Reviews - aeternus

Discovery GC is the second Freelancer mod that I joined after playing single player for a bit. After a good bit I joined the dev team and have been doing mainly model/FX work ever since. From a dev perspective, having worked on other mods, I must say the scale of this mod is daunting. Well over 200 custom ships, and an additional 200 or so station modules or custom stations make it quite hard to manage at times. Not to mention the economy - multiply the 200 or so bases by 100 or so commodities and you get the idea. Updates are infrequent as a result of this sheer scale.

The dev team, naturally, is all volunteers and tends to change over time. People come, people go. Folk lose interest in a game or come back later, it's a given. But as a community, this mod is still going strong with an active playerbase that still peaks at max server capacity (225 users) on occasion - in low times 50 or so players.

The chief problems from the devside on 4.86 are:
- Gallia not properly implemented (yea, it was a rushjob, since the development had stalled)
- Capital ships often didn't get damaged by explosives
- Significant lag when large battles occurred, especially when groups of 20 or so capital ships met.
- Lack of NPCs when the server population increased - due to NPC throttling when the server is under high load.

In the 4.87 devcycle, which we're working hard on, these issues will be addressed. Hopefully this will make the player experience on DiscoGC a little better. We don't have an ETA for the next release yet, but I'm hoping Q1 of 2013 is feasable.