Three elopements and a misscarriage

DEATHMACHINE> well it looks like i am 2 hours late
[several minutes of complete silence]
DEATHMACHINE> I AM 2 HOURS LATE

I went looking for a priest

I said say something please

I don't wanna live my life all alone

He said God will take care of those that help themselves

But you look pretty screwed, send a letter

Three elopements and a misscarriage
Well, it looks like the cat is out of the bag. Nfocipher mentioned today in this forum post that BDE will be in fact be developing Subspace, and my reading of his message is that his company RiSC is in charge of either the entire thing or a chunk of it. This follows an announcement at Subspace.Net by the SSC a few weeks back that a new client (or at least the meat-potatoes component of a new client) is is being built from scratch. More recently, I read at 8025: A Spec Freq that a Subspace clone has been put up as a zone in Infantry. Haven't had a chance to try that one yet, but it looks as though we have some competition on the horizon.

Meanwhile, HyperSpace hit another setback after the recent departure of programmer Alioth from Klache Entertainment. Valyna posted to the HyperDock Wednesday with the unhappy news that Dazz, his replacement, was recently injured in an automobile accident. The important thing is that thankfully he was not badly hurt and is recovering well, but injuries to his arm will unfortunately render him unable to work effectively for quite some time and Klache, which in that same post announced a name change to Eighth Day Games, finds itself on a hunt for new programmers.

In other news, another game in the genre called Hostile Space has been picking up speed since entering closed beta. I've given this a cursory looking over and they seem to be adding a lot of features. This could be a good or bad thing, as anyone who's played both simple and convoluted Infantry variants will probably know. It's a bit disheartening to see people in #hyperspace referring to this game as "HS", but one can you do.

The big news

I've been relatively silent on the sale of Infantry to Sony. I am not fond of Sony and will hold my nose while writing them a check, but all things considered there are two truly important things about this, and the rest is basically trivia. First, it is likely that Jeff and Rod will finally be compensated for their work. Second, we now know with near certainty that they can and will make a third game. Whatever concern or controversy might arise from the Sony thing involves other matters, and with all due respect to those who are worried--including my own self from a few days ago--on reflection I simply don't think those other matters are important in the scheme of things.

Turf may return

It's finally underway . . . maybe. Ringleader 1stStrike posted an announcement at the Subspace HQ messageboards and I followed up with some additional information about how we're attacking the task. Turf is the VIE-era grandaddy of Death Star Battle, Trench Wars, and other games based on stationary flag ownership. Unlike those zones, it involved territorial defense and expansion through a sprawling maze (the map was usually full size) involving hundreds of flags. Throughout 1998 and some of 1999 various efforts attempted to bring back the full size turf game with little or no success. We have our work cut out for us. If you would like to get involved please contact 1stStrike or myself.

Saturday Noontime Sheep Shearing

A new event ran today in SCF and, NEWS FLASH, was not an unmitigated disaster. In fact his was the first time in months that an event has gone down in SCF with serious planning and a staff. It was a small staff, but it was all we needed for what was attempted, and it actually ran very well. ASWZ's lord and savior divine.216 and the vile Mackieman got the word out, and Death Star Battle own infamous Travesty22 moderated the event while I went into a catatonic trance, gawking at the fact that the whole thing was actually working out. My thanks to everyone who showed up for it, especially divine, who inbetween walking on water and reinventing Subspace as we know it spammed his own zone to bring in players. Rock.

The main arena is enjoying a limited revival owing to a consistent game (no new settings every week) and a funky SVS rabbit chase game. There is also an excellent new super zone called Fun Space which has set up camp in a subarena. If your travels bring you to the land of Dolly be sure to ?go funspace because it is quite a bit of fun.

Next weekend's event will be a tunnel hunt. More on that as it develops.

Oh yeah, the abbreviation for Saturday Noontime Sheep Shearing is SNS2. I am so clever I could scream.

By the way . . .

Just a reminder - this page uses some obscure fonts. Get them here if you like. They don't make the page look great, but at least they make it inoffensive. :)

Scenarios, scenarios, and more scenarios

<petvirus> Anybody know HTML? Hyperspace needs a new lead programmer . . .

