Administrative Affairs
 

So what's currently going on with Linux Cyberjoueurs at the moment? It's been pretty hushed so far, but pretty much everyone is well aware by now that Stefan is no longer with us. So that leaves me curious, where are things headed now?


This isn't a thread for discussing drama or anything like that, but I'm sure a good number of players would like to know more about the current situation going on with the actual company itself.

A lot of users could certainly use some support, and the game client itself could use more updates. So will be be seeing another lead programmer or two soon? I've heard rumors about two new people being hired to take on that task, but no official word on any of that yet.

It would be really nice to see the company actually grow and additional improvements made to the game, but without solid support that probably won't happen. So I figured that, on the behalf of the community, I'd go ahead and ask in this section.

I dont know too much about what is going on "inside", but I do know that Unix is working very hard to get things back on track.

Will Uncle Stefan ever return to us? :(

IDK what happened between Unix and Stefan the Great, but they need to get back together again. Stefan is Graal.

I agree also. A very big change in quite a few things and to be honest, i see a bright future for the game especially with the Administrative changes we've seen the past year. I do however, wish the PC platform had equal attention. It has it's own broad, unique fan base that iOS servers don't.

PC Servers are where most of the content for Graal is first created, and the community can only do so much without updates to the actual client and server programs themselves. Some things can be scripted to work within the game, but others require updates and it's not exactly great if the flow of updates has halted.

I brought this up mostly out of concern, and it would be really nice to hear from Unixmad on the subject if possible. Like I've heard of 'Xor' in some conversations who seems to be a higher-up that I've never even heard of, and same basically goes for Rob, our most recently announced PWA.

But staff lists on the forums and wiki probably need to be updated to reflect that, so that developers know who to get in contact with.

Not that it needs to be discussed much further, but Stefan had a bad habit of jumping from one project to the next without going back to make sure any of his old projects were still doing okay, which is a primary factor that has led to lots of people quitting over time.

Just consider some of the projects he was heavily involved in:

Graal Classic (Java)
Graal Classic (Client)
Graal 2001
Graal Kingdoms
Graal Zone
Graal 3D
Graal Games
Graal Mobile
Graal Facebook
Graal (Gameboy Color)

It was a new project every year or two, and a lot of them hardly received the attention they probably deserved. So new blood in Linux Cyberjoueurs might not be a bad thing if we can get help from some really experienced people who will actually interact well with the community and help out when there's major trouble on servers that are well-established.

Aye, and thankgod Graal 3D never got finished.. no idea what he was thinking with that one. But still..even if he did jump from one thing to another, its more than ive noticed anyone else in charge of this game doing.

Things look really stale at the moment, would be nice to hear whats planned or whats going on, even if my days on this game are nearly over.

The game can still run fine as long as players and developers are doing stuff, but there's other issues in play as well, like the fact that Graal for PC is not advertised nearly as well as it is for Mobile.

Increasing exposure to the public in order to get more users is tough, but we could probably discuss that sometime in the future in another thread.

Graal 3D = cool if it actually looked nice and worked properly

I'd love to see unixmad upgrading the Era iPhone iOS server.
We're at a playercount of roughly 3300 players right now and a lot of players are experiencing lag spikes.
Era has a lot of potentional, I don't think that should be thrown away.

The Graal3D Winter Preview server was definitely a step in the right direction. It was nicely styled and for the most part stable too. I think that the engine has probably been modified quite a bit since then though.

Was something wrong with the character models on my end?

PC Wont get the same attention iServers get mainly because the player staff won't give it such attention. Why should graal administration work so hard to do things that the players themselves won't support? Everyone sees mobile servers can take the same quality content, and get more players with it. No one wants to dev for pc anymore even. The sad thing is theres another solution, like improve the quality instead of just adding more of the same quality. And I'm not saying there ignoring PC completely. Because there not.

Xor has been around for a couple of year and does a good job imo. Reminds me of MagicalTux.

As far as the staff list(s) displayed, it appears there actually up-to-date which is good. I may be wrong.

Stefan was great but i do agree he jumped from one things to another, and i bet for Managers of the Servers, that was pretty annoying. It'd most likely be beneficial if he returned, but unix should keep doing what he's doing now if that was ever the case.

I agree to a certain extent. Everyone has mobile devices, it's just new the new age were in. A majority of the people that have a mobile device more than likely have a computer also. I think PC development should keep going, it just needs a drastic change, somewhere..

Graal should be HTML5 capable.

If Graal is still doing okay financially, (which it seems to be) I would really like to see some different programmers stepping in to continue driving the game forward.

People give this game crap all the time because it's mostly player-run, but that is always a double-edged sword because the game is only as good as we are at working on it. Every once in a while, we need support from programmers with access to the source code or the game's technology will remain where it is.

I've played this game for well over a decade by this point, and one of the things that has always brought me back is that it's essentially a 'Sandbox MMO' that quickly provides players with access to tools we can use to build online games quickly. But sometimes the updates we need have to come down from on high.

We could really use a hand or two at the wheel right now, just to make sure this game keeps going well in the foreseeable future.