Not that anyone will care, but DarkSpace is celebrating its 10th birthday today.

Go play or, or maybe don't. It's still an honor that many titles will sadly never achieve.

Congrats!

I started playing FE again now thats its free to play. Recovered my old characters and am having a decent amount of fun wondering about. The F2P limitations are not readily apparent and do not interefere with the actual gameplay. In all they FE has made a very smooth transition into the F2P market.

Much Kudos.

Sorry, but this had to be done....

My only criticism is why the game has not been released yet. I mean, I know they want to make they game as good as they can, but I want to play it already...

Bunch of slackers :-P

Go the the GameList, pick a random game and try it out for a few hours or days.

You will have some awesomely bad experiences, and you will also have some amazingly fun times. The key part is being able to enjoy the games together - it doesn't really matter what you play.

No way. I try to use a different email/password combination for every game account I have.

That just means I will have more free time to work on my own game...

A few days ago we released version 1.670 of DarkSpace.

This patch features a huge overhaul of the game balance, finally implementing the updated Dreadnought and Station Layouts and a major change to how repair affects ships.
There is also a noticeable improvement in the graphics engine due the addition of shader support.

Remember, DarkSpace is free to play, so join up today!

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Patch Log:
- Halved the damage and doubled the fire rate of all core weapons (Stellar Incinerator, QST, Ion Cannon) - effectively reduces single volley damage while keeping the overall DPS of these weapons. Ammo has been adjusted where applicable.
- New Cruiser layouts!
- Torpedo changes:
* Anti-Matter:
* 10% damage increase.
* Range: 480 gu.
* Speed: 60 gu/s.
* Splash: 10 gu.
* Proton:
* 10% damage increase.
* Range: 560 gu.
* Speed: 65 gu/s.
* Splash: 30 gu.
* Fusion:
* 10% damage increase.
* Range: 640 gu.
* Speed: 80 gu/s.
* Splash: 10 gu.
- [GCQL] Mutes can no longer be removed by reconnecting or changing channels.
- Muted players can no longer talk in-game via global channels (/yell, /team, and /faction).
- Added new drive flare effect for missiles - only available at medium or high detail setting
- New Utility Ship layouts (Transports, Engineers & Supplies)!
- Flux Wave now only affects enemies.
- Pulse Wave now only affects the enemy's projectiles and has a 65% chance of destroying each projectile it hits.
- All damage-orientated beams have had their damage and energy efficiency improved. Second tier beams have had their damage vastly improved.
- Stations have had their max speed lowered by about 45%.
- Missiles are more likely to aim for your ship now, rather than your shapely behind.
- New Dreadnought layouts!
- Fixed an exploit wherein you could initiate a jump and cloak.
- Fixed the issues with an Interdictor going through a Jump Gate and keeping ships dictored. Also fixed an issue with going through a gate to escape an Interdictor causing you to get stuck.
- Cloak will no longer display a faux cooldown when activated.
- Including %t in a message in-game will replace %t with whatever you are targetting.
- Reduced energy drain of Tier 2 and Tier 3 missiles, also increased AoE radius of Tier 1 missiles by ~90%, Tier 2 missiles by ~35%, and Tier 3 missiles by ~5%
- Armor rings now are colored depending on if you have shields or armor on the ship. Shields on defensive mode have an extra layer of white to indicate an arc in defensive mode (purely cosmetic)
- Swapped out old K'Luth psi/shredder missiles for new Psionic Missile and Shroud Missile.
* Psionic Missile: high energy drain - medium-high damage - payload scales with ship class - no ammo usage
* Shroud Missile: medium energy drain - medium damage - payload scales with ship class - uses ammo - high negative signature
- Fixed a bug with Ablative armor giving beam energy damage resistance, instead of kinetic energy.
- Tweaked energy drain values of the Psi Cannon and the Stellar Incinerator.
- Significantly increased the energy drain of all core weapons.
- Increased Planetary Siege Missile damage output significantly.
- Shield rotation will now charge shields at a rate of 20%, up from 10%.
- Reactive shields now have 20% resistance to all damage types except ELF and EMP, which have -20% resistance.
- Tweaked AHR to repair all ships' hull to full over 10 minutes. AHR gadget repair rate also changed to now require 5 minutes to fully repair all gadgets (not counting the ship's automatic single-gadget repair feature).
- Increased Ablative Armor's weakness to energy-based weapons.
- New layouts for all player-faction Stations!
- Planetary depots will now repair all ships within 500 gu, and have a 1-per-panet limit.
- Team chat is now coloured teal instead of gold.
- Supply Stations now have a repair field device similar to how depots function.
- Bump mapping has been applied to all ICC, UGTO and K'Luth ships.
- Medusa can now do Specular Hightlighting via shaders. This has been enabled in DarkSpace.
- Stations have lost one reload which has been replaced by an AHR-esque gadget named "Damage Control". This will repair the station and it's gadgets when the station is damaged.
- Planetary damage has been increased on all non-pd based defence bases.
- AHR and the new Damage Control can now only be reloaded by planets, depots, and platforms.
- HCL's and AD's cannot be used for PD now.
- Released: July 23rd, 2011
- HOTFIX: AHR and DC now repair armor, and costs ammo to do so. K'Luth Organic Armor regeneration rate lowered to compensate.
- HOTFIX: K'Luth stations have had their DC's replaced for a couple of weapons each.
- HOTFIX: Players getting their jumps aborted has been fixed.
- Released: TBC

