In order to ensure the smooth running of the game with updates that won't interfere with games and game data.

Every weekday, the games will be closed between 11:00am and 11:30am EDT.

Thank you.

Lehmund & Vadis

There we have it 1.4 is online and this is the R-1, so some bug have been fixed from the Release Candidate. I will adjust the version as we go to make it smooth and keep optimizing it and remove all the bug that are not map related (map getting redone on 1.5)

Vadis

---

Hey all, the new version is here!

We're still kicking at some bugs as we go and making some other "forgotten" mods as we go. We will often update the game.

IMPORTANT: In order for the version to work properly, you will NEED to completely clear your browser cache and press F5. For some, a few times will be needed, like those of us with relatively crappy computers that don't listen to instructions properly... lol. This will allow for the new images and scripts to load and coordinate with the software properly. Otherwise, you'll receive odd problems and won't be able to play effectively.

Spread the word!

Feel free to write bug reports in the forum to help us find the little bugs that are remaining. Just make sure that if you do so, your machine works well off the bat.

Cheers!
Lehmund

It has been decided between me and Vadis that it would be best to launch the new version on Monday August 9th. Friday the 6th is an odd day to do this after all with me being out of town and both of us being away for the weekend (it is summer after all!). So we figure it is best we launch it on Monday instead.

All the preparations are made or are being made for it prior to the weekend and we'll do the switch from the test to the live server on Monday.

Expect perhaps seeing some downtime on Monday and of course, as planned, all ranked games will end with a win (we'll boost the 1st place person or corp to a win) and all other games will simply disappear.

This will be a great start to the new version with all admins/devs on board and present to deal with small issues that may arise on launch.

We hope to see you there on Monday, probably come the evening, when we let you all know that ITS ON!!!!

Cheers!
Lehmund

So you may have noticed the event did not start.
The reason is rather simple I have no completely finished the combat.

Since I want to test everything in a decent environment for everyone the test event game will wait until tomorrow 8pm

I'm really sorry about that all we are missing is the combat resolution so as soon as it is online I'll prep the test server for you guys and create the game and post the link.
I decided I would still post the bullet point for 1.4

- DataBase optimization
- php optimization
- forum bypass (in case the forum is down or in maintenance)
- option to turn the flash off, when turning the music off flash player unload
- website rework for better visibility
- trade fix
- tutorial fix
- add a variable in engine for min cargo trade amount to gain xp
- target system
- edit and fix on mines
- smaller building img for better display
- new central display
- minimap centered
- display the credit with a M to avoid overflow
- moving resources from base to base or base to npc
- chat log for game and site
- Dscanner works on login and always visible with new design
- Display of ratio bonus fixed on load
- new score system on victory

- and the infamous and still not finished new combat system only missing one part so it should be ready soon.

what will enter 1.4 once the testing has started
- team split resources
- declaring a home base

Here is my ruling about how the Huge Mistakes game ended.

I have confirmed that the there has been a mulling strategy used to win.
Now the there will be no penalty for that action for a simple reason that I want to make extremely clear.

Every single person that has [B]ranted/accused/bashed/etc...[/B] (we're talking personal attacks on other players or the admins, playful banter is fine in public and fun) publicly about this issue has not followed our rules on the chat and the forum. All of the above [B]should only go to the admins in private and never in the public. [/B]. There was also some frustrating issues in the game mechanics that provoked players to act the way they did, and that's our fault (the system is getting fixed in the next version to prevent such occurrences from happening again).

We will not tolerate people acting like that in our community. When you have an issue with a player you come to the admin, if you have an issue with the game, you can post publicly, but use respectful language, children are often reading what you write and there is always a good way to write things up nice and clear. Nobody likes a hothead.

We are building a gaming community around a game that we develop with the community.

As we are finishing up the next update, Version 1.4 of Tradewars Rising, we saw that several things needed to happen to make the transition.

- When the update applies, we'll need to close all ongoing games at that time.

- It contains a completely different and more advanced combat system (not easy to beat the current one) and it needs testing.

See the details on the features [URL="http://www.sylien.com/forum/showthread.php?2768-updates-Version-1.4-features-list"]HERE[/URL].

- Much of the back-end is different in order to optimize the game, speed it up, eliminate the chances of odd out of sync problems appearing (like immortal mines, ships disappearing and other weird issues that happened on occasion etc...)

