I was thinking about talking to somebody about modernizing SL. I don't know who that would be, as I'm not sure who currently runs the place.

I was thinking about ways in which we could introduce elements of 3D, without fundamentally changing what SL is.

Or, it doesn't even need to be 3D. A graphic makeover, modernization of the UI, along with a small marketing push could revive the game a lot. Also, modernizing the technology used would make it feel less dated.
Something as simple as implementing AJAX to update pages without a reload would help immensely(and that's a pretty old technology now, there is so much we could do to make improvements).

Seems like their is about 10 people actively playing, which is really close to being critical, and there being really no point to playing.

Skylords is fun, but It's 100 times more fun when there is a thriving community. I'd be willing to donate my time, I'm sure others would be as well.

Hopefully the powers that be see this, and we can get to work. I'm sure the time I've invested in SL pales in comparison to the current owners, so they should be equally motivated to revive this thing.

There are a lot of people with a lot of ideas. However there just isn't enough motivation among those with the skills needed to make any meaningful changes. Shoot Iiridayn an email @ support@skylords.com and hopefully he'd be willing to collab. william15, iiri, and zero were working on a similar project last year but it just kind of fell off. As long as the changes don't break the game, I don't think many would be opposed to updates.

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Previous Aliases:
JR Scovill
Future SL Ruler
Reaper Of Souls
Reaper Of Souls2
ReaperOfSouls90
RosReborn

MinorThreat1989: I'm not a designer, but I've bought a lot of books... Haven't had time to read them yet though. I strongly feel a graphic uplift would be great, but I've not put the time into learning design, and don't know any I'd trust w/SL and are affordable.

Regarding AJAX page loads... I personally hate Single Page Applications . I can and have built frameworks to do just that (to think, I was a junior developer when I started w/SkyLords), but I don't like them. I really like HTTP. That said, some Comet/AJAX Push for certain pages (like space) would not at all be remiss.

I would love to see SL thrive. Just need to find a time I can do it... :/. Any stable help I can get is always appreciated.

There are always a few people about that are willing to help, but as Iiri pointed out, getting stable help is hard to come by.

I am willing / available to help out where I can but some sort of private Git repo will be needed (if there isn't one already setup).

I started playing this game years ago and then fizzled out, but I keep coming back to it to see if my last planet has been taken. These days I head up a department of Designers and Frontend-Developers and have a family of 2 kids and 3 dogs, so needless to say time is precious.

Happy to contribute Iiri (we had this chat years ago), but I aint using Vim :-P

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Admin and site owner of - - www.indagalaxy.co.uk

The home of SL Satellite and other great tutorials!

Yeah, I've been learning just how precious it can be... Once I finish cleaning up the massive backend duplication I'll be in a position where I can start worrying about a design refresh. As is, the HTML structure is copied everywhere. I don't blame Zygi - it's important to get the job done, and I now have more years programming than he did at the time, and I've certainly made my share of mistakes in my younger years.

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SkyLords Head Programmer

Spelled: I I R I (not irii, irri, or iri).

Force of nature.

Oh, don't misunderstand, I don't think SL should make huge changes like becoming a single page application. However, reducing page loads in certain areas of the game, like for open space, seems to be a no brainer. It's crazy to me that something like that hasn't been implemented yet. Using AJAX would be a pretty simple implementation, and would just be a huge quality of life improvement. There's other options besides AJAX. Also, there's plenty of other things that can be improved.

I want to donate my time and expertise to improving SL, if you would allow it. My suggestion would be to get a core team volunteers, set up some sort of team repository, and set very specific development goals and implementations. If the effort is organized well, you wouldn't have to worry about devs popping in and out and doing work here and there, as opposed to investing a ton of time into it.

I'm currently between jobs, and am just doing some side gigs to get by, so I've got plenty of free time at the moment.

@DAngel - you were the one developing indagalaxy? That's rad, I remember checking that out when you were first developing it, it wasn't much more than a login page then. Totally forgot about it. Did you develop it into an actual game? Do people play? I just found the code for the game Tarogstar and I were working on years and years ago on an old hard drive. Really wish we had followed through on that. Edit: just checked out the progress on indagalaxy, I like your design a lot. Looks like you haven't done anything with it in a long long time though as the clan I created is still there. You should definitely do something with that though.

@MinorThreat1989 Yeah, there's a lot of work that'd I'd have to do to get it into "team development" state - right now updates are applied by SFTPing into the server and editing live files (always fun for the heart). Configuration is still not centralized into the web directory either, and there are various partial attempts to do something using git which I need to figure out and clean up.

I've done volunteer programming before (for a MUD, in my case), and can now understand the hesitation the admin displayed; and he actually had some change management in place . I've invited volunteers to help before and been burned (player gave self UINT16_MAX credits, then wiped out the market, vaguely recall something about boosting friends too), or in other cases not provided adequate support (like never getting around to merging changes live).

It also doesn't help that I get about 2 hours a week at my computer outside of work, and I only spend about 1/20, of those on SL. SL is not dead - but the developer is overwhelmed :/.

I agree that AJAX on the space page (though I'd prefer Comet personally) would be great, as also some 3D support on it (though that'd have fairly significant gameplay implications). I'd prefer to fix some structural issues with the code first - I know I've said that for years. I've put in 10's of hours (80?) already into that project, and that's just the first pass to structure the code such that I can start removing duplication. I'm uplifting the code to fairly idiomatic PHP 4; the prior style is more like early ASP I think - with interleaved code and markup, string builder style. My long term plan is to have template files which are passed variables and separation of concerns - closer to early PHP 5 style.

Late for work, off.

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SkyLords Head Programmer

Spelled: I I R I (not irii, irri, or iri).

Force of nature.