If you’re a Star Wars Galaxies rogue server fan, especially of the pre-NGE variety, there’s a lot of info coming your way from the OG SWGEmu developer team, as first kicked off in a dev series last December.
First, the SWGEmu devs have announced that the SWGEmu project has achieved 1.0 – namely, that the original goal of creating an “open-source code repository for vanilla-server daemon software that interacts with the SWG pre-CU 14.1 client,” which is to say, the goal first laid out nearly decades ago, long before SOE’s SWG was even sunsetted.
Second, the devs explain that Finalizer – the server that replaced Basilisk but is not Suncrusher – was meant to be a testbed for post 14.1 additions, but it also taught the devs some things that probably have old SOE devs nodding along right now. Among those lessons is that the game needs a system for fresh content at the 90-day mark to avoid losing the vast majority of the playerbase.
If you’ve been following SWGEmu for a long time, that sentence probably gave you whiplash, as for many long years, SWGEmu has staunchly refused to deviate from its OG mission to recreate vanilla and vanilla only, but now that it’s declared a 1.0 state, the team is willing to “veer sharply” from that original plan – and it involves the closure of the current version of the default SWGEmu.
According to the team, the SWGEmu gaming project will be archived, the forums will be disabled and preserved, the source code will stay up for public use, the devs will keep working on stability and Jump to Lightspeed, and eventually, the project will downsize and stop taking donations.
The remaining devs will move on the the new NFS team to move forward with what sounds like a new custom server, financed separately. Finalizer and the associated test servers will continue online until around a year after the launch of the new NFS and other community servers, at which point they’re sunsetting – though it sounds like JTL will make it to Finalizer soon and long before that happens.
Perhaps most intriguingly, LordKator, one of the key developers for the SWGEmu over the last few years, says that in lieu of focusing his efforts on the NFS project, he will be launching a platform – SWGRealms – that makes it easy for server operators to get a new instance up and running, building on the existing SWGEmu infrastructure but extending it to other SWGEmu servers too, with modern security. The NFS server and CUEmu server teams will apparently be the first such servers, with more to come.
