I admire your optimism.

This has already been stated, but Ambrosia would never support a new Avara because the original Avara never made money. They will also not release the source code, not that it would help anyone. This has all been settled in the past, and is not likely to change.

Actually having a conference where people physically meet is extremely unlikely. It's hard enough to motivate old players to simply log on and play every once in a while, let alone travel somewhere. It would be wiser to devote your
time to trying to organize a strictly online gathering. Scan old message threads and pick up retired players' email addresses, then send them a message with details about the date and time, then see if there's any interest. You might be able to get some reasonable games going, then perhaps some of the players will stick around once they see there are still a few people playing.

AJ, if you are serious and have the capability and desire to do this, just do it. Make the game with your own vision, the way you would want it, then accept suggestions and tinker with it later. If you openly ask people for help, you will get bogged down with conflicting arguments of what it 'should be like'. That's what's always happened with these 'Avara 2' projects. People who aren't actually capable of doing anything sit around and argue about what it 'should be like', and then nothing happens. If there are other existing projects out there that have made any real progress, this doesn't apply to them. But I have seen this pattern happen before, and that's the way it usually ends. You've played Avara. You know what you liked about it. If you can, just make something functional that you would like, then ask for opinions later.

Is it just me, or is the Avara tracker dead tonight?

Path

------------------
Gondor has no pants. Gondor
needs no pants.

Well, about the AvaraCon, maybe you should check out the QuakeCon project. People get together, play Quake, etc. However, since Avara is almost dead, we would have it over the net (I was thinking, at least). There would be a date and time that a lot of people would play, and we would open a chat channel, and have a good time. Maybe this could happen once a month or so.

------------------
-C#

Okay! Just a quick peak at the traker today. It is 11:58, and look at that! The last game completed 11 minutes ago (Yay!). In the past nine days, there has been 54 servers and 102 players. Although some of those maes definetely did not get off that ground, it is till quite impressive for a "dead" game. Also that means that there was a servers running at a rate of six servers per day, or one every four hours. We ain't in the coffin yet!

------------------
-C#

Well, an online AvaraCon would be fun. Like Pat-H said, going through and emailing a bunch of old players might be good. It's true, the game isn't entirely dead... last night I played with two other people at like one in the morning. (Probably an anomaly, but what are the chances?)
Btw, could someone post the link for the Avara Tracker? I seem to've misplaced it, and I can never remember what it is...

------------------

"Jelly Belly should be sued for contributing to the delinquency and
intellectual torpitude of the nation." (insert a link for the billboard)
What do you think? I need to either find a picture or take one yet...
Haha. You could be the Ralph Nader of the Intellectual World...

(url="http://"http://tracker.avara.com:20001/")http://tracker.avara.com:20001/(/url)

AVARA:
Over 105 Served Worldwide!

(-:

------------------
I'm allergic to anime.
God bless,
Robert Marlin

(This message has been edited by Robert Marlin (edited 07-21-2004).)

(This message has been edited by Robert Marlin (edited 07-21-2004).)

How do you use that tracker?

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Gondor has no pants. Gondor
needs no pants.

Dude.

While I had a blast playing Avara 'back in the day', and frittered away a good portion of my time at college doing so....the game is dead. Finished. Done. Played out. Old. Ancient. I mean, really...not that many people played it to begin with, and it was a faliure for Ambrosia, money-wise They have no interest in touching it again. Period. That should be fairly obvious.

I was one of the nuts who actually bothered to pay for it, and I had fun with it. I was involved in the community--at one point I even had an @avara.com email address. I miss the community, in some respects; I've never been so involved in a game community since then, and I sometimes wonder what happened to everyone I used to 'hang out' with.

But really, guys. The game's dead. Let it rest in peace. Go play Halo, or something.

------------------

Quote

Originally posted by Gimli:
**
But really, guys. The game's dead. Let it rest in peace. Go play Halo, or something.

**

shrug People still play. It's a great game. And there is still a great sense of community. I don't see any reason to stop...

------------------

"Jelly Belly should be sued for contributing to the delinquency and
intellectual torpitude of the nation." (insert a link for the billboard)
What do you think? I need to either find a picture or take one yet...
Haha. You could be the Ralph Nader of the Intellectual World...

Just go to the tracker website and it will show you all of the current servers and players in detail.

I play Avara because it is the only FPS that I'm halfway decent at. And it's just plain cool.

------------------
I'm allergic to anime.
God bless,
Robert Marlin

I can't seem to log on to any servers on the tracker website.

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Gondor has no pants. Gondor
needs no pants.

You can't. It's just there to show you what servers and players are up, unless I'm mistaken (very probable). You have to log onto servers from the game.

------------------
I'm allergic to anime.
God bless,
Robert Marlin

My tracker in Avara seems to have stopped working though. I click for it to look for servers, and it tries to look up the tracker IP, and about a minute later it tells me that the name lookup failed.