Maybe you'll think of me, when you are all alone.

Maybe the one who is waiting for you

will prove untrue - then what will you do?

Maybe you'll sit and sigh, wishing that I were near,

then maybe you'll ask me to come back again -

and maybe I'll say, "maybe".

Stay tuned . . .

I haven't gone anywhere. It's just that most of my Subspace involvement has been happening on a notepad lately. ;)

Oh, and I must admit I have been playing Fallout for consistently longer stretches of time than I've ever spent in one sitting on another single player player game. Man oh man can you ever lose yourself in that game. I'm not normall much of an RPG nut, but that sucker is just epic and badass and hella fun. Yow.

Scenarios, scenarios, and more scenarios

I'm on a roll. We're going to be doing stuff in the SCF this Saturday afternoon that no one has ever seen before. I mean that, and since I've never said it before in two years of running scenarios I think you should believe me. ;) We've got a kick ass little staff and a bunch of new maps, but there's always room for more. If you'd like to help out, get in touch. More on that scenario tomorrow.

Dawn of the Dead 3

Yes, there will be one.

Since the original event has been more or less made into a subarena of Star Warzone, the focus of this year's special Halloween event at the Sheep Cloning Facility will be a brand new scenario. It's always best to keep things fresh and original, anyhow. No details on that just yet but I'm aiming for genuine-scary this time as opposed to stupid-scary. Of course, we'll have a healthy dose of stupid-scary as well, with a new spin on the old zombie scenario.

For new players not yet familiar with our lame customs, Dawn of the Dead is a yearly (so far) Halloween game originally thunk up to commemorate the predicted demise of Virgin Interactive Entertainment's then-dominant Subspace servers on Halloween of 1998. In it, helpless human players struggle to stay alive against an ever-increasing onslaught of slow, invincible undead. In the end, the last remaining player is hunted like a dog, and we eat his flesh while he is still alive and screaming for his mother, then we pronounce him the winner of the game. Don't worry, it'll all make sense when the time comes.

And then there's Turf Zone

I wasn't going to say much about this, but since someone has been going around Subspace spreading outright lies about what happened and what's going to happen, a response is warranted.

No one has "stolen" a zone from anyone. I took over control of SSCE Turf Arizona with the full blessing and cooperation of its server administrator. The previous sysop had secured hosting on the premise that decisions for the zone would be voted upon by a coalition of eight Turf losers including GiGaKiLLer, FlippMode, Xalimar, hydro, Divine.216, Era, and myself. After hosting was taken care of, this eigth member proceeded to make changes to the zone without consulting any of the other seven.

I want to be very clear about one thing, because the respect and loyalty I have for the people who administer servers in this game has been questioned, and I take that far more seriously than any nonsense about who should or should not run whatever zone. It's been alleged that after I was granted sysop powers, I used them to remove access for the other sysops. This is NOT the case, and the person making these claims knows it. Passwords for FTP, web support, and *sysop were made at the administrative level - not by me.

As things stand now, all eight members have equal say in how the zone operates,

I guess I'm back.

<berrie> he's 90% bullshit and 10% honest mistake

Close your eyes, touch your mouth in the mirror -

That's the wound that is made where the past meets the future.

Moo
Don't even ask.

I guess I'm back.
Once again, I didn't realize so much time had passed. Kind of a lousy week offline, in many ways. Nothing monstrous, just general lousiness all around. Online, it seems Infantry is in a bit of a hard place due to all this. That's sad, but Infantry will be fine. The rest of GameFan will not be, and as much as my heart goes out to those who didn't know better than to lie down with dogs, I have to say this. Today is a good day.


So what now?
Since I'm actually playing Subspace recently, maybe I'll get back to this a little more often. Or not. You never know. Let it be known however that I decided about an hour ago the Minefield will indeed see a Year Four. Unless I change my mind.

The good old SCF is slowly becoming an actual zone, with a tiny but slowly growing population. I could use some help with this. What say you?