Poll of interest of BNT recode?

[TheMightyDude]

I just wanted to know the amount of people that would like to see a recoded version of Blacknova Traders which would be coded from scratch, the game will still be opensource and look the same, it will just be cleaner code making it more easier to add new stuff if needed..

I am just trying to see if its worth while doing the recode, there would be no point if there was nobody to play it once it is done.

[MrBrennus]

I played BNT around 2003 and enjoyed it a lot. If there was a new version I imagine that I'd find it just as addictive as before.

There are a lot of games out there today though so I don't know if it could still attract an audience like it did in the past.

Maybe it could be re-imagined and modernized for mobile gaming instead of a classic recode?

[TheMightyDude]

I played BNT around 2003 and enjoyed it a lot. If there was a new version I imagine that I'd find it just as addictive as before.

There are a lot of games out there today though so I don't know if it could still attract an audience like it did in the past.

Maybe it could be re-imagined and modernized for mobile gaming instead of a classic recode?

Well due to what is displayed that will be an issue for Smart Phones.

[Rincewind]

I believe what this game needs is:

+ not necessarily a re-code, but it would be welcome if it will even further improve performance and reduce bandwidth with further optimizations
+ a subreddit for easier sharing, promotion etc. (I created one, I hope you don't mind)
https://www.reddit.com/r/BlackNovaTraders/
+ while development is going on, collect email addresses from people interested in the game, I know I'd be interested to play a couple, help with moderating the subreddit, administering games...

+ most importantly... new players use their turns for nothing and don't feel rewarded for their actions, they are too impatient to wait for new turns - so they quit and never come back. We need some good video tutorials of some actions, some examples of multi-tab attack/resupply etc. If we can setup a universe with dummy accounts with planets, etc., some veterans would possibly be willing to record those with some commentary? It's hella fun, I remember doing it, but that was 10+ years ago, so I kind of forgot a lot of it, but I started playing again a bit on http://bnt.wyesoft.com/ to remind myself

That's all for now, I may post more if I think of anything useful.

[RancerDS]

It would be interesting to learn if the re-coding will be done using PHP5 or if it will instead be done using the newer PHP7.

[Hexeus]

Still hoping this game gets continued.

[TheMightyDude]

Still hoping this game gets continued.

Sorry a bit of a long response ...

Well I have been busy doing stuff along with being ill on and off for the last few weeks and having to shield myself due to Covid I haven't been able to see a doctor right away.

Apart from that...
My plans was to create a new game from scratch "trying" to keep the game like it is as I can, but things "will" be changing.

[New Stuff]
I am hoping for a Windows Desktop Client first and then later on if all goes well and can get Web Sockets working ok on our Server a WebGL version that will be played in the browser.

I still plan to run the Authentication Server on our server along with one game, and then make available a lite weight Game Server that will be written in .NET Core and will come pre-compiled self-contained app which means it will be a larger file with contains all the .NET Core files allowing for it to just be uploaded to the server + config set and it "should" just work out of the box.

The Game Server "should" work on both Linux and Windows, well this is my plan.

The reason its taking so long is I am having to write my own Framework and sub services to allow for both Socket Connections as well as Web Sockets which are completely different.

[Old Code]
I did at one point try to do a complete recode from scratch using Apache, MySQL and PHP, but where PHP and MySQL keep changing we will run into compatibility issues later on and the current code was a real mess, that along with the game being REST based it limits what features can be added, sure we could move over to Web Sockets which would allow for most of the new features I wanted to add, but I would have to create a server with web socket network support, have the user download the client side as a whole every time they wanted to play.

So for an admin that wanted to run their own server like some do now I would have to make sure they have a certain web service that allows for proxying Web Socket traffic, along with whatever framework I use for the backend which handles the actual Web Sockets Traffic (like Node.js etc)

And then there is the Client Side in the browser, if done in HTML5 (WebGL) we run into issue like we do now in browsers with compatibility each browser handles things completely different some runs things better or worse that other browsers.
So I didn't want to code it all the way up for it to not work as well in a certain browser than it does in another one, and also where it would have to use JavaScript or maybe Web Assembly (know nothing about Web Assembly as yet) but JS has its limits due to security, this was why I wanted to move completely away from PHP, JS etc.

[Where I am Now]
It was those above limitations that moved me into doing a complete new code base using a completely different language which allows me to work with a said framework language and version and the version run on the server would just be a drop in (uploaded + configured) self contained application.

The new version will need more RAM due to the Universe as a whole will be loaded up into it from the database at start-up then as users sign in their information gets loaded in, all information will / should get periodically saved back to the database, this is to reduce database queries being made.
But this is still work in progress at the moment.

I am currently still (SIGN) working on the Network Sockets which is Multithreaded and have tested on Windows and Linux with an easy 5K concurrent dumb clients sending random traffic locally without any issues, but where this was all local traffic (i.e. ultra-low latency) I assume real life traffic due to this being a controlled traffic "might" reduce that 5K connections to about 3K to 4K per average server which is still good compared to what we have now.

I have also been looking into splitting up areas (i.e. zones / Universe Systems) into clusters which would allow to split the load across servers if running a large / huge universe but I haven't done any code for that, so that feature might not even get added.

There is a lot more that I have been looking into not just for BNT but for other project.

This will sadly like I have said before be closed sourced, BUT will still remain free to play.