NS is three years old! On this day, three years ago, NS v1.0 was unveiled to the public. With a high server CPU load (we tested on nice machines...oops) with some questionable balance and totally unexplored gameplay, it was an exciting night and ensuing few weeks. So to celebrate how far we've come and where we hope to go in the future, NSRadio, in conjunction with RichNet.tv, are sponsoring the first NS Birthday Bash / Halloween Monster Mash tonight starting at 8pm EST (go now!). There will be interviews with various community members and developers (including myself, although I'm sick as a dog right now) as well as skits from your favorite NS comedians.
We thought that after releasing the game we could finally take a break. Fools! Instead it forced us to work harder, or lack of updates would threaten the community. It's a bit of a vicious circle. So we released four more patches as fast as we could and then set to work with trying to improve the bigger stuff. What started as NS v1.1 morphed into a huge rework which eventually became v2.0. The list of changes was actually too long to create, at least for us at that point.
Then we started on NS v3.0, with more reworking and inclusion of NS:Combat. During this time I've been working on NS full-time and more recently, been trying to do enough business development to figure out a way to get our company funded and off the ground. I've been living off Constellation donations for these past three years, and for that I'm extremely grateful. It's been a sparse living and not for everyone but I want to see new games in the NS universe and this is the most likely way it's going to happen.
So now at this landmark, we're faced with what some call impending doom. That is, the web site is down, and all the other big mods have moved to Half-life II (though CS and DOD got access to Half-life II before release and have full teams working on them!). We have a lot of work to do. While this may not be the high point in our community morale, I do believe that we are finally on the brink of making the big leap forward (pun intended) with NS popularity that I've been hoping to acheive with all the previous NS versions. I believe we're making some critical gameplay changes that will make the game much better as well as being more atmospheric and easier to play than ever before. It's not going to be available tomorrow, but I think it will be worth the wait. We will be making a couple key announcements soon about our plans for NS:Source and will be using the mailing lists on the new site much more often to keep you informed. NS v3.1 is also ready for release and we will do so shortly after the site is online so we can keep our mirrors updated and get feedback.
So, we do appreciate your concerned e-mails, but please always remember that even when you see nothing happening on the surface, there are faces lit up by their LCDs working away so you can play. We've been working on NS over four years now and we're not about to give it all up because we got hacked.
We're glad to have you with us and look to the future rife with possibility and optimism.
Happy Birthday NS and Happy Halloween everyone!
Today is the day we start testing the new web site! We're going to send out e-mail to our playtesters and have them kick the tires. Once we think it's solid, we'll release it to the community publicly. It's our hope and belief that this will be the last time the site goes down for any length of time (though of course we'll have to perform maintenance on it from time to time, that's on the matter of hours). In other site outage news, we're not sure what happened to Readyroom.org, but they've missed their annual hosting fees in the past and I suspect it's something like that but will let you know when we know.
Things are otherwise proceeding along, although life as a startup is always difficult. We recently attended another investor conference, where we did a small pitch and showed our trailers, artwork, etc. to as many people with money as we could. There seemed to be a lot more entrepreneurs there than investors, but we got a couple leads that we will follow up on.
In the meantime, big changes are afoot with NS:Source. It looks like a whole lot more work than even we anticipated and so we're rethinking things. With our two big "competitors" (Counter-strike and Day of Defeat) both having a full-time professional team making them, we have a lot we're up against. Of course, those two projects also got access to Half-life II before it was released. When it comes down to it, "porting" NS to Half-life II is really more of a rewrite, with all the art and levels being redone. We expect a lot of the code and game design to remain intact, but there are even chunks there that will need to be recreated. We're currently trying to figure out a way we can get a top-quality NS:Source done in a reasonable amount of time with no funding. We're talking to publishers and investors without a lot of luck yet. Anyone have any other ideas?
It must be hard to believe that we're still working on the site, but it's true! We've been hacked a few times in the past year and each time we just plugged the hole and put the site back up as soon as we could. This time we're trying to solve the underlying problems completely, and this has meant almost an entire site rewrite.
We've made great progress though, and we're getting very close now! We've got almost everything working again, with only a few areas like the galleries and forums needing more work. We considered releasing what we have early, but we wanted to make sure that once we brought the site back up, it stayed up. Have a look at the new site by clicking [file=uwe-newweb.jpg]here[/file].
Another thing we decided to improve during the downtime was our handle/forum naming rules. We've relaxed the rules considerably, and now allow names with any number of capital letters and numbers (though we are removing spaces). We are going to allow all members one free handle change, so you can restore your handle and all your old posts to your original handle before the last site upgrade! The main reason we're doing this is to allow players to retain their identities they use on other services like Xbox Live, Gmail, AOL, etc.
So things are moving, even though they may not look like it from the outside. Hang in there folks, we'll be back soon, promise! Shortly after we're back, we'll give you an update on NS:Source as well...