No More Development?

[SenorPez]

Did I miss an end-of-life announcement? I just noticed it's been a year since the last patch notes on the wiki.

If so, thanks for a great game. I come back to AI War sporadically, and always enjoy it!

[Draco18s]

Chris (and Co.) have been hardcore busy with Stars Beyond Reach, and briefly for Starward Rogue.

While AI War is their flagship title, it does get long periods of no development while new titles are being worked on.

[Pumpkin]

There is hope. Brighter days will sure be shinning upon our beloved PvE RTS / TowerDef / 4X-lite. When remains to be determined.

Chris said "if".

Spoiler for Hiden:

Just for the sake of argument, how would you feel if:

1. We released a new version of the game called AI War Reborn or similar, charging probably $20 for it.
2. We drastically upgraded the underlying engine, had copious mod support from the ground up in that, did new art, and so on.
3. We built as many of the features from all the AI War expansions as possible into that, although minus things that nobody really likes anyway (Defender mode).
4. We started with something that is really simplistic but with mod support, and then during an alpha where you guys are involved, built things back up so that you're not left out of the process until the last second.
5. We then leave the original AI War alone, period, and AI War Reborn becomes the new AI War experience that any expansions go to, and that players can focus any modding efforts on, etc.

The reasons for this are numerous:
1. Doing the sort of modding support that would be useful at all would require pretty much a complete rewrite of the game engine to do, to be honest.
2. We now have experience with exactly that sort of thing in some of our more recent work -- you would not BELIEVE how mod-friendly Starward Rogue is, for instance.
3. We've had 4+ years of engine improvements since the original AI War, and people are going to be seriously frustrated if they try to work on the older version of the engine (I sure would be), so the upgrade to a newer engine would be good all around.
4. We'd be able to ease some of the performance woes that people are likely to introduce in mods by using some more multithreading, probably.
5. We could also upgrade the network library.
6. And so on.

Basically I like what you're talking about, but what you're talking about is a completely different game from the one that exists now.  I'm not saying that the above will happen for sure, but it is something we've talked about internally.  I'm curious to take your temperature on that since you guys brought it up.

Check the (rather old) thread here.