- The addon system won't be compatible with the new back-end code in such a way that only we will be able to use it at all (with special tweaking on our part). So we'll just shut it down after the update applies and reopen it up when we have time to revamp it and bring it up to where we want it to be.

Its such a great change and I'm sure everyone will enjoy it very much.

In order to transition smoothly, we'll do two things:
1. We'll no longer bang ranked games to ensure that most, if not all ranked games have time to end by the time the update applies.

2. We'll test the new version on the test server thoroughly and invite a bunch of players to test it all with us as on the test server as we make edits, correct issues and all that. We've actually decided to make it our next Event game! So everyone who wishes to play the new version with the new combat, you'll be welcome.

[B][COLOR="Red"]SPECIAL REWARD[/COLOR][/B]
The V1.4 TEST EVENT will be open to all players who wish to try it out and more importantly, test it out and help us debug it. Therefore it will be an unranked game where Vadis has full control over whether the game changes, crashes, bugs out, restarts etc... as needed. The objective here is for you to try out the new systems, find buggies, report them and generally help us make you the best version of TWR!!!

To reward you for this game, since an actual game winner, traditionally speaking, probably won't be found in all the chaos of testing, we'll look at all players involved that participated in the debugging and reporting process, and we'll pick the one player we think helped the most.

[B]We'll give that player a special Badge for their profile that noone else will be able to acquire.[/B] This Event is all about having fun bashing each other's face in using the new combat and items without fear of repercussion in your profile and Score, debugging some and generally have a great time as you continue playing your "serious" ranked games to termination.

Hope that sounds cool enough.

When the version comes online we'll restart the process of creating Ranked games as usual but using the new code on the live server.

[B][COLOR="Red"]The EVENT will start on July 15th, 8pm.[/COLOR][/B] The link will be provided on or slightly before that date and time.

We'll let you know in an obvious way when we get closer to the start date and we hope many of you will wish to participate in this one.

Cheers!
Lehmund & Vadis

This Saturday, June 26th, sometime in the evening, Vadis will perform a major upgrade to the forum, ergo it will become unavailable for a duration of up to 3 days to you guys.

This means things like Private Messaging and posting in the forum in general should be impossible for a duration ranging from a few hours, up to 3 days (we are certain it will be fully back up Tuesday the 29th, in the evening, for sure).

On top of a much needed security upgrade, the forum will also look somewhat different and should have a couple new interesting features.

It is possible that some unused sections will be removed, but the TWR section will probably remain untouched and all your PMs, posts and threads will be intact through the process.

Hope you enjoy it!

P.S.: Vadis tells me that the new combat system we're working on (and fixes overall) will be awesome and give a total new life to the game. I can assure you that you won't see TWR in the same way once we launch the game's new version (V1.4) in perhaps a month or so...

Cheers!
Lehmund & Vadis

I'm back and I've started work on what will be V1.4

I know you are all waiting for game fixes and this version will bring back-end stability, ergo no more bug appearing after some time.

This update might only be a back-end work but this is not clear yet. The new method that will be introduce into the code of the game will allow for less lag and no bug appearing/relic and issue created in the database.

This approach will take sometime and I am currently unable to give a time line on when the version will be out but it should fix a lot of things. It will also fix account issue on its own.

During that process I will be updating the server OS so once I have a 1.4 running on teh test server I will be announcing a downtime until then nothing will change for you but it will be worth the wait.

Our purpose is to increase how much fun players are having in the game. A big way to do this is to increase the amount of people playing, so what weve done lately is to create the Tradewars® Rising Facebook application. Using this tool, you can easily invite a lot more people to the games you are playing, hence more fun!

Since this is a new application, it may still have a few odd bugs in it, so we're asking any able player out there to check for odd behavior and report them to us by e-mail. For now, we're considering it a BETA.

First thing to do is [URL="http://apps.facebook.com/tradewarsrising"]INSTALL the APPLICATION[/URL]. It takes only a minute.

Then, send us an e-mail at [EMAIL="support@sylien.com"]support@sylien.com[/EMAIL] after you have done the following:

* Played a the game a while within Facebook
* Published a promotion or a player kill to your Friends walls
* Invited some Friends to install the application

Giving us feedback on all three points will help us improve on the application. In return for the feedback, well give you [B][COLOR="Red"]30 days Premium time[/COLOR][/B] (or extension).

The more players we have in games, the more fun they will be! So lets all use this new tool!

Next step for us will be to fix a few bugs that our wonderful community discovered over the last while, so stay tuned for bug and feature fix updates.

