End of Year Update

[Ramsey]

SWGEmu End of Year Announcement

Four years and eight days ago, two men began a task of enormity; the task of building the greatest online game of all time. When Ramsey and his team began their work in December 2004, SWG was a sinking ship, and before long the game they wished to create had disappeared entirely. With these changes came a challenge which had never been overcome, a hurtle which had never before been attempted: recreating a lost game.

Now we are experiencing the fruit of their labour in the first person. Every day thousands of watchers and viewers, participants and posters, chatters and jokers, players and testers, visit the SWGEmu network to connect with others, assist development, watch for updates, and most importantly test their game. Not the game belonging to Sony, nor the game belonging to the SWGEmu Developers, but the game developed by the community for the community. This is the message SWGEmu wishes to share. Players come and go, Games come and go, years come and they do go. But a great community stays strong forever, and proven this we have.

With close to one hundred new people signing up every day, one to two hundred on the test centre at peak times, our recent stress test hitting a massive five hundred and fifty players and two thousand visitors to the forum daily, as every day passes the anticipation and awareness grows. Advertising can sell games, but only sharing and passion can create and uphold one.

The last year has seen SWGEmu evolve from a closed lipped and closed sourced project into a fully functioning development studio. New features and code is committed sometimes on an hourly basis, with almost eleven hundred revisions so far. The team of SWGEmu Developers working daily with only their passion, vigour and spare time, are some of the most talented and intelligent of individuals. Their hard work is the foundation of all that has been created, and all that will endure.
2008 carries with it the memories of so many achievements, so many improvements, and so much growth, they are too numerous to mention. Let us share with you those we feel stood out over the year:

[added] basic vendor/bazaar functionality
[added] Resource/Survey
[added] dancer and musician /commands, flourish
[added] New Characters now spawn with appropriate clothing and gear
[added] All shuttle paths
[Added] Creature Harvesting
[Added] Harvesting, Survey XP
[added] Vehicle Deeds to Blue Frog
[added] Faction Rank System
[added] Medic/Doctor
[Added] No Build Zones/Areas
[Added] Vehicle Crafting
[Added] Starting Location Selection
[Added] Rest Of Galaxie NPCs to SVN
[added] experience gaining for most actions
[added] spending experience (and credits) to gain skills
[added] consider levels
[added] exp for lairs

2009 will be a year that we hope dwarves 2008. It will be a year not of rashness but responsibility, not of normalcy but nuance, not of procrastination but perfection.
So many of the key features to which there has been such devotion will finally come to fruition. As the game approaches a playable state, as announced on Christmas Day, we will be launching Sun Crusher; our fully playable test centre running in tandem with our current Core3 Test Centre, Nova.

For the next year we are looking to bring server communities closer to SWGEmu to expand the options for new players on release. If you are operating a server community and have ideas on how SWGEmu can do a better job of integrating server communities (in general) with the SWGEmu player base, please do not hesitate to post on the forums. Over the past few months, the bigger SWGEmu community has fragmented into smaller server-based factions with ideas only being circulated in the smaller groups. The PreCU experience on any server would be much better if we try to reestablish connections to server communities that do not participate in the growth of the emulator. The SWGEmu team looks forward to working with server communities this year, more so than we have in the past.

2009, and the changes it brings, will no doubt go down in history as yet another vital step forward in the growth of this project, of open source projects worldwide, and of the gaming world. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it will never forget what has occurred and will occur here. History will be made here, and it is an honour to be here to share it with you all. Thank you. From everyone, from all times, from across the world; thank you for the opportunities you have given us, the support you have provided for us and the commitment which fuels us. We shall work without sleep, we shall solve the unsolvable, we shall continue to smash the odds and figures; until such as time as SWGEmu is absolutely complete. We shall never give up.

A Happy New Years to all of you. May good fortune follow you in all that you do.

--Team SWGEmu