We've released a new client which, barring catastrophic bug discoveries, should be the final beta before public release. Please do have a go, play each other, tell people about it and please let us know about bugs you encounter.
For the moment we still have to play as guests. Also, when the 1st half of a game is finished, switching and refreshing the screen only places the pieces remaining from the previous game to their nearestappropriate squares. Dewi is working on this at the moment (and reckons he wil already have it fixed before the first game half is finished! 
). This will be worked on first. It's believed restarting the client may solve this in the interim. We will be adjusting and optimising the graphics for a slightly better look and much quicker download as well.
More known issues can be seen here. Any problems encountered/bugs seen, do please e-mail us from our profiles.
Many thanx and happy thudding!
Ahem - yeah, the problem with the changing sides thing was because I was forgetting to make the pieces "alive" again when I set them up. So, they were placed, but they were all ghost trolls, and invisible zombie dwarves: you couldn't see them!
I also took the chance to optimise the graphics, so now, rather than being on a par with the first 2005 alpha, we've got the smallest ever version, well under 300k - yay! For the time being, this should hopefully be small enough to be playable for most people, especially as it should remain cached on your machine once you've played it the first time (depending on your browser cache settings, of course).
Couple more bugfixes today - the "100%CPU when idle" bug (should now be much better behaved, except when starting up when it's still a ghastly CPU hog), and fixed the background so it's actually visible, and some other little stuff.
Today's upgrade has the private chat on the game board, along with a lot of the game progress messages.
I've also made the exception errors more readable. For example, where before you'd get constantly-scrolling messages like:
Welcome to Thudgame. Connecting...
-- Connection to 66.197.210.71 failed ! --
-- Reason: SECURITY EXCEPTION
-- Exception info: java.security.AccessControlException: access denied (java.net.SocketPermission 66.197.210.71:8080 connect,resolve)
-- Connection to 66.197.210.71 failed ! --
-- Reason: SECURITY EXCEPTION
-- Exception info: java.security.AccessControlException: access denied (java.net.SocketPermission 66.197.210.71:8080 connect,resolve)
Connection lost. Reconnecting...
You said: resolve
-- Connection to 66.197.210.71 failed ! --
-- Reason: SECURITY EXCEPTION
... and so on
Now you get:
-- Out of Cheese Error: Connection to 66.197.210.71 failed!
-- Reason: 'SECURITY' EXCEPTION. This usually means you're not running the applet from the above server, so as a precaution, your machine won't let the applet connect. You can find the correct game at www.thudgame.com - you can also ask on the forums there, if you are running the game from the correct server and still getting this error.
Retrying connection in ten seconds.
Old JREs without UTF8 support are now (I hope) permitted to connect, and should get an intelligible error instead of constant spammy exceptions. Whether the text will display OK, especially when people use the euro symbol, I don't know.
It also has it so that if you click in the main text area (or if you've copied text from it or something), you can still type, rather than having to click the input field. It was a minor niggle, but it irked me
It was an easy fix, too, and works for both text areas.
Another minor niggle-fix is that ':' colons aren't stripped out. So your smileys will work. This involved a surprisingly large number of changes in the code.
Enjoy.