That's kind of my point. Any small change is met with resistance by the established community. I experienced that with v3, in fact. And doing a graphical version of TW is a major change. But as far as keeping the game as close to its roots as possible, I don't think there are many people who are as purist as I am. Just about every attempt at modernizing the Trade Wars gameplay has resulted in something more like Privateer than Trade Wars. The tendency is to make this more simulation than game. I see classic Trade Wars as a complex game system more than a simulation. It's not about piloting space ships into battle. It's about managing a trade empire. I believe that it's possible to expand the game world without discarding its roots. And I'm encouraged by the success of other classic games that have managed to evolve without losing their identity. Look at Dragonquest 8. It's a solid 3D game, but it retains the simplistic turn-based battle system that it had way back in the beginning. That's what I'd like to see from a new TW, a beautiful presentation but the same basic gameplay.

If I'm the only developer, when I'm ready to do another Trade Wars game, expect a fairly simple 2D graphical interface. If a team of developers takes on the project (which is what I'm currently planning), the quality of the presentation could be much greater. But either way, my vision of how the game would play is the same. Trade Wars won't sell out to graphics. I just want to sweeten the presentation a bit.

Anyway, that's all speculation. Right now all I can promise is to continue to support v3, to support this community with a forum and other web-based areas, and to keep pushing for future work on Trade Wars. My primary objective right now is to increase my potential to make games, both in my own skills and in my ability to work with others. If I can succeed on some other projects, that opens the door for me to do a Trade Wars that lives up to my standards.

AND that guys and gals is what is known as a wrap.
My self i look forward to the next release of twars,
be it v 3.14 or 4.01 I know its coming, just dont know
the exact eta. But when i know you will know.

I love your vision, and kind of see a new light.. I would love to be sitting in the low red glow of the ***pit in my CFS as I go from port to port, quickly robbing everything they have to offer, or seeing the bright blue and white trails of the photon I just fired at zentocks rear through my on screen display... The bright green tractor beam locking onto spaceghosts pod while I play ocean ambience tunes in my holodeck to remind me of home

Yeah... I could go for something like that...

It's FPS I don't think I could handle.... but yeah, like I said, it feels like whatever comes out of your mouth is gold.. I think thats a fantastic vision you have (That i might have twisted a little bit)

but I've played the startrek sims, and I wished it were a little more like TW....

Well, one of the main reasons I'm trying to keep this community alive is because, when the time does come, I really hope you can be a vital part of the design process. I don't expect everything we do to be accepted with open arms here, but I'm going to try to shoot for something that is at least deserving of the Trade Wars name, and I have a much better chance of achieving that with the help of the old-school players and gameops.

Well, thank you.

I don't think all changes will EVER be accepted with open arms, but like I said in previous posts, evolution is a key part of life. We can either accept it, or continue to work with stones.

I agree that evolution is undeniable now with the game, and I personally would like to see it come about, even if the graphics aren't like EVE online, which is the only graphics online game that comes close to TW, but it is really complicated, and most people who try it lose intrest in it because of that, I think JP has the right approach to the evolution of the game, while upgrading the GUI, keep the game play as close to the original as possible, but with the new graphics involved, some things will have to change on the play level, but they should be minor. But all in all, I think it is time TW had a chance to evolve, who knows, we may like it.

I get a warm fuzzy feeling in my heart everytime JP talks.

We know you'll do the right thing in the end, and the overall majority of core players will support you i'm sure. I'd love to see Tradewars brought more mainstream. Heck, all my friends have no clue what the game is, and look at me like i'm crazy for playing this game, but everytime I want to leave it I come back because of it's simple and complex gameplay.

Well the open source versions of Tradewars, the ones based on MS-BASIC and Turbo Pascal, before the Martin's/EIS' version became popular, had a big run. Yet they could not compare to Tradewars 2002, and TW 2002 had a shareware business model like many other BBS games makers of the 80's and 90's. I can recall others like Operation Overkill, Food Fite, Global Wars, BRE, etc. I think the others died out, or went to a postcard registration for free, or became open source themselves. That was because, unlike TW 2002 and later TWGS, they did not evolve to an Internet game. The Internet almost killed the BBS, but many BBSes are still around but many are Internet ready and on the Internet.

Yeah Graz, Muds killed the text based games. The youth of today just eat them up. We need to teach them that text based games are still fun as well.

As far as TWGS goes, I'd suggest to keep the classic version and just fix bugs and make it stable. Maybe port it to Unix platforms if you can. If people want a new version, I suggest calling it TWGS: The New Era or something and then keep V3 as TWGS: Classic and develop two products. If you cannot afford two versions, I'd suggest staying with the classic version.

I once, in 1997, wanted to make a GUI version of Tradewars. Of course I knew nothing about TW formulas so it was going to be a game written from scratch using Java. A player could drag and drop a missile to an enemy ship and it would fire it. There would be a dice-roll to see if it hit. Computer level of your computer and the skill of your Gunnery crew would determine if you hit, verses their Computer level and if they had any defensive weapons like sandcasters. Overall it was not like Tradewars at all. There was some demand for it, but not enough to get past the analysis and design stage. Planets would have cities one could build on, and train troops and build vehicles and explore the planet. It got way too complex and I scapped the project before I got into the code writing stage.

That Tradewars 3D MUD looked interesting, but it evolved into an Everquest clone.

I look forward to the Tradewars 2D project, I am willing to try new things and keep an open mind.

I have VB abd ASP programming skills and I am trying to learn new languages as well. I am on disability right now, but I hope to get off of it one day and recover from my many illnesses. There are other languages I know, but I haven't really used them that much to mention them. I am currently trying to learn ladder logic for PLC systems. I did study up on PHP, MySQL, VB.NET somewhat, but college and family matters took up most of my time, and the rest was used when people needed their computers fixed that knew me.

I might be able to work part-time, and I might even work for free to gain the experience. In VB and ASP I can debug things if the developers get caught in some of the code traps. I am not expecting to be accepted, but I offer the possibility of my help some day.