Greetings Galaxy,
In about a month, I’ll reach my third anniversary as the leader of development and operations for SWG Restoration. When I first joined, I committed to addressing two key needs: first, creating the infrastructure and mechanisms for the project to operate sustainably, and second, building and training a team of developers and other volunteers to deliver the project's north star: a CU-like Star Wars Galaxies experience. With our upcoming Publish, I’m pleased to see we’re on track toward completing those objectives, and I’ll be moving on to a new chapter.
One often balancing act between my two goals was when to spend time building capacity versus building the game. Since I joined, we’ve changed over 1 million lines of code, which has changed a lot, including gigantic tasks such as removing an antiquated framework from the client called STLPort to modernize it and give us new capabilities (including building the 64-bit client), creating new tools to help designers build content and do it faster than ever, providing a robust set of tools for support to resolve player issues, refactoring the original Maya Editor to work in Maya 2023 so we can fully build and export new game assets of all types, creating continuous integration and deployment mechanisms to increase the quality and agility of our development, adding modernized frameworks to increase the stability of the engine and improve logging and observability, developing meaningful partnerships with our peer servers, and many more cool things we’re just starting to experiment with use cases for, like large language models and machine learning.
Most accomplishments like the ones mentioned above aren’t seen in the nearly 500 patch notes for the content we released over the last three years because they were all behind the scenes and enabled the work of our other developers, support team, and marketers. But in those patch notes, we got to share three major publishes and countless game updates that provided both restorative and new content developed with our community and their representatives in the Galactic Senate as a sounding board for building the best game possible. My proudest accomplishment has been the team we’ve been able to build that provides support, marketing, content, development, and more to keep this community running and having fun. But some of the numbers are impressive, too. As of today, since we started the server, 49,509 game accounts have created 66,400 characters on the Restoration Galaxy, playing a total of 21,073,817,093 seconds (or more than 600 years), completing 2,784,130 quests, and moving 91,581,240,723 credits through the economy (with less than 10% YoY inflation, by the way!).
For me, the most interesting part of live game development is the variables you can’t control (players) and seeing what they do. A joke article from the SWGEmu archives playfully calls this the “Moron Quotient,” noting it’s hard to develop for the scenarios where players will “dismount their swoop while trying to call a pet going into a Krayt spawn with orange hotpants AND trying to compose a new email at the same time.” But the unexpected from players is both a challenge and what keeps our work refreshing and fun.
Of course, we didn’t get here without plenty of bumps in the road and changes in direction. The project started as an emulation of the Combat Upgrade era of the game, with strict rules framing the way players could participate in the galaxy (remember no ITVs?); we struggled with a member base of particularly toxic players, had rampant abuse of multiple accounts, and dared to address these and other challenges in ways no SWG community ever had before. While I’ve made mistakes in my leadership over these years, I’m also proud of all the many bests I’ve been able to make possible with the amazing team we have as well.
Three years is a long time to lead a project, and with the restoration work I set out to see through nearing completion, I’ve been working with our leadership team to determine how to make a seamless transition that would allow me to step back and focus on other goals. Earlier this year, I asked Ornj, who has been with the project for almost two years, to join the leadership team and assume the role of Lead Developer in a learning capacity. I’m pleased to share that this change is now permanent, and while I’ll still be a part of the SWG Restoration team, I’ll be stepping back and moving into a predominantly advisory role focused on special development projects like Nar Shaddaa and some of our exciting community features, while Ornj is now officially at the reigns to manage all development, content, and the future direction of SWG Restoration. Exceed, our Community Manager, will continue to lead our community functions like marketing and support.
Ornj will soon share a Developer Diary with you, in which he’ll introduce himself and share more about the project's future direction, including some exciting roadmap updates. I’m very excited about the future of the project and the work our amazing team will do to deliver the best Star Wars Galaxies experience. As always, if this sounds like something you’d be interested in helping with, consider joining us.
