If the goal is to increase the netrek player base, then isn't this a "marketing" issue? From the Netrek Frequently Offered Clever Suggestion list it appears that any recommendation outstide of the inner "clue" circle is immediately shot down. So if there are no major features or enhancements that are even needed for netrek then why even bother rewriting the code? I am not looking forward to actively participating to cause another genre of kids to skip classes, to get CTS (Carpel Tunnel Syndrome), or to be exposed to the vulgarity of some of the players out there on the public servers. The fact that the code base still contains "doosh," and that someone uses it as their email address, and has been maintained in the code base for years sickens me. The only hit on the word "doosh" you will get in my code is in the readme saying that I didn't put it in. I am more focused on using Netrek for educational and research purposes, then just using it as a game. The idea of an entirely autonomous team, or one that is semi-autonomous with an observer "captain," that can defeat an entirely human team is intriguing. Making training scenarios for players are nice, because they can be used to train the bots also. At some point my code will dramatically shift from the current code base to support pluggable bots along with the increased security and performance monitoring that is needed for them. As long as we are moving in the same direction, I don't have a problem. If you want a mini-server for clients to be able to run, fine, I am doing that. If you want to have scenarios to teach newbies how to take planets and ogg starbases, fine, I will do that to. Don't want to use my code, don't want to run my server? I am not staying up late worrying about it. I am not trying to flame anyone or trash netrek entirely, although I do so hate the game, but I am merely explaining what my goals and reasons for doing a rewrite are. Darryl -----Original Message----- I agree, mostly. I think better time is spent improving the client. The idea of a stand-alone server that runs on the client machine is nice, but we can get most of any benefits from that setup by having a real, dedicated newbie server with training bots. While I commend Darryl and others for trying to do a complete Java rewrite, I think that those "reimplementations" will have little to no benefit in improving the netrek player base. Regardless of the technical differences between Java and C/C++, any Java port will require substantial man-hours of implementation and testing without the help of most of our existing developer base that, I would guess, will continue to work on Vanilla, COW and other software. -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: smime.p7s Type: application/x-pkcs7-signature Size: 3043 bytes Desc: not available Url : http://shadowknight.real-time.com/pipermail/netrek-dev/attachments/20011205/f69dae75/smime.bin