Unstable Space Delayed

(Just mirroring the post from Torn Stars)

I hate to be the bearer of bad tidings, but I think it is obvious that Unstable Space will be delayed. Currently I am mainting the mod and site in 'caretaker' mod. We have a 97% done Beta for US, but we are lacking our leader and main coder. That being GrandpaTrout of course. He has been waylaid by real world responsibilities and has bowed our for the time being (temporarily). Without him and his skills it just doesn't seem to make sense to delve into a Beta when there will be little chance to deal with or fix any problems or issues that might (will) crop up. So we have decided to hold of conducting the Beta test until the fall of this year. At that time GrandpaTrout, and hopefully a few other team members/contributers, will be be able to pick up where things were left off and get, conduct the Beta, and get US released. Then we can move on to Traffic.

This delay has really come about because of our decision to tackle some issues we had previously planned to deal with in Traffic. Bringing these changes to the coding (in particular, removing all the PS traffic scripts) resulted in a huge amount of additional work being heaped onto the US release. Nevertheless we feel the work had to be tackled, as without it US would still be shackled with some serious issues that were left over from TS.

Despite this delay we are still confident that US will be released in the fall. We have worked on it too much and it is too close to being finished to let it ever not be released. So please bear with us and forgive our tardiness. Unstable Space will be released ...when it is ready! (wraps the modder's mantra around himself like a shield)

Hey Cambragol, Grandpatrout and any other team members: Any update regarding the reheating of this mod project? I know it's been on hold until fall sometime...but is there still hope for US to get done in the near future? Just curious.

Any status info would be appreciated.

We will reheat it most certainly. I am ready to dive back in pretty much anytime. GrandpaTrout is the key currently, though when he does find the time I am not sure how full time he will be. Joco and he have recently set up a server to handle all the coding they plan to do, so that is a good sign. Until those two are ready to start coding (debugging) we have to remain on hiatus.

My large RL work project is wrapping up and I should be free to begin some beta work at the start of October. That is about a month sooner than I was expecting, so good news. It has been a long time since I last looked at the code. I think we were feature complete, but pretty untested. And the jump tunnel stuff, we need a team decision of if we are leaving that in, or pulling that feature. I think we just need the help files updated and then the team could take a look at the game. There are tons of new features, and without help, no one will ever figure out how to use them.

The game was much more stable this release than last release (torn stars). But there was also a whirlwhind of changes at the last moment, so I can't remember exactly what is tested/untested.

Good news! I'll put the finishing touches on that dialogue/text stuff I was working on, then. I'm not sure how else to help, but if you can think of something, let me know.

I nearly have the new build scripts sorted out with better dependency checking going on. Also the SVN server is looking pretty stable.

J.