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DarkSpace.

Nuff said.

I miss TR too, for all of its faults.

You won't 'kill' the WoW clones. It is a proven and successful business model, and while it remains so you will keep getting other developers trying to emulate that success. It is also far easier to get financial backing if you are trying to develop an evolution of another title instead of coming up with something entirely new.

DarkSpace has distinctly non WoW/EQ style combat. I would argue that Eve does not belong on this list as it uses very similar combat mechanics in terms of 'skill' use.

You will see a number of titles going F2P once their subscription momentum runs out. If done well like LOTRO and DDO it can be a very positive boost to the games player base. I also hope that Warhammer Online goes fully F2P next. It's another game that I could never justify paying for past a few months.

If they are able to pull this off successfully then all power to them. There are a number of titles that can benefit from a publisher willing to take the risks.

For one I am anticipating Fallen Earth being F2P. I like the game but could never justify the subscription fee.

DarkSpace, although extremely biased as you can tell by my signature.

I've been playing since 2003.

Free-to-play is definitely becoming the to-go model of MMO development. It has been repeatedly shown that MMO's stand to make more from item-shops than from subscriptions (you can even nickel and dime for both). Just look at the success of DDO and LOTRO.

This model allows for a wider audience to access your game without feeling obliged to pay. Those are players that would not have otherwise even considered purchasing your game, but hey, it's free! Although it is hard to justify the initial development cost to investors without a box price, the success of the free-to-play model lays with the recurring revenue it generates. The trick is to price your 'optional' game enhancing services so that they create more recurring revenue than a straight subscription.

One way to do this is via abstracting real money into your own currency. It's a pure play on psychology as the majority people have a problem with associating in-game currency with real cash. Where $9 might seem a high price for a characters backpack, it doesn't seem as bad when it is 900 e-chips, and you already have 2000 in your bank.

I don't think we will ever have an MMO that covers all of these.

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Originally posted by Ihmotepp
I would take anything on GameDev with a grain of salt. The basic attitude there is if you aren't a programming genius funded by a major studio, you will fail.
And that's probably an optomistic post for that forum.

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You are still likely to fail even if you are. Just look at the list of major MMO failures over the last five years, of which Tabula Rasa is probably the most representative.

FPS style combat is heavily dependent on network latency. Regardless of the progress of technology since 2000, over-subscribed networks and traffic congestion still serves to make that type of game-play not viable in a 'true' MMO environment.

For MMO's that do have the FPS style combat, it is rare to find more people in a single location or zone than you would find in a conventional FPS server (hence the previous exclamation marks around 'true'). As soon as you start reaching similar numbers then the major latency issues start to hit again.

This is a property of the servers attempting to keep all of those players synchronized with each other. A lot can be resolved by pushing more of the load out to the individual clients, but this then opens you game to network interception exploits, which is a big no for any MMO.

There is also only so much you can do without this pesky concept called 'the laws of physics' rearing its ugly head.

"Success" depends on what you are looking for from your game.

The game I work for has a development team of less than 10 part-time volunteers and is about to celebrate its tenth birthday later this year. You don't need a million players to be a success. You only need enough income to support the running cost of your game, be it 100 players or 100,000.