You know what’s missing in GSB?
Yes, yes I know you want a big 4x style campaign game built around it. ONE DAY maybe, but certainly not by the end of the week. One thing that is not quite so huge and unwieldy for a short term project is the area of online community.
Player A reads a forum post by player B, and decides to issue them with a challenge that proves their point that tribe frigates kick ass. Player B is oblivious, unless they happen to be browsing the challenges and spot they have a new one, from that player. Wouldn’t it be much cooler if every time someone issued a challenge to you, beat your challenge, or played (and presumably lost) your challenge, the game knew about it, and collected those messages for you to review at your leisure?
So rather than having to go to challenges, filter by personal and check if anything looks new, you could have a little spangly message popup saying “you have new messages“, on the main menu, and clicking there would tell you what’s new in your world of GSB.
This sort of stuff isn’t *that* evil to code, even though it involves server-side stuff. I already have it all up and running, UI and all, and the server is currently processing messages as I speak (although nobody has a game version that lets them see them yet. But I can tell that a bit earlier, superneals sent a new challenge to knightsofni, for example.)
This will go into version 1.28. At the moment it’s system generated messages, so you just get pre-defined text messages notifying you of events. If people liek it, I think it would be awesome to be able to win a challenge, then type a message for the person you just beat saying “Ha!, i beat that fleet without even using plasma. I’ve responded with my winning fleet.” of course, you need to be able to block abusive / spam messages, but I’m working on that now. Besides, anyone spamming or being abusive will get the ban hammer :D