The future of SF

Hello everyone, just want to give an update on what is actually going on.

Brent is working a HUGE part on SF right now, removing all the network coding to redo it from almost scratch, splitting up the coding to use multi-threading, and fixing up alot of the messy coding that SF has had. It's a HUGE HUGE project, so it will take some time. With those complete we should have a nice base for a game. But again, it will be ready when its ready. The old network coding is just too far gone to try to fix, but we're still going to use the raknet engine thats already integrated.

I'm working on getting a basic nexus and website setup. The delay overall is working on phpBB3 and integrating it with the game as well. Overall it has 'groups' which I'm converting to 'fleets', but theres alot of things to be added/changed/etc. For nexus stats it will simply be its own table (using an ID to track). I'm aiming to at least release the website before August, but that depends on my work schedule. This doesn't include nexus to game integration yet however.

I want to get off these boards because first off, the host here has alot of issues and goes down alot, it's a pain that everythings all over the place (wiki one site, boards another, download game/main site another, etc) and these boards are now being hit by spammer, though most of them are being successfully blocked, I'm getting about 20-40 emails a day of accounts that are approved (aka bots that passed the verification system) but the email doesn't exist so it bounces back to me. That's not including the 2000 'members' waiting for approval last week, I cleared it, and I'm already at another 350 members caught. Mainly I'd prefer phpbb3 because its alot more common and in terms of addons, there are tons. (mobile, administration, etc etc). What we'll probably do is redirect these boards but leave the boards around in case I want to pull something from old dev chats. A simple solution is making a stellarfrontier.com/oldforums area where they will be locked but we can view all old topics and kill this one off completely.. We'll see though.

Another thing I'd like to note is that we don't need MORE moderators, we need less. This game is supposed to be unmoderated, much like Continuum or a similar game. Moderators aren't needed to moderate the game, only the boards and remove stupid posts. And only one, maybe two people are needed at this time to do that. Most people who DO have moderation status, don't actually even use them anyways. If you'd be upset about losing these powers, then maybe you shouldn't be playing to begin with. The only thing so far it's done for alot of the case is cause drama. I'm personally resigning from trying to solve the drama constantly, and I'm personally going ot put it to one or two people to deal with. I'd prefer to be a programmer rather then a babysitter of the forums of people that are older than me.

At this time, I don't care about servers in 1.4. There will be a few things change in 2.0 involving 'whitelisted' mods while playing on the nexus, including a multiplier value for mods, so we can lower/raise the overall prestige gained on a game win. This way a game like KoTH, where you gain tons of points due to multiple wins, can be balanced vs a game that takes 3-4 hours to play. I'll discuss this at another time though. Everything is going to be fair when it comes to the prestige in 2.0.

Thanks