@ Milriko: About voice chat: The most important reason for not adding voice chat is that my implementation would most likely suck because I have no experience in this. It would be bad and cause lags (it's a very critical topic because of the network traffic and prioritization etc) and it would totally ruin the entire game. Believe me: You don't want to see my voice chat implementation in the game. I said that many times already.
And after reading all your posts I want to try to make you understand my position:
Technical stuff:
CS2D is over 10 years old, the reprogrammed version (max) is about 7 years old. This is a lot of time for a game. It uses BlitzMax as programming language and engine which is a really bad thing because BlitzMax is ugly, old and limited. This means that I don't see much future (from a technical point of view) for CS2D. Its core is simply too outdated. The code of CS2D is still maintainable but it's hell compared to my current coding standards.
Don't get me wrong: It's a good game, it works fine and I think it's fun but technically it's definitely not future-proof.
Community stuff:
The community has two faces:
The good one:
It's (in my opinion) incredible that the game still has so many players and so many contributors. It's insane and I'm very grateful for that. You people are awesome and I highly appreciate your support. I'm probably very bad at showing it but it's true.
The very bad one:
There are so many assholes out there causing serious trouble. Kids crashing servers, using cheats and hacks, even DDoSing my V-Server and simply destroying everything. All that for no proper reason. Because they are bored, because they think it's cool or because they got banned. This is extremely demotivating especially because there is no efficient way to stop this crap. Random kids destroying work of a decade for no reason. Awesome!
Personal stuff:
Most of the time of CS2D's lifecycle I was a student (school and later university). I had so much more time than I have now. This means I have to evaluate very carefully how I want to invest my time. A fact is that I simply can't work as much on CS2D as I did before. Moreover I want to try new things. It's really boring/annoying to work on the same thing all the time. I want to do new stuff. I want to concentrate on Stranded III and Unity. That's why I have even less time for CS2D.
Conclusion?
CS2D is old and there is a shitload of asshole kids doing bad stuff (totally unbearable actually). I don't have much time to work on my games and I would like to concentrate on new stuff. CS2D is a great game nevertheless and I invested an incredible amount of time. Also there is still an awesome community. So I concentrate on Stranded III but at least I try to still update CS2D from time to time because the game itself and the community deserves it.
So please don't expect big updates for CS2D. I won't make them. Even if this means that CS2D dies. That's okay for me because I prefer working on new stuff instead of working on old stuff just to keep it alive.
And what about you? You have as much support as I can give you. CS2D is online and running. Everyone who wants to play it can play it. For free, 24/7. It's awesome. Either do it or don't do it. It's up to you.