Okay this is a big one - I'll have to try being brief per item and link to more details or I'll never finish / break the forum 
NEW STABLE BUILD
Cooked for nearly two months in a somewhat quiet period this none the less gets us one of the most important things we need: Functional modding. This is huge, and already pretty easy and straight forward. Start looking, modding, and sharing - please forward this to anybody you think might be interested
As I was suspecting activity is picking up again and it could get better yet with the new modding potential and some free time over the holidays. Stuff that is pending here and there!
More misc
Like indicated recently direction is good and we're getting more of it
NEW STABLE BUILD
Cooked for nearly two months in a somewhat quiet period this none the less gets us one of the most important things we need: Functional modding. This is huge, and already pretty easy and straight forward. Start looking, modding, and sharing - please forward this to anybody you think might be interested
- Huge thanks to Immortius for pushing through his modding arc and getting us this key piece
- This finally allows users to easily bundle their own work in a package that can automatically get picked up by Terasology (future step: source outside the main repo)
- Most core content is also wrapped in these modules so you can easily tweak central stuff
- Starting mods include books/bookcases, mineral block pack, miniions, portals (gelcubes & spawning), potions, soils block pack, and a test mod for animations
- We're working on a modding guide in our GitHub wiki as well as a modding API detailing what's available. Auto-publishing javadoc etc soon. More details in the incubator, more to come
- Other new stuff in this build include new menu music by Chrisk (one of many new and amazing pieces), some GUI tweaks, better loading, and a bit less Groovy for now
As I was suspecting activity is picking up again and it could get better yet with the new modding potential and some free time over the holidays. Stuff that is pending here and there!
- Combat system is still hanging out in a branch done by aherber - need to get this merged from his branch soon!
- Adeon is also still working on Crafting, likewise would like to think we can get this branch integrated into develop soon
- Amazing work and progress toward integrating the plate tectonic terrain generator Laurimann brought with him into Terasology and using predefined heightmaps in general with various other passes like climate simulation done by Nym Traveel (on GitHub) on top for high detail worlds with believable biomes. Part of a big effort to easily allow alternative generation tactics and eventually provide moddable interfaces to terrain gen
- The new terrain gen could soon allow us to actually place all of the mineral blocks by metouto in a sensible fashion in the world, where maybe you could realistically deduce from the overworld what might be found in the underworld - via science!
- AI development is picking up with a fancy three tier AI proposal by ReleeSquirrel and some deadly implementation work by Esereja (in this PR)
- Skaldarnar is getting more commits in for his Procedural Architecture Grammar meant to help generate buildings and such
- Esereja has added and is improving a new module focused on glowing blocks/plants
- Still need to grab the GUI updates from x3ro which should help make GUI more moddable and interesting looking
- ddr2 is putting more work in on porting the organic growth simulator woodspeople prototyped for us
- And last but not least - Immortius is starting a multiplayer arc!!
More misc
- We got a mention in print from the German gaming magazine c't! A Terasology build was included on a bundled CD/DVD as well. Maybe they could've picked a more interesting screenshot ...
- Immortius participated with a small team in one of those themed and time limited game dev contest leading to Footbrawl - check it out!
- IntelliJ 12 is out and we've got an open source freebie license for the Ultimate edition to hand out, woot!
- Supplies for making prototype Gooey plushies have been acquired - lets see what might come from this ..
Like indicated recently direction is good and we're getting more of it
- A'nW has started up a bit of a block factory in the forum for creating new blocks and reviewing submissions to get some quality blocks for the very core of the game including a starting batch of handy shapes and some fencing (should make it to develop soon). Also: Cheese wheels or over-sized gold coins? You decide!
- Hunter team badge is ready, yay Some stuff happening there soon
- I'd like to focus over the next stable build (month'ish?) on getting as much pending (and some brand new, I'm sure) content crammed into the source tree as possible
- Next after that - possibly pause for a bit with a fairly clean network graph to be able to do some overall source tree refactoring on structure, checkstyle fixes, splitting out mods, and maybe something Android related? Mainly planning ahead for a quiet period to avoid massive conflict storms
- Personally I'm finally managing to squeeze more time out of life for Terasology - admittedly at the cost of sleep and sanity, but hasn't that lead crazy people to great heights in the past?