Cheers!

Press Release – Sylien Games to offer Tradewars Rising games on BattleClinic

BattleClinic and Sylien Games have teamed together to offer gamers the opportunity to play Tradewars® Rising, a remake of the original Tradewars2002 game. The Tradewars® Rising minisite on BattleClinic allows players to join in to Tradewars Rising games specifically tailored for BattleClinic visitors as well as a leaderboard and a starship killboard, as well as view forum posts, announcements, and news.

As the creators of the browser-based space strategy game Tradewars® Rising ([url]www.tradewarsrising.com[/url]), and owners of the online strategy board game community at [url]www.igGameCenter.com[/url], the people at Sylien truly understand the dynamics of a thriving gamer community, and what makes them tick. The people at BattleClinic have also proved themselves a great asset and gatherers in the sci-fi strategy massively multiplayer online game (MMOG) realm through their collaboration with CCP (for the EVE-Online game) and the makers of great titles such as Star Trek Online, City of Heroes, Jumpgate Evolution and more. Together, they have shown how one can build a great fan site.

But that is just the start of the relationship. There are plans to allow fans on BattleClinic to create videos, player guides, tools and further resources that would be useful and exciting to any Tradewars® Rising player as the fan-base grows.

“I think BattleClinic is the best example of a web site that truly caters to the modern player. They think in communities and are trying to get the players involved in the creative process of the games they carry as much as possible, which is a mentality Sylien Games shares and has been using since its birth,” says Sylvain Rochon, CEO of Sylien Games. “Working together, we can create a tremendous example on BattleClinic of what ANY fan can do on their own site using our affiliate tools to have their own Tradewars® Rising games on their web sites, and perhaps even make a bit of money.“

Players wishing to have fun with Tradewars® Rising can play for free forever, however after an initial 45 day trial membership, players are invited to upgrade their membership in order to retain all perks cumulated so far through gameplay and to gain further benefits.

“We’re truly excited to partner with Sylien Games and give our members another reason to enjoy BattleClinic. It spotlights how game developers and publishers can leverage the reach and marketing power of top-tier fansites. It’s a new way of marketing that has clear advantages. We couldn’t think of a better partner that Sylien Games; look for even more collaboration in the future!”

[B]About Sylien Games[/B]
Sylien is an independent developer and publisher of "next-generation" casual and strategy hobby games.

The flagship game, under exclusive license, is a reintroduction of the 25 year old mega-brand "Trade Wars", one of the world's first widely played MMOs (Massively Multiplayer Game), hugely popular and rated as one of the top 10 PC influential games of all times by PC World.

The Ten Greatest PC Games Ever

Sylien Game's casual games channel igGameCenter.com also offers 100 popular and exclusive titles, with a rich community platform, offering tremendous social multiplayer experiences.

Sylien Games provides a fun & unique game-driven online social experiences to a fast growing community of thousands of players, played & supported on popular web browsers and across emerging platforms.


[B]About BattleClinic[/B]
Operating continuously since 2001, BattleClinic ([url]www.battleclinic.com[/url]) is an award-winning independent game support site. We work with game developers and publishers to build tools and guides and provide these free to players. We do this without membership fees or unrelated banner advertisements. We encourage an active community that's friendly to veterans and new players alike, supports open source, and showcases great sci-fi games.

In addition to our support tools, we operate BattleClinic Deep Space Supply, a publisher-authorized reseller for game time codes and virtual items with millions of dollars in annual sales.


For more information or interviews, please contact:
Sylvain Rochon
CEO of Sylien Games
[url]www.sylien.com[/url]
[email]info@sylien.com[/email]
+1 613 302-2084

Chris Condon
President, BattleClinic
[url]www.battleclinic.com[/url]
[email]general@battleclinic.com[/email]
+1 (888) 834-7359

As advertised, we were able to introduce the two elements we wanted to put into the 12 hour downtime we just ended. This is the start of V1.3:

- Regular accounts have been modified in order to introduce them as a free very casual account type that comes at the end of Trial time. Regular account members cannot buy the fancier ships and they have less performance while in combat (by 10%). However, if you are a casual player and only have time to play only one TWR game at a time, yet wish to have all the accumulated perks of Premium members for that game, you can unlock those rights for a low cost of $1.95USD (about $1 per month). This is also great for competitive players that don't have alot of time.

