Shattered Worlds: Making Progress news

Five Months from it's initial release on August 8th 2008, Shattered Worlds now has a 1600+ character count on its server and forum. Currently Shattered Worlds is one of the most active Freelancer Server by the official Hamburg City top server site and server activity is increasing daily.

In order to ensure continued success and sustain this growth cycle, the Server Staff began a series of improvements to provide the best possible experience for players.

In October we transitioned to a new server host, Velocity Servers Data Centers, located in Dallas, Texas. Velocity Servers has quickly become a leading force in the Game Server Provider (GSP) arena so it was a key choice for Shattered Worlds to be hosted there. Boasting a Intel Core2Quad Q6600, 4GB DDRII Memory, 250GB Western Digital SATAII HDD, 1500 GB Bandwidth and a 100Mbit uplink to an internet backbone site. As a result, server load during peak times has dropped by from an average
of 50ms to 5ms, an improvement of 90%. This has had a significant impact as seen by players, and reported lag related issues have all but disappeared.

Along with server improvements, the DevTeam has worked tirelessly to improve the mod. Our Shattered Worlds Version 1.2 currently in beta testing features....

* Atleast 6 new guns and 4 new turrets for all NPC factions in-game. This addition of 360+
weapons brings the cumulative total to 900+ different weapons in-game!
* 144 new non-faction specific shield defeating gun variants to fit every single load-out combination imaginable with respect to speed, range and re-fire; for a total of 216 shield killing guns.
* 5 new Race pods for players to use at the racetracks located in the Green Zone
* 12 new player flyable ships ranging from fighters to freighters
* 7 new systems for player clans/factions to discover, claim, and construct infrastructure
* New missile balance with 9 new missile types
* 40-50 new and interesting commodities
* A total overhaul of the trading economy, I assure you this is one of the best balanced economies in any Freelancer mod.
* Overhauled all item icons. Over 96 new commodity and equipment icons unseen in any other Freelancer mod have been added.
* New dense asteroids that can be mined by larger mining ships for more profit than regular asteroids.
* Miners Rebalanced some can mount the new Heavy Duty Mining Lasers
* Light Bomber Ships rebalanced (to facilitate implementation of capital ships)
* More powerful Thrust Interceptors
* Higher Mission Payouts
* Overhaul of all encounters and patrols in-game, expect tougher enemies
* Tougher and more powerful bases
* Racer specific equipment for maximum adrenaline rushes in the racetracks
* Extensive changes to Reputation between NPC factions and Empathy effects which are determined by player actions
* Player flyable Nomads (we originally had to remove player access to the Nomads in the initial release due to some unforeseen balancing issues)
* Player Nomad Cloaking
* Player Nomad Regenerating Armor
* Buyable Scanners
* NPC Pilot drops, shoot the enemy down and sell him to the authorities or into slavery
* New ID Cards (Generic Lawful, Generic Unlawful, and Nomad Cult)
* Increased Visual range of Bases, and other solar objects
* New ALE FX
* New Fuse effects for damaged stations.
* Dynamic lighting for weapon projectiles
* and much more...

The Shattered Worlds Version 1.3 currently in development features...
* Player flyable capital ships.
* NPC capital ship encounters.
* Missions against NPC capital ships
* New Weapon Sound FX
* New Music (Background, Danger, and Battle)
* New Planet Textures for all planets in-game
* Slaver Faction to add more role-playing possibilities

All
in all, its been a busy few months for the team. We are looking
forward to the challenges in the future and making Shattered Worlds Mod
the premiere Freelancer mod available.