May The Force Be With You,
Aconite
In about a month, I’ll reach my third anniversary as the leader of development and operations for SWG Restoration. When I first joined, I committed to addressing two key needs: first, creating the infrastructure and mechanisms for the project to operate sustainably, and second, building and training a team of developers and other volunteers to deliver the project's north star: a CU-like Star Wars Galaxies experience. With our upcoming Publish, I’m pleased to see we’re on track toward completing those objectives, and I’ll be moving on to a new chapter.
One often balancing act between my two goals was when to spend time building capacity versus building the game. Since I joined, we’ve changed over 1 million lines of code, which has changed a lot, including gigantic tasks such as removing an antiquated framework from the client called STLPort to modernize it and give us new capabilities (including building the 64-bit client), creating new tools to help designers build content and do it faster than ever, providing a robust set of tools for support to resolve player issues, refactoring the original Maya Editor to work in Maya 2023 so we can fully build and export new game assets of all types, creating continuous integration and deployment mechanisms to increase the quality and agility of our development, adding modernized frameworks to increase the stability of the engine and improve logging and observability, developing meaningful partnerships with our peer servers, and many more cool things we’re just starting to experiment with use cases for, like large language models and machine learning.
Most accomplishments like the ones mentioned above aren’t seen in the nearly 500 patch notes for the content we released over the last three years because they were all behind the scenes and enabled the work of our other developers, support team, and marketers. But in those patch notes, we got to share three major publishes and countless game updates that provided both restorative and new content developed with our community and their representatives in the Galactic Senate as a sounding board for building the best game possible. My proudest accomplishment has been the team we’ve been able to build that provides support, marketing, content, development, and more to keep this community running and having fun. But some of the numbers are impressive, too. As of today, since we started the server, 49,509 game accounts have created 66,400 characters on the Restoration Galaxy, playing a total of 21,073,817,093 seconds (or more than 600 years), completing 2,784,130 quests, and moving 91,581,240,723 credits through the economy (with less than 10% YoY inflation, by the way!).
For me, the most interesting part of live game development is the variables you can’t control (players) and seeing what they do. A joke article from the SWGEmu archives playfully calls this the “Moron Quotient,” noting it’s hard to develop for the scenarios where players will “dismount their swoop while trying to call a pet going into a Krayt spawn with orange hotpants AND trying to compose a new email at the same time.” But the unexpected from players is both a challenge and what keeps our work refreshing and fun.
Of course, we didn’t get here without plenty of bumps in the road and changes in direction. The project started as an emulation of the Combat Upgrade era of the game, with strict rules framing the way players could participate in the galaxy (remember no ITVs?); we struggled with a member base of particularly toxic players, had rampant abuse of multiple accounts, and dared to address these and other challenges in ways no SWG community ever had before. While I’ve made mistakes in my leadership over these years, I’m also proud of all the many bests I’ve been able to make possible with the amazing team we have as well.
Three years is a long time to lead a project, and with the restoration work I set out to see through nearing completion, I’ve been working with our leadership team to determine how to make a seamless transition that would allow me to step back and focus on other goals. Earlier this year, I asked Ornj, who has been with the project for almost two years, to join the leadership team and assume the role of Lead Developer in a learning capacity. I’m pleased to share that this change is now permanent, and while I’ll still be a part of the SWG Restoration team, I’ll be stepping back and moving into a predominantly advisory role focused on special development projects like Nar Shaddaa and some of our exciting community features, while Ornj is now officially at the reigns to manage all development, content, and the future direction of SWG Restoration. Exceed, our Community Manager, will continue to lead our community functions like marketing and support.
Ornj will soon share a Developer Diary with you, in which he’ll introduce himself and share more about the project's future direction, including some exciting roadmap updates. I’m very excited about the future of the project and the work our amazing team will do to deliver the best Star Wars Galaxies experience. As always, if this sounds like something you’d be interested in helping with, consider joining us.
May The Force Be With You,
Aconite
