December 24, 2011

It has been a while since our last update, but we are indeed still here.

uTanks development has taken a turn towards addressing deeper issues. We created a heavy development plan for the last period (which ended December 13th), and through exploring the issues we sought to address, we realized that a vast majority of our bugs could be fixed with some more efficient foundational rewriting. We learn more every day, and for us this is part of the experience. Some of this rewriting has already been implemented, particularly the removal of caching for the database. This addresses a host of scoreboard issues and in game award updating (see Prestige). Anyways, this is the main reason why we have yet to release new tournament types as the last gameplay addition before starting on final release content. We are also working on a voting system for the map competition, which is taking a bit longer than expected. Soon we will have some polls up for voting on the new maps. In the meantime, we will schedule tournaments on a weekly basis. I have not been doing it lately, but I will be checking the replay request thread on the forums to decide the tournament maps of the week.

More importantly it is Christmas Eve, and we are all very excited to spend some time with our families. Christmas time can be a stressful season, but finally the time is here. For some reason, Christmas time makes me a bit nostalgic. While writing this update, I had originally started off with "Merry Christmas, uTankers," but I deleted it. It made me think about how many Christmas Eves and Days we spent together as Battlefielders, and that this is our first real Christmas together as uTankers. I remember playing Christmas Eve and late afternoon Christmas Day tournaments. We had some pretty good team battles on Christmas too if I remember correctly. It always seemed to be a time equally as important to our community as it was for our families. I can only speak for myself, but I loved getting into some Battlefield action on Christmas Day. I think moments like these are what originally motivated me to get involved in this project, and the point we have reached now makes me proud of our achievements together. We have finally recreated what was so attractive about Battlefield. We have reunited the community with a solid base of players. We are back. It's kind of strange to think about after all of these years, but it definitely makes me happy that we came back as a community.

So relax, enjoy a few eggnog pumpkin spiced cocktails (21+ ofc), play some tournaments, and do not doubt for one second that there are some Christmas tournament surprises in store.

To a community reborn, Merry Christmas, uTankers.

Comment on this post

Back to Archive