- The first part of the Design Tool has been put online today, which allows players to create Addons to TWR, like new Ships, new planets, new buildings, resources, or modify current game elements. Players can then use their Addons when they Create a new game and play with their new content. This is a HUGE part of our engine design and it will expand to give further options as we go ahead as well, up to the point where players will be able to essentially design and create their own games.

Vadis, myself and others worked VERY hard this past week to make this happen today, but unfortunately the downtime was short a few hours (yeah, imagine that). Don't worry, everything is functional. There are just a couple things we need to finish up from now 'till next Monday:

1. The buff that manages Regular account's diminished effect on combat and the buff "blinking" error fix both need to be completed.
2. Some of the help descriptions in the addon stuff have not yet been put in (there is LOTS of stuff that needs to be described and we just couldn't finish up in time, in particular when explaining what the effect Libraries do with their Values).

I'll check off these elements here as we finish them up.

We are very happy to announce that Sylien Games has created an excellent promotion for BBGsite.com, offering interested individuals visiting this large browser-based gaming site the opportunity to gain a Free Tradewars Rising 90 day Premium membership Trial (15$ USD value).

[URL="http://contest.bbgsite.com/giveaway/tradewarsrising/"]Giveaway[/URL]

20 unique keys are being distributed to BBGsite.com members as we speak, as part of their promotion.

Let me remind you also that Tradewars Rising also has its own special [URL="http://games.bbgsite.com/games/tradewarsrising/"]minisite[/URL] within BBGsite.com as well, which is regularly visited and for which you can vote to climb it up in ranking.

This is a great community and we hope to join others like it in the future to spread the word!

Cheers!

Here is a list of features that have changed or improved in this update. Next update (V1.2c) will be coming up by mid-way September or so.

- Fixed transwarp description in StarDock Mall

- Reduced the Tholian Sentinel defense ratio to 2.0 in order to make the ship non-abusive yet still fun

- Modified some texts and formatting in the tutorial

- Removed Trade between players temporarily while we fix a bad exploit within

- Federation StarShips have been reduced in power, exp and alignment gains adjusted to fit and increased amount of Credits if players do kill one (though not very lucrative kill, really)

- Made some minor text adjustments here and there

- Automated some of the Event mechanisms to make things go smoother

- Games ended you have played are now recorded in your profile

- CEOs can now quit their own corporation: CEO status is given to a random associate if this happens. If CEO quits and no associate is available, the Corp is disbanded.

- Social Groups from forums can now be used for Teams and set to Private so only your team members.

There will be a downtime the 1st of September from 19H00 to 20H00 EST.

We'll start the Total Annihilation game right when we come back from the downtime at 8pm (20H00 EST)

The owners of BBGSite not long ago contacted us and asked us if we would be willing to help them build a mini Tradewars Rising site for their Browser-Based Games site (bbgsite.com). BBGsite.com is a site dedicated to the rating, reviewing and showing off of browser-based games. It is the new sister site of massive mmoginfo.com which has over 1.6 million registered visitors.

Of course we accepted.

Part of the deal is that we can update the site, post news items and modify it at will, pretty much. We also plan to do various promotional activities with them in the short term and later.

Players can vote for TWR [URL="http://games.bbgsite.com/games/tradewarsrising/"][SIZE="4"]HERE[/SIZE][/URL].

This is a start of a wonderful relationship, and hopefully this will also attract lots more players to us as well as possibly the attention of other game sites who are looking for more strong brands to connect to their sites.

With more players coming in, and us starting to actively advertise through banner ads and more, we hope that the player experience will increase. We are also at work with a new update V1.2b which should be released in a couple of weeks or so (no specific dates revealed).

Cheers!

This small update follows the latest GUI update we put in not long ago. Here is a list of features and fixes that are included:
- AvgScore and game end elements were fixed
- Tournament Module is put in place allowing Admins to create better major Events
- Station Billboards have been put in place, allowing players to write announcements in-game for sector visitors.
- NPCs now move correctly, fix.
- Optional invites to friends added allowing players to invite friends when viewing game info or Joining a new game.
- Added Tholian Sentinel ship
- Added a good playable TWR tutorial to the site
- Adjusted some entry-level web site texts
- Reduced weapon cooldown time to 2 seconds
- Modified all 4 winning conditions for more balanced and exciting play
- New Level System added, creating a ladder-style progression to player’s game experience.
- Miscellaneous minor fixes

There should be only one other V1.2 update (called V1.2a) upcoming before we set out to work on V1.3. You can follow our progress more closely by visiting the TWR site regularly.

