Summer has arrived in Germany and I am supposed to enjoy a public holiday 
. So let’s make this quick!
On Monday I launched Junkers into its 9th round and took the opportunity to send out a newsletter with a roundup of the most important pieces of info: Said game world relaunch, the Q1 dev update and the call for ideas for the potential 2027 anniversary event. Especially the latter is still on-going, so please pitch in!
The Junkers relaunch made me realise that there’s am bit of a gap coming up: The next game world to expire is Domination at the end of July. So in theory, I could squeeze in at least one new game world. Any ideas? 
In terms of development, I continued my work on the “gen-3 UI”: I wrapped up converting what I’ve completed so far to a “headless UI library”. “headless” here means the 3rd party library provides all the functionality for the UI components (like complex autocomplete fields, menus etc.) but it ships without any styling. The obvious disadvantage is that you need to provide all the styling yourself. But at the same time, that’s also the advantage for which I am doing this: It doesn’t tie me to a particular way of doing the styling, which is something I feel much more comfortable with despite generally being a “design idiot”. It’s just that I expect this code to around for a long time (I am replacing 20 year old code right now) and I hate having to a.) adjust all our frontend code once a year because an external library decided to change their API and b.) trying to figure out how to change something should the library be unmaintained in…say…2042 
The switch is complete for the components that already existed, meaning the “good” old AS design has now been applied to things like the game world info popup or the in-game change log.
Next up will be the header conversion, which I got started on late last week but which will likely keep me busy for a while. More on that next week.