If you missed it, the Best of May were announced last week!
Winners of the Friday Night Funkin’ Jam have been determined and the crew is working on some write-ups of their favorites. I’m gonna go ahead and announce some other news that was postponed due to so many other things going on this past month and a half.
2-Factor Authentication
On your Account Settings page, under Account Details, we’ve added a link for Login Options and 2-Factor Authentication.
On this page you can set your login to be via email address only, so logging in isn’t possible with your username. If you have a popular account and sometimes get emails triggered by failed login attempts, this will likely eliminate those emails.
We’ve also introduced 2-Factor Authentication (2FA). To enable this, you will need to install an authenticator app (we recommend Authy) on your phone and take a screenshot of the barcode on the screen. If you are doing this on your phone and can’t aim your camera at your own screen, there’s a button that will reveal a code you can enter into your authenticator app.
If you have 2FA enabled, your login process will have an extra step where you check your authenticator app for a six digit token to complete your login process.
Having our own 2FA is part of the process of removing Google and Facebook social logins, since some people prefer them for their 2FA option.
If you’re using a social login, we’ve already been prompting you to create your own NG password for several months now. At some point in the near future we will remove the Google and Facebook login options, at which point you can perform a password reset to create a password if you haven’t already.
WebP
We now accept WebP for art and thumbnail uploads. WebP is a modern compression format that allows better quality images at a smaller file size. As of September last year, it is now supported by all major browsers.
@Potatoman was the first person to give it a try, updating this art piece to WebP:
Art thumbnails are now generated as WebP regardless of the source image. We’ll eventually re-process existing thumbnails across all Portals to make everything load faster. At the moment we’re compressing our WebP thumbnails, which can be noticeable. It’s tempting to use the lossless WebP variant but we like how quickly the Art hub loads at the moment, so it’s a tough call. We won’t be compressing art on the art view page, however we may convert art to lossless WebP in the future, as it would be identical but load faster. Let me know if you have any concerns about that idea.
GZip Support
We added support for games that use GZip, which was becoming more common with Unity games. This solves some games that weren’t working and future games will be able to load faster as a result.
I'll bet some GMTK Jam entries are benefiting from this update.
Ruffle Update
Today’s Ruffle update brought Red Baron back on-line! Ruffle is an open source Flash player created by @Mike and a dedicated team of really smart people. Each update brings more classic Flash back to the web.
Other News
We also upgraded and added servers, including our primary db server last week, updated jQuery, made lots of optimizations throughout the site and other odds and ends in response to FNF Week 7. Thank you to all our Supporters for helping us keep this going and growing!
@Bluebaby aka Edmund McMillen has launched a Kickstarter for The Binding of Isaac: Four Souls Requiem!
@Mabelma is organizing an Isometric Quarantine Room Collab!
@TheEnkian has published a book with cover art by @cyangorilla!
The Art Inspired Music Contest deadline is June 21st.
@Stanpai is organizing an NG Summer Festival for June 25-27th!
The Stay Awake Animation Jam deadline is also June 27th. This is the first of our Summer Animation Jams series, hosted this year by @BrandyBuizel. Thanks to your support, total event prizes are over $4,400 and growing!
We're doing Double XP for the rest of the month, so you can vote on at least 10 entries per day to log 20 XP!