Swirve Blog

As I’m sure you’ve all noticed by now, the Utopian frontpage has undergone some changes. I’ve been reading the comments and feedback left on the blog, and I would like to take this opportunity to call for any further suggestions you may have. I will be collecting them all and improvements will be made based on your input.

Currently, I’m working on some basic in-game changes, of the nature described in the previous blog post. In a few weeks, they may propagate in-game.

The Earth frontpage will also be getting a new look, in the near future, so if there are any Earthers out there with ideas or suggestions, now would be a good time to hear from you! I have created a thread for comments of this nature specifically, here.

The new forums have mostly taken their final shape now, so I would like to announce their official opening. In a few days, the frontpage links on both Earth and Utopia will be switched to the new forums. The old forums will remain online for the next few weeks, so that you have time to copy any material still wanted to the new boards. We won’t be reading the old forums any more, so I would ask that any bugs and suggestions especially, be posted in the jolt forums from now on.

We have taken a number of your suggestions into account over the past few weeks. Avatars, images, and signatures can be disabled on an individual level, we have added a quick reply feature, and adapted to some of your structural requests in order to resemble the old forums more closely. Requests and input may be still be considered, to the extent they’re realistic to implement.

Forum downtime remains an issue at the moment, which we’re still working on resolving. The downtime currently occurs at 07:30 GMT for between 40 - 60 minutes, and is a consequence of the database backup. The backup is to ensure that archive date is not lost if the database goes down, or becomes corrupted.

We’d like to announce the start of the Earth and Utopia Tools (EUT) program. Some of you have been working for a long time on some very cool tools which support the Utopia and Earth communities. We’d like to recognize this by having a formal list of the Official tools that we can point new players to and encourage to download/use. Anyone who is on the EUT program will also get advance schedules of our internal development plans, so that you can manage compatibility and add features as you see fit.

We’ve spoken to a lot of the developers already but anyone who’s interested should get in touch by mailing eut@omacindustries.com

The list will be up in the next week or two but we’d initially like to announce that Brother Green’s Utopia Angel will be one of the first on the EUT Program. We asked him for a quote and he was kind enough to say the following:

“After 9 years of existence, we are grateful to the new owners of
Utopia for officially endorsing Utopia Angel, the leading tool for
Utopia. This demonstrates OMAC’s intention to keep close relationship
with the community. We are honored to inaugurate the official EUT
list. This may not be a coincidence, as if you look closely you will
see that UT is a major part of EUT. ;-)”

Hey everyone -

So, at this point, I guess you’ve all been wondering what’s going on over here at OMAC, in regard the games. With that in mind, we’ve set up this blog to keep you updated on the day-to-day goings on. The blog, in conjunction with the forums, will be prime sources of information for anything and everything to do with the development of the games.

Our first priority will be to update the user interface and manuals somewhat, to ease entry for newbies. Then we’ll start to advertise, and hopefully bring fresh players to the games - we expect the games to grow quite rapidly over the next year. Once we’ve reached that point, we’ll begin to make more major updates to the games - adding some of the features you’ve requested, and some we think you may enjoy. We intend to work closely with players, so we expect plenty of suggestions and thoughtful input ;)

As you can see, we’re starting out slowly on some of the smaller things - this is to give us a chance to play and get to know the games, before we make any major game altering changes.

I’ve been playing on both Utopia - WoL and now Genesis - and some of the Earth servers, and am really enjoying both. The everyday interactions with people I have found to be one of the most rewarding aspects of these games so far. I think at this point I’ve made almost all the nub mistakes - and my nwpa is finally looking a little better! I’ll tell you more about my adventures in future posts, provided I’m not PKed, or worse…

I’ve talked to a few of you now both via email and IRC, and we’re hoping - at some point - to talk to more of you on IRC, in the future - but more of that later.

Right now we’re finishing up a full development plan for the games, and were setting up some ancillary resources - like this blog, and the new forums. We’ll try to keep you updated here, as we continue to work on the games - and if you have any questions that need answers, or would like to see us talk about something in particular on the blog, let us know, and we’ll try to accommodate it!

Róisín