

@@ -15,7 +15,7 @@ It's that last group I want to talk about.
 Whether formed by a core group of friends who met in real-life or some other online forum, a MUD is as much about the people and the motivations that drive them to keep going as it is the size of the world, depth of immersion, or playability of the code itself. That handful of real people, often separated by miles, leagues, and countries are the heart of the MUD itself.
     </p>
     <p>
-Once upon a time, in a dark age known as the late 1990s, a core group of online friends came together around their love of the Wheel of Time series by Robert Jordan and set out to create a MUD they eventually named <span class="gametitle">As The Wheel Weaves</span>. They took a stock DIKU/ROM codebase and began to modify it to fit their vision of that world, and it was to this world that I first set down on my fourteen year journey through mudding.
+Once upon a time, in a dark age known as the late 1990s, a core group of online friends came together around their love of the Wheel of Time series by Robert Jordan and set out to create a MUD they eventually named <span class="gametitle">As The Wheel Weaves</span>. They took a stock DIKU/ROM codebase and began to modify it to fit their vision of that world, and it was to this world that I first set down on my twelve year journey through mudding.
     </p>
     <p>
 Time and the stresses of ever more complex personal lives took their toll on <span class="gametitle">AWW</span> and eventually the administration changed hands, the MUD being renamed to <span class="gametitle">Prophecies of the Pattern</span>. In those days I saw at a distance how the interpersonal connections between that initial group of friends changed and evolved. Some fell into relationships with one another that went beyond the text world they'd created, and some of those relationships broke down with disastrous results, but through it all many more people came and went who'd joined in on the fun only to find themselves embroiled in some of the deepest and most personal ways imaginable.
@@ -89,7 +89,7 @@ Do you remember the moment you met your first real friend in your game of choice
 I sat around in the bank in the city of Caemlyn (our equivalent to a central hub through which everyone comes and goes around the world) just waiting those ten agonizing minutes between chances to request a quest to get up the quest points to buy a new skill that would raise my stat cap to twice its normal level. A Mentor in the game came in, an Aes Sedai of the Yellow Ajah, and asked how it was going. I don't know what happened after that exactly. I probably spent a lot of time asking some basic questions, but the end result was the same: that line of communication was open.
     </p>
     <p>
-We'd talk from time to time about game stuff or theories about where the series was going, or complain about our relationships in the real world, and that bond just formed and grew. We had a lot in common, but a lot of differences too that made us interesting to each other, and fourteen years later? I talk to that person every day and consider her my best friend. I can't imagine a world where the random chance of my computer lab time coincided with her logging on and just hanging out in the game didn't happen. Even without ever meeting in real-life, that person became closer to me through the random wanderings of our conversations and sharing the ups and downs of our lives than many of my oldest friends in the real world.
+We'd talk from time to time about game stuff or theories about where the series was going, or complain about our relationships in the real world, and that bond just formed and grew. We had a lot in common, but a lot of differences too that made us interesting to each other, and twelve years later? I talk to that person every day and consider her my best friend. I can't imagine a world where the random chance of my computer lab time coincided with her logging on and just hanging out in the game didn't happen. Even without ever meeting in real-life, that person became closer to me through the random wanderings of our conversations and sharing the ups and downs of our lives than many of my oldest friends in the real world.
     </p>
     <p>
 That's the power of words, and it happens all the time. It's only even one example. I could go on for hours about the friends I've made who became a second family to me; or the ones I thought were going to be important and lost contact with overnight in a single flurry of angry ranting. There are people I can't imagine not being a part of my life because we came together over a singular shared interest in this archaic little world of text-based gaming. Those people are the core around which our game has continued to persist, but even if the game went offline tomorrow they'd remain a deeply important part of my life and continue to inspire me with the openness with which they share their lives.