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Oolite - End of an era

It's with some sadness that Giles Williams has announced in his blog at http://oolite.livejournal.com that he's burned out on developing Oolite. He intends to finish some OpenGL enhancements before turning over the project to a new maintainer. Developer burn out on a project does happen, and Giles has been working on this for over two years now - and sometimes, you just have to move on and start on a new project - or even just do some real life things instead.

What does this mean for Oolite?

The game has come on far enough now that there's a large community of OXP writers who are continuously expanding the game. This bit of foresight - to make the game easily expandable - will mean Oolite will continue to grow even if there are few new features added to the code base. The game is already a highly competent enhancement on classic Elite. Oolite's future is assured, even if the original developer decides to do something new. As Giles hands over the baton on Oolite development to someone new, he is also going to make a few other changes - he plans to move the code base to a new license - the GNU General Public License, which amongst other things, will allow Linux distributions to include the game as part of their official repositories.

You can get the latest version of Oolite from http://oolite.aegidian.org . Find expansion packs at Oosat - http://oosat.alioth.net .

Winston 13:27, 16 October 2006 (UTC)

Opening the Frontier WikiNews

In the tradition of any new news source starting out by mostly reporting on itself, the Frontier WikiNews will now do this very thing.

The Frontier WikiNews comes from the ashes of the former Frontier News, which used to be at http://frontiernews.alioth.net. The old Frontier News is now closed for good - you can thank spammers for this, who were spamming the site so hard it was seriously impacting the performance of the entire web server. Thatware, the software that ran the Frontier News, just wasn't set up for the day and age of rampant spamming.

The good news about the new format is that if you have news to shout about, you can easily post it yourself rather than waiting for an editor to actually read and post your submission. Your submissions may of course be subsequently edited for grammar and consistency, but at least you can get your news out now rather than having to wait for a lazy sysop to read your submission and post it. To discuss news articles on this page, please use the Discussion tab (the Talk page) right here. Remember to sign all news articles and discussion by typing four tilde (~) signs after your submission or comment.

Winston 11:09, 4 October 2006 (UTC)