Maybe I just need to download a new copy.

------------------
Gondor has no pants. Gondor
needs no pants.

Quote

Originally posted by Pat_H:
**My tracker in Avara seems to have stopped working though. I click for it to look for servers, and it tries to look up the tracker IP, and about a minute later it tells me that the name lookup failed.

Maybe I just need to download a new copy.

**

Nah, I tried on mine, and says that there is no servers. Tracker must have been down for a few minutes or something.

------------------
-Kyle "Vader" Blessing
-(url="http://"http://www.homestarrunner.com")Homestar Runner(/url)
-Don't love, or hate... Just join the (Players Club)

hey gimli,

though i don't quite understand how your bit about "actually bother(ing) to pay" is in harmony with the rest of your message, the attitude is just insulting. i don't have the patience to go into why, but avara is a superlative work of shareware. by that, i think those who paid the registration fee were far from being "nuts."

in all, your message indicates that you have less discrimination in games than your lengthy experience with avara would otherwise suggest.

------------------

Well, I've been thinking about my proposal to redo Avara for OS X over the last week or so, and checking back every now and then to see what people are thinking, and two things I realise, 1) we have all become engrossed in the visual eye-candy of games today, which may I remind you, tend to require the latest and greatest to play well, and 2) getting together a group of people to work on it would be tedious at best, so, what am I going to do about that? Well, simply, expect a refreshed Avara(2) for OS X. I'm not expecting Ambrosia to back it, or anyone else for that matter. All you can expect, is full screen gameplay, revamped graphics(hell, if I'm really feeling up to it, I'll throw in some of that current day eye-candy your all looking for - can anyone say pixel and vertex shaders with fullscene anti-aliasing), enhanced network play and whatever else I can think off. Don't expect it soon, but I'll keep you all posted, even if it is only every now and then. Maybe when I finish it, there'll still be a remnant waiting to give it a whirl.

------------------

Thak you, sir. We'll look forward to it. If you need any suggestions, feel free to email me at Robb6ie@earthlink.net.

------------------
I'm allergic to anime.
God bless,
Robert Marlin

My comment about 'actually bothering to pay' was a reference to the amazingly large amount of pirates that were plaguing the Avara community at the time we were playing. There's a reason that Ambrosia considers Avara a faliure. Piracy was pretty rampant. Not enough people paid to make it worthwhile to support the game. A shame, in my opinion.

I registered Avara the day it was released, and got a good couple of years of solid fun out of it.

------------------

Sounds good, AJ. My only requests for Avara is the support of more players... I'm quite happy with the graphics and the physics engine provides some of the best gameplay I've ever had. And even though it's rather ironic to be asking for it now, when one can hardly find one or two other people at a time to play with, it seems that networks can support far greater data transfer and it should be reasonable to allow more players on a server. That would be simply cool... although you probably need better graphics just to grab the attention of a new audience, and if anything is painfully lacking in the curent Avara it is an audience.

------------------

"Jelly Belly should be sued for contributing to the delinquency and
intellectual torpitude of the nation." (insert a link for the billboard)
What do you think? I need to either find a picture or take one yet...
Haha. You could be the Ralph Nader of the Intellectual World...

Quote

Originally posted by rebelswin_85:
**Sounds good, AJ. My only requests for Avara is the support of more players... I'm quite happy with the graphics and the physics engine provides some of the best gameplay I've ever had. And even though it's rather ironic to be asking for it now, when one can hardly find one or two other people at a time to play with, it seems that networks can support far greater data transfer and it should be reasonable to allow more players on a server. That would be simply cool... although you probably need better graphics just to grab the attention of a new audience, and if anything is painfully lacking in the curent Avara it is an audience.
**

More players, definitely. Anybody played BZFlag? The graphics aren't great (simple texture maps), but there are huge numbers playing. I'd like to see Avara get to that level. Maybe, just maybe I'll let windoze users in.

The magic recipe is playability. Nobody likes it when a games slows down in a fire fight, so my primary goal is to bring Avara up-to-date technologically and give users an awesome playing experience. I'm sure I'll find a good balance that keeps everybody happy. (Wouldn't that be nice.)

Do you think Ambrosia would have a problem with me using the name Avara, or would I have to give it a new name? Even though the game was a flop for them, it hasn't been opensourced, and Ambrosia still own the rights. Anybody know who to ask?

Regards
AJ

------------------

Quote

Originally posted by AJBrindley:
**Anybody know who to ask?
**

Andrew's the big man around town. Also, I'm not sure how much of the rights Juri Munkki retains... Undoubtedly one of the moderators has a better answer.

------------------

"Jelly Belly should be sued for contributing to the delinquency and
intellectual torpitude of the nation." (insert a link for the billboard)
What do you think? I need to either find a picture or take one yet...
Haha. You could be the Ralph Nader of the Intellectual World...

(This message has been edited by rebelswin_85 (edited 07-29-2004).)