If you want to win some points to upgrade your V-Adoptable's game there are 2 new competitions on our Forums!

Closing dates: 14th, 16th February.

With the arrival of our new developer, Kenny, we hope to be getting more work done much quicker! Right now we are concentrating on updates for our other game editor V-Adoptables.com. Once complete we shall begin work on updating V-Petsite.com to v3.0.5. Make sure you visit our forums and start posting you ideas in the Suggestions forums!

I will update this post again once work has started with a link to the progress thread so you can keep up to date with all progress on the update.

For those of you who have not yet noticed, our Adoptable based game maker - V-Adoptables.com is now live, check it out!

Some of you may be aware i am working on a second game maker to complement V-Petsite.com. V-Adoptable's is based on Adoptable's and as such fits the same category as V-Petsite which one of the reasons i decided to create it.

V-Adoptable's allows you to create a new games based on Adoptable's which are typically placed in forum signatures for other users to click and level them up. The adoptable's can grow in three stages so you can make them evolve which results in a appearance change (Image change) or simply use an Egg, Baby Image and an Adult Image of the adoptable and see them grow as they are clicked over time. This is a completely different approach to the standard "click and get some exp points, yaaay!" method.

Other than the above, that is all i am saying :P...
Release date: Expected 1st Jan 2010.

I have just finished installing and setting up gZip Compression on the server. This means that web pages are being compressed making them smaller in size thus reducing Bandwidth and Load Times.

After running some speed tests on text heavy areas of the site, such as the forums, results show that after the file sizes have been compressed they are 76% smaller and the time taken to load them is now 4x less.

Edit: This also applies to your own V-Pet games so you should also experience a slight increase in speed when playing your own games, unless you have a stupidly fast connection, you may not notice anything.

It has been much requested, so it's being setup. There is now a secondary currency on your games if you choose to use it. You can change the name of the secondary currency from Administrate -> Main Settings and then clicking the Special Currency tab.

Use the following tags in your header or footer to show the secondary currency name and the amount the user has. {Currency2} and {Points}
You can also use the tag {Converter} in the bank to allow users to convert primary currency into the new currency.

This is the only progress so far, so right now the secondary currency can't be used, but can be collected for the time being. Ways to spend the secondary currency will be created within the week.

Well it's been quite some time since i added any new games to the Arcade, so i have taken a moment to add two new games, leader board enabled and ready to be added to your Petsite's if you choose to use them.

Cat Catcher is a simple strategy game in which you (Dog) need to catch the cat, whilst protecting the Mouse from the cat.

Shooting Practice involves shooting wooden targets whilst avoiding red or skull targets. There is no blood or killing of any living organisms in this game.

By default, you may have noticed the pet and enemy images in randomly encountered battles are re sized to 100x100 to fit correctly with the default layout and battle template. You can now change the width and height for both the pet image and enemy image or remove re sizing completely if you layout can support the images in full size.

To do this just go to Administrate > Settings > Explore settings and then click the Encounters tab.

A new market has been added which will allow users to share free layout, or if you are a talented layout designer you can sell your layouts for cPoints.

The Market will hopefully allow more users to earn some cPoints and others to get new layouts especially if they lack the know-how to create one themselves. I'm also hoping this will reduce the amount of threads asking for free layouts.

You can browse the market by going to Upgrades -> Market.

A small number of small bug fixes for shops and pet shops.

• Shop Descriptions BBCode not displaying when viewing a shop: Fixed.
• Item Descriptions BBCode not displaying when viewing an item in the shop: Fixed.
• Pet shop Descriptions not showing at all: Fixed.

It has been reported that the custom features made with the feature maker have slowly stopped working. This is due to issues with window.onload loading more than one thing. I have made a fix to get around the issue but you'll also need to do a little work to get it running again.

All you need to do is edit all custom pages, and make sure the embed code is at the very, very bottom. All id="" code and other HTML must be above the embed code, this includes the div with id="Debugger". Then save, the embed code will convert to the new embed code when saved.

Well, i did say on release that, being a new feature, it may have some bugs. Well, it did. One bug was found and reported and has been repaired. Checking to make sure you can afford the cPoints to buy the layout was not working correctly.

A small tweak was made to inventories so that all items would be ordered. I have noticed, with inventories that have a lot of items, that the items listed would be all jumbled. If you had 4 pages of items, and 2 Ball items for instance, it often occurred that you would have 1 ball on page 2, and one on page 4. Ordering has been put in place and all items are now grouped next to each other in the inventory.

As i am pretty sure you have noticed i have spent a lot of time redesigning the pages and converting them into a tabular interface. This change has certainly made a bug impact on the appearance of the site and the tabs have reduced a lot of clutter. I hope you all agree it looks totally awesome!

There are still a few pages waiting to be redesigned into the new interface, they are mostly under the Edit & Create drop down but i should have them all finished very soon.