For the cool folk who have followed the Solar Empire legacy through thick and thin since 1999, those cute .php3 file suffixes, Moriarty’s continuing denegration of all other developers, the revolution that open source brought, the sudden push towards OOP, and the…err…security and bug population… Working on anything hitting it’s 9th anniversary in PHP is really interesting – 9 times the fun and games ;) .

Astrum Futura was envisaged as a desperately needed update to the long running open source Solar Empire franchise, where players engage each other across a galaxy of 500+ star systems mining resources, building colonies, and generally screaming bloody murder at each other. It’s not the most impressive or ambitious of online games, but it’s always been tenacious and attracted roaming users who like a quick dash of destruction in their daily diet.

In January 2008, the oft delayed development process will once again creak into action. The current tracer code was built originally using the Zend Framework 0.2-0.6 and famously led that Spring to my long running “Complex Views With The Zend Framework” blog series that gave birth to the Zend_View Enhanced proposal, and maybe gave Ralph Schindler a few headaches ;) . Building anything more complex than a login page was pure heart ache previously.

Now that time is available, the Zend Framework significantly more mature, and we have a lot of legwork carried over from 2006 in the Quantum Game Library (thanks to Jacob Santos), it’s about time we got something concrete done. The usual suspects, if interest levels are high enough, can report to the shiny updated phpBB3 forums at http://forums.astrumfutura.com – same domain as this blog you’re reading.

And we will be applying XP this time – the random running process that usually prevails just doesn’t work out well. So get your Selenium gear in place.

Related posts:

  1. Astrum Futura to Subversion
  2. Absidon Support for Astrum Futura
  3. Astrum Futura: An open source space strategy game project
  4. Astrum Futura: Performance and Optimisation
  5. Sourceforge Ranking Review