DevLaTron wrote:

Dear players,

quite a while ago we announced a new, old, blue universe. While we (the OGame team) are still in a phase of testing and fixing a lot of bugs and issues, we felt that we should update you on the progress, and fill in some background information and history about this universe.

First of all, the testing is well on it's way, with well over 100 people helping us out. Thanks everyone involved!

Second, we want you to know that during the last months, we've been solving quite some technical issues in the current version of the game. If you check the release frequency of the game, you'll notice that we're going for more small and short releases rather than single big ones. This is because we changed a lot of our deployment and internal handling of things.

This change in internal structure allows us to be a lot more flexible in the future and bring more cool features to the game we all care about. Bug fixing and performance issues in the current version of the game are of course more important than the retro universe. We hope you understand that some of the issues we had to resolve may seem simple on the surface but are technically very complex "in the code". OGame has been around for quite some time, and the code reflects this.

Part of the team is working hard on multiple fronts to fix the issues, be it small bug fixes or usability changes, while others work on the deeper, more complex issues. Our structural changes allow us to push small changes faster and independently of the larger ones, allowing us to push fixes to the servers when they are ready, without having to wait for the ones not ready.

Another part of the team is working on new features, such as the wreck fields.

The retro server is a bit of a special snowflake here.

Not so long ago the last old design universes were shut down. This was because the architecture it was running on was outdated, insecure and unstable. Even worse, the software they were running on (Database, Web server, Operating System) were past their life cycle and not receiving security updates anymore. There was a big risk of these servers being compromised if not shut down. You can find the announcements about this on the forums. The code itself was in a similar state. Outdated, buggy, and not compatible with modern versions of the Operating System, Database Software, etc.

The two "code strains" (RD- Version and OD) were so far apart, that it was not worth the effort of bringing the old code up to modern standards and functionality from a company point of view.

So, what changed you might ask? How come we then announce a retro server half a year later?

There were changes in the development team, and with these quite some changes in how things work internally. The retro universe was a personal and private project, trying to bring the old version code into a state that would eventually run in a modern environment. Over the course of dozens of weekends one of us fixed up the old code. After many initial failures, this "hobby" project evolved into something that was remotely presentable, and our Product Director got a look at it. That's when the idea of the retro universe was born. The problem here is that there is no way to know in advance "how bad" the rest of the fixes will be and how long they might take, and we all of course have "the real job", which is working on the current version of the game, and which will of course have priority.

If you are "techy", imagine getting an old 8-bit DOS computer game to run on a Windows10 64-bit architecture. There are a lot of things that break, a lot of bugs that appear that were not there before, and even more things that needed rewriting because the old code was simply incompatible. If you fix one spot, another one breaks, breaking a subsequent piece somewhere else. PHP, the programming language, had changed, the database software had changed. We need (for security reasons) keep this code separate from all the other servers, and that had to be set up as well. There is quite a lot going on, and a lot of things are not as simple as they may seem.

If you're not that "techy", just imagine getting a diesel truck to work in a world full of electric cars. It's pretty similar, and equally hard to accomplish.

Now, this means that we also have to triage. ACS for example was so buggy that we decided to just turn it off. It's not that we wouldn't want to turn it on, it just breaks so many places that it would take ages to fix. There are also strange timing effects, that's why we limited the speed to single speed. We disabled all the commander features, and made some changes to keep your personal information safe. The Battle cruiser, originally making a first appearance in 0.75 was also excluded from the version for technical reasons. Some changes or settings were chosen because we read about them in the forums. (Yes, some Developers read the forums in the respective languages they understand).

So, what you're getting is basically a modified version of 0.77, with changes made and settings deactivated because of a lot of different reasons. We try to make each decision as best as we can.

We hope that this gives you a bit of background information about what the retro server is and how it came to be. We're still working hard to flesh out the last bugs, and hope to see you on the server soon! Get your skins and your alarm clocks ready, and travel with us back in time in something blue.

And as we all know: OGame has always been bigger on the inside.

Raid safely,

DevLaTron, Alliance Karlsruher Zentralkomitee (KzK)