There will be a downtime tomorrow august 24th from 10H00 to 14H00 EST.
During this update the game site and the forum will be worked on so you may have reaching the forum trough the redirection on the game site but it would be normal

There will be a downtime on the 18th of august from 20H00 to 24H00 EST, during that time the game site will be fully down and the server will give an error if you try to go on the site.

The forum will still be up.

There was some service done on the server so there will be a downtime tonight from 23:00 to midnight. During that time I'll reset a few things that should help with the lag issue.

We've decided to put in place the new UI and web site functionality now instead of waiting for the full V1.2 release (hence why the version says 1.2 already). We'll let you know when the next downtime is for the rest of the upgrade coming in (which will include most game-related fixed and additions).

Since we're displaying on browser, the images you see are on your computer, specifically in your cache. So the first time you see the new UI, you'll probably see everything crooked or misplaced.

This is because your browser is trying to mishmash the old images and UI with the new one. Not good but it can be easily fixed for you by clearing your cache of the old images so the new ones can load correctly and stop the madness:

Simply click on Ctrl-Shift-Del and check on the the "Cache" item on the menu that should pop up (this will work for Firefox and Internet Explorer. Not sure about Chrome.

After you did this, press F5 to refresh your browser page. Images should reload with the fresh ones correctly. If its still not completely ok, do it again.

If you're using anything else than IE 7+ or Firefox 2+ or Chrome 2+, the display may never be perfect for you as only those browsers are tested on and 100% compatible with the game and web site.

Enjoy the new images and graphics. We'll be modifying some more images as we go towards the full release of the V1.2 update.

There will be a downtime on the entire system the 5th august to apply some update on the game, during that time TWR website and game will be down for maintenance from noon to 16H.

It will be highly recommended to clear your cache after the update. Or at least try a few refresh.

I've just finished the new website and I invite you to test it [URL="http://test.tradewarsrising.com/"]here[/URL].
[URL="http://test.tradewarsrising.com"]test.tradewarsrising.com[/URL] is brand new and everything need to be tested you can do everything but play the game.

Let me know everything you find. If you do not like the skin unless you can do a better one do not comment on it since its the new skin :) speaking of it, in the menu as soon as I get the red version I'll post it and it will be displayed :cool:

Here is a quick list of what we are currently putting into the V1.2 game version at the moment. This version is being put together on the test server so that you all don't suffer from too many changes as you play current games. This list is unlikely to change but we will inform you on a final list after the launch of the version.

- New improved game and web site graphics
- New web site functionalities, making it easier to Join, Delete, get info on your games and share links
- Station billboards allowing players to leave messages in sectors at a Credit cost (Premium members only)
- Ability to set locations for quick travel from the Asset list and the Large Map
- More sounds will be added
- Minor score and average score fixes and modifications
- Make opponent ship appear properly in front of yours in space field
- Optional e-mail friend invite tools for Info and Join pages
- Working buttons to close large menus
- Tournament module allowing admins to set Events automatically. This will also allow Regular players in some instances to be able to play Event games as a bonus to normal TWR games on the site (i.e. more than 1 game at a time).
- Give CEOs the ability to delete corp.
- Add turn penalty on planetary transwarp based on the ships player has on board (i.e. if you have 10 ICs landed, its going to cost you lots of extra Turns to move the planet)
- Game data on finished games will be kept and made available on site and possibly in your own profile if you were a creator or participant
- Addition of the Tholian Sentinel and Merchant Freighter as player ships
- New image for the Outpost combat computer
- Possible ship and station image retouching
- New Item and Buff icons for space and console views to make them much clearer and also represented while doing a mouse-over

Remember that we reserve the right to modify any one of those points as we develop, but this is what we want to do. ETA may be revealed later but for the time being we can only say that it won't be very long.

So like you know Lehmund and I were somewhat in vacation and now we are somewhat back here is the list of what we did yesterday and today so far, hope you will enjoy it. :p (These are all things that work on all current games so it applies everywhere)

- Players now suffer less alignment loss while stealing

- Turns are properly deducted when trading at stations (1 turn per trade)

- 2 Turns are deducted per steal attempt

- Augmented Turns per Day for the current BigClassic game to 3k to match turn cost increase

- the Show Cluster field and button in the big Map now works properly

- Planetary Shield buildings now are built BEFORE the Transwarp Module on all planets

- Corrected the description of the Photon Torpedo and changed its active time from 10 to 20 seconds

- Commander Bonus mentions (something that was never reimplemented in this version) in the manual were removed as it doesn't exist anymore.

