Epic Middle States Status

I've been lurking lately, not posting, but I had to chime in here for this. This one of the few games or mods I've been looking forward to with so much anticipation, and for so long. It seems like ages ago I added my little bit to this team's efforts. The Middle States still live and breath in my heart and mind, so I can't wait to take a tour.

Kudos for staying the course so long, and through so many challenges. I'm very very eager to see how much further you've taken this game. I-war2 never left my older machine's HD, and was one of the first installs on my newer machine for just this reason.

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Hot4Darmat

I'm also still lurking around and I am also very curious where you have taken the game. I think once a working version is out and the word spreads (where I and I am sure others will gladly help with) a lot more people will pay attention to this mod. As it also deserves (probably, I still haven't seen it. )

Keep it up GP!

Congratulations! I eagerly await this release also. It'll be good to take a trip through the Middle States again.

And thanks for the years of hard work on this project.

Thanks everyone for the encouragement - years worth! It has been lots of fun, and this is a great community to spend time in.

Runner - you bring up a great point about publicity. The Middle States was planned as a stand alone release. But this jump bug really breaks the economy. The player will need to "workaround" to play the game as intended.

The Traffic release will fix this bug for good. No workaround needed. For this reason, I would rather we waited the publicity until Traffic.

The team debated not releasing the Middle States at all, and just waiting till Traffic was done. But in the interest keeping the community together and moving forward, we chose to release.

That sounds overly harsh. The Middle States is good, with one annoying flaw. Hopefully the community will enjoy it (and will give us good feedback so that Traffic is even better).

Ok, back to writing help files...

You know that X3: The Reunion is going to be released soon, in about two month. If you really release within the next two weeks then it would be extremly easy to spread the word in the corresponding X3 Forums attracting literally thousands of people who certainly have bought EOC back then and who are really hungry for more space sims in general and good ones like probably this mod in particular.

As far as the "bug" with the autopilot is concerned I think it's not a big flaw really. I thought you just deactiveted autopilot which makes the game a times slightly more annoying I suppose but keeps the economy intact, right?
And then when you will have attracted several hundred people it might well be possible that a true hacker is among them. So make a competition that someone might produce a patch which modifies the binary(!) executable of EOC where it disables such behaviour. I am almost sure that such hard core reverse engineering hacking should be possible and I am also quite sure that there will be someone who'd like to show off. The prize of the competition might be something like a faction in Middle states named with his name or somesuch.

cya, Runner
p.s.: Writing helpfiles, huh? You don't happen to be a professional in the IT business, right?

I would still rather wait. While it would be fun to have hundreds of players right away, I would rather we had hundreds of happy players a few months from now. Hopefully all those X3 players will be looking for a new challenge come this winter.