April 2004

News for Tuesday April 6, 2004 · VGAP 4 not so far away?   Be greeted Galactic Traveller, Tim Wissemann himself announced just a couple of days ago in the Newsgroup alt.games.vgaplanets4 that VGAP nears completion. TW: "The next step is the finish the help files and the AI and declare the game done." - so after years of hard work and beta testing VGA Planets V4 finally comes to life. You can read the full thread here including first statement about the big question "When comes VGAP V5?". A big german newspage called Golem.de dedicates even an article about it on their page today. For those interested (and familiar with the german language) here's a link to it. Regarding hosting VGAP 4 games on EchoCluster.com we have not made final decisions yet. As it is clear VGAP3 hosting will definatly go on the way it does currently, hosting VGAP4 games takes more time, more work and lacks a good hosting software as well yet. Stay tuned and feel free to discuss the meaning of all that in our forum.   by Black Shadow

News for Monday April 5, 2004 · server outtime   Dear VGA Planets Fans, we had some server downtime yesterday night due to unknown reason, so some games were delayed till noon this day. However all affected games are hosted and back to normal schedule already.   by Black Shadow

News for Thursday April 1, 2004 · VGAP by mail   Be greeted Galactic Traveller, we are proud to announce a new play-by-mail concept. To support those with bad mail-slurping mailboxes or even restricted or non-existent internet access we will setup games using common snailmail. These games will be indicated by a snail right next to the game name on the games list. Hosts will run only if all turns are in. When playing in this game you will receive your RST burned on a CD-RW or DVD-RW depending on the size of your turn. After doing your turn burn it back to the CD/DVD and send it to the host. You can get a confirmation if your turn is good or stale by sending in some extra-postage for the letter back to you. Once all have sent in their turns host will run and the procedure starts at the beginning. Costs for that extra service will be around 10-100 EUR per year depending on the number of hosts in that time and if either CD or DVD is in use for sending out the turns. Currently our teammember StarHawk is working on an RST/TRN encoder/decoder for those who are not yet so lucky of owning a CD/DVD burner yet. This will make it possible to print out RSTs and TRNs on simple paper. This way you only need to enter your RST code into your machine and will have your latest RST ready and can print out the TRN for sending it back to host. We calculate postage being a bit higher this way but you have no costs for CDs/DVDs this way. Please note that you will need some more time for entering your RSTs if you decide on this option. We invite everybody to discuss this idea to enhance VGAP-gaming fun even more! The thread can be found here. addition 02.04.: April April ;-)   by Black Shadow