On hold
... for how long?

I think that everyone noticed by know that Quadrant Wars has been on hold for a while. I personally doubt that it will be coming back in a completely finished shape.
Although the game got really far (It's pretty playable), the (confirmed) problems with my internet provider (see November 2002) have really had it's impact.

There simply was no solution back at the time for this problem (Except for changing providers).

Despite the sad news, I'm happy I have learned so much from this game. Especially regarding multiplayer net code. One important thing what I learned back in 2002 is that, when depending on other people for servers, a linux server should be provided. Unfortunately this was (and is) impossible with DirectPlay.

DirectX 9 released!
20 December, 2002 - By Almar [Programmer]

Well, most of you probably knew it, but DirectX9 was released a while ago. Now this is good news for you and me =).
DirectX9 should work through the @Home hardware problem, as written below (news of 29 August).
So, last weekend I tried it with someone from Australia. And guess what? It worked!
He had like 400ms latency/ping, but the game went pretty ok, in my opinion.

The VB Christmas contest is also back again in two days, so I'm qiuckly going to add shield recharging and submit QW again (again).
If anyone can run a server (on a machine with DirectX9) please contact me, that would be awesome!

Regards,
Almar

Forums up
10 November, 2002 - By Almar [Programmer]

The forums are back up, I got myself a new domain persistentrealities.com which is a "collection" point of all my stuff I have online.

Unfortunatly the problem regarding the packets still exists. @Home has confirmed the problem, and found out that it's a problem in a Com21 controller "smaller versions" for not-too-large-cities).. I asked Microsoft how big the intial connection packets are... Answer: 5 bytes. And guess what? The defect in the Com controller drops everything under 6 bytes. @Home dropped the problem at the door of Com21, but Com21 doesn't seem to really care.

The only way that will make QW go online is moving to ADSL, but it's too expensive, and the speed is much and much slower :-/...