You may have used the downloadable client that we have now. It does some things, some of which it does ok. It, however, reached a dead end on the graphics front. Well, I could have pushed it, and eventually made something kinda nice, but there were limits I did not like. Thus, we scraped the client, and started work on a new one, from scratch, using different tools. It looks fantastic, but still lacks any basic functionality other than planet rendering.
Along with the new client, I designed a new server architecture, which I think will work much better. I have finished the basic architecture, and done some basic testing of it. Everything seems to work well, though there are some features missing as far as automatic crash recovery and distributed processing across multiple servers (basic multi-core support should already work, and the database server can be on another machine), but I think everything else major is solid.
Along with the basic architecture changes, I have now implicated a new networking protocol. It has basic error detection, and should be a solid base for the networking. There are a few details that are currently in need of optimization for high loads, but I will get that fixed soon. I still need to implement it on the client side in python too. (Edit After some testing, for small messages, my code is more than twice as fast as RealBasic's built in alternative, and about 11% faster for much larger messages. I also got it about half implemented on the python side)
Also, I should note that several developers other than me have been active recently working on various design and documentation tasks, as well as the ground combat system which will be ported to the new server, client and networking once finished.
I think that is it for now. No pretty new pretty pictures. I need to rig up a PHP script so I can easily update a gallery of new screen shots for all you (not very numerous) fans :)
