Over 8000 Downloads

Collin noted that we passed 8000 total downloads today (adding up the "All Time" statistics, the "Files" screen number is slightly lower). We have been on sourceforge for a little under a year and a half. Sure Gaim or Azureus get more than that in a single day, but we still think we are doing pretty well. Thanks for checking us out everyone! Read on for an update on what we're working on.

We have been hard at work for Alpha 1.5, although we don't have a release date in mind yet. We have done a lot of restructuring and behind-the-scenes work that, while it doesn't make for a better game right now, should make it much easier for us to add new gameplay and content in the future. We have been realizing that we really need to work on the framework if we want to keep the code manageable. We are trying to focus on laying that foundation, while continuing to add some interesting player-visible improvements as well.

One large improvement is a new resource manager. It automatically takes care of loading resources, and shares a single copy of the data between multiple resource users. That allows us to only load a single copy of every texture that gets used, even if it is used in 10 places in the game. It's already made life easier for us, and we've only had it for a few weeks...

We are working on some player-visible enhancements as well. We have a preliminary naval battle HUD, and we are working on implementing a supply/demand based dynamic economy. Hopefully we'll have more on that as it progresses.

Some other things I want to do are update the data directory on the website, and we realized today that the dev-c++ instructions are really out of date. I am hoping to get both of those updated soon... Thanks again for the interest so far, I'm looking forward to the next 8000!