Welcome one, welcome all to the second Bi-Weekly status report from Lumonality.

From the last article, many changes to Lumonality have been in effect.  Applications are now more secure, Google Login has been implemented, the Lumonality Core Launcher has been revised, and the friends list has finally been rolled out.

Account

As a way to make your account secure, Lumonality has implemented two features.  The first of these features is IP restriction.  Accounts will only stay logged in until moved to another location.  This means if a user steals the session cookie from your browser, it is useless.  Lumonality will detect the location change and destroy the session.

The second feature allows a user to hide their email from third-party apps.  Lumonality provides you with an email address that will forward emails to the email address on your account.  This hides the original email attached to the account and gives users finer control over spam.

Users may also now sign in with google.  If a user already has a Lumonality account, the google sign button connects to your account via the email address on your google account.  If the email address is not attached to a Lumonality Account, you will be prompted to create an account to link to your Google Account.  Once created, Lumonality will pull information from google, such as your profile picture and account Identification number, and log you in.  Once this account is created, anytime you attempt to log in with google you will immediately be presented with your Lumonality account.

Applications

Application security has been upped a notch.  Lumonality has introduced Application Permissions.  These are permissions that an application can request from a user to access specific information, such as the friends list or the email address of a user.  Applications can require certain permissions, though this ability is only enabled for trusted applications.  These permissions specifically control an application's access to certain API features such as the friends list, extended sessions, account information, and more.

When a user logs into an app, if they have not done so before, the user will be prompted with a list of the permissions an app is requesting and a toggle box for each one.  Users can accept or decline each permission.  Maybe a user would like to give access to the friends list, but disable the ability to view their original email.

The Lumonality Core

The Lumonality Core Launcher is a program that allows a user to manage and download applications from Lumonality.  This application has been entirely rewritten in a different language to negate the number of issues presented by the previous system.  Applications can now download and update their own dependencies; the Launcher can keep applications up to date and connect with friends.  The application uses the Arizotaz Core and Render Maps to halt processing when the application is not open, this saves on memory and power draw.

Friends

The Friend list has been officially released; users can add other users as friends.  When two people add each other as friends, they are added to each other’s friends list.  You may view your friend’s playtime on their public profile, and in supported games, play with each other.

For business users, the friends list is an easy way to find others in your domain you may manage friend options from the domain manager on your account dashboard.

Arizotaz Games

Many games hosted on Arizotaz have been updated and published to Lumonality.  One of these games is the infamous Tile Game that is featured in the banner art all over the Lumonality Website.

This application goes by the name, Havoc.  Created in mid-2019, this application has gone through many different revisions and game engines.  Havoc specifically was created in April of 2020 as a way to teach myself the Java Programming language.  This version of the game was the most feature dense, providing an electrical system, infinite terrain generation, different biomes, and world saves.  Though, as it was a learning experience, it fell apart quickly.  The game became hard to maintain and develop.  While I created one more attempt in Java, it was abandoned after attempting to implement multiplayer networking.

Currently, this game is being developed in Unity, though it will take some time to develop.  At this time, I have decided to publish the archive of this game to Lumonality, while a little buggy, it may be fun to mess around with.  You may find this application on the Store Page here.