IGN are running a poll to find out what gamers think will be the next big MMORPG. If, like us, you think that game is Pirates of the Burning Sea, then go vote for it! You can find the poll here.

Its been a fun week on the forums with all the entries to our contest, however the time has come to announce the winners.

So, without further ado, there they are:

First Prize: Teredo

For his entry:

I'm anticipating Pirates of the Burning Sea more than you because...
my inner-pirate keeps poking me in the kidney with his peg.

(wins The Pirates! books by Gideon Defoe, PotBS t-shirt, PotBS tankard plus a beta key)

Other winners: PuRu, Sailswift, Jadson and Ruby

(each wins The Pirates! books by Gideon Defoe, PotBS t-shirt and PotBS tankard)

Congratulations to all our winners. You can read all the entries in our entries thread and discuss them in our discussion thread on our forums.

Flying Lab have sneaked out a new design of the user content which seems a lot more streamlined to my eyes, and allows you to look at your rejected items and so on. Look at it HERE!

It began one dark stormy night a couple of weeks ago. Mag, one of Coldfront Network's web coder monkeys, was locked in a basement with nothing but a PC and the Flying Lab forums to keep him company. His task: to create a tool that would catalogue all the posts from the Flying Lab developers and produce pages with the latest developer posts on them.

We - or rather I - had originally planned on keeping Mag locked up till the dev tracker was finished, but unfortunately he escaped while I wasn't looking and went skiing for a short while, but now, after that short delay, and a lick of paint provided by our own Rhaegar, we have the Coldfront FLS Developer Tracker!

I'd love to take credit for this, but aside from repeated nagging at people I didn't really do any of it.. Oh, one more thing, as Columbo would say: We do know that some devs need adding.

Discuss on the forums!

* Mag breaks in
I have to add that gluon was locked inside with me, he cleaned up my messy behemoth code tons and poured it into a very portable piece of scripting, so half of the kudos goes to him.. :-)

The Age of Sail and Piracy and 101 project has launced with a website to co-ordinate its efforts and track its progress, as well as provide information for people who wish to contribute.

"The Age of Sail and Piracy '101' Project hopes to provide a range of information for all those in the general POTBS community so as to enhance the experience of the game through better role-playing and a better idea of what the world of 1720 was about", Project organiser BritPrivateer explains.

The project will produce a series of articles, which will be published here on Coldfront. We're all very excited about this, and look forward to the first article which will hopefully be arriving in the not to distant future!

Flying Lab have announced that they've employed a couple of new developers to work on PotBS:

Jess Lebow is an anagram of Elbow Sesj, and is the new Story Writer Guy, which I think should be his official job title. He has an exceptional pedigree, having worked on Guild Wars as World and Story Designer, and being a bestselling author.

The catchily named andrewb, whose name is an anagram of Ban Red W, is the new head of Quality Assurance. So in the event of any bugs, blame him. He encourages feedback on what people would like to hear more about in future devlogs.

It's always exciting to read about new developers joining the Flying Lab. Best of luck to them.

As you may have heard on the grapevine, Pirates of the Burning Sea is one of mmorpg.com's most anticipated MMO games of 2006. PotBS is currently in a six way tie for second place, so get thee along there and give the game a bit of hype, why don't you?

Hmm.. that smells like a contest to me..

Yes, that's right, we at Coldfront have several sets of Gideon Defoe's brilliant The Pirates books to give away -

The Pirates! in an adventure with WHALING

The Pirates! in an adventure with SCIENTISTS

Courtesy of Flying Lab we also have a BETA key, and a couple of tshirts and tankards to give away too.

Discuss on the forums

One of our contributors unearthed this article in BBCnews.com's technology section. We were a bit suprised to find FLS mentioned in the news, but were even more suprised about the content of the article.

It appears that FLS have paid for some marine biologists to study dolphin movement so that they can include realistic and ride-able dolphins in the game.

We approached Aether about this because we hadn't heard of the feature, and he confirmed that this is going to be added to the game, although probably not at launch. It is more likely to be added to an expansion that they have planned for a few months after the game has started shipping. He did however include a proof of concept screenshot with his email, which you can see here (click on the image for a full size version).

April Fools :P

We were lucky enough to be the first to be given the chance to give the beta version of Pirates of the Burning Sea a whirl, and then write our thoughts in a nice shiny article. The beta test is still at an early stage, so we weren’t sure what to expect…

This article is completely uncensored, with the full blessing of FlyingLab Software, even when we discuss [redacted] - just kidding - and completely our own, with no artificial additives or preservatives.