- Jinbadi ship icons now appear correctly in the player list

- Fixed damage amounts noted in chat and log posts to fit real damage (which was already correct)

- Outpost ratios have been corrected and adjusted to be 1.2 ratio on attack and defense, and they shoot 2k fighters per wave.

- Chat and log posts for Outposts have been fixed and outpost works correctly in all situations

- Ship Transwarp device changed so that they consume 15 Fuel Ore per warp (from 20) but they cannot go through wormholes anymore (this was a necessary decision, where otherwise the item could not work anymore in bigger maps, due to memory issues).

- Transwarp also switched its restriction on destination from Mines to Planets and Outposts (StarDock and Terran sector are still fine destinations), whether they are yours or an enemy's.

- Trade/Pirate buffs now stack correctly with the Psyprobe upgrade.

- Hitting mines now show logs and chat properly for attacker and defender (mines won't show on the navmap mouse-over still until a next upcoming version, so be careful)

- Corrected the game Manual to match all modifications, including removing the Commander

In a word: JOIN UP !!!

This game has 100 x100 sectors, 3500 Turns to start and 2500 turns per day, with a 10 000 Turn bank.

All players are invited, regular and Premium members alike, AND there's a cap of 300 players AND up to 10 members per corporation !!! Let's fill her up and have a blast.

We'll announce the winners and perhaps even some cool moments as the game progresses.

In the meantime we're already thinking of setting up a date for the next EVENT:

Mega Game III: ThugVadis revealed

Keep tuned in.

We've started the promotion of a new very large game to all players. The game is currently available to join (see the top of the Play page) and can currently carry up to 300 players. Contrary to most large games, we decided to make this one open to all players of all account types, Premium or not, in an effort to have as many as possible. If the 300 cap is reached by game start or a bit after, we'll even increase that max to ensure the game is PACKED!

The universe is 10 000 Sectors and you'll have 3500 Turns to start on game start, 2500 Turns per day, and 10 000 Turn bank. The Classic winning condition applies and I set Team size to 10 allowing large organizations in there.

Though people can Join the game right now, Turns will be allocated only at game start and ColoTickets will be reset to 1500 then as well.

[B][COLOR="Blue"][U]Game Start: July 15th, 8pm EST.[/U][/COLOR][/B]

[size=+3][center][URL="http://www.tradewarsrising.com/?page=join&game_id=8"]JOIN NOW[/URL][/center][/size]

We hope to have Loads and loads of players in there.

In this current version of TWR, we added the last features last weekend and as of today, Vadis was able to resolve all of the major buggy issues. Then we were hit either by a hack or by a very unlikely coincidence that made player resources go negative. (ugh!).

I took it as a sign to move the dev offline now and not touch the current version unless there is something major online going on, like a big exploit and whatnot. Players seemed to clamor all together for us to reset things and start over and since we won,t be devving on 1.1 from now on in a live fashion (if we do need to tweak something, we'll create a downtime for it), we can be pretty sure that games will stay the same from day 0 to end, giving you guys the chance to get score and points.

This is essentially me saying that this version is considered complete! :D

We've already started devving on the next version, with awesome community features, a new look and alot more. We'll integrate new bug fixes and display issues into that version.

We'll be able to write out what will be added or changed in the next version in a week or two so you all know exactly what's coming and after the update is done, we'll release a list of fixes and features to you so you can review things. Finally time to dev like we should be. :) And no worries about the games that will be currently underway, as those will be updated with the proper information to be up to date with the update, so there will never be games that are "out of sync" with the game or engine development.

You'll also all see a new large game setup which will start on July 15th 8pm on top of the Play page where you will be able to Join in advance if you like (you don't get any advantage for doing so except being able to check out the stats and who is in there with you in space, if any... :P ).

Anyway, its been quite a ride, with some frustrations but alot of excitement as we release stuff.

We're certainly happy to be at this point where we can start devving like pros finally. And for those who worry about another occurence where things change everywhere, be assured that Vadis just set up a system where we backup all data in games several times a day, something we could not do effectively while we were live devving.

Consider the testing over, and the version good to go.

Building functionality is the last critical feature we wanted to put into this version as it involves player combat with new systems, and involving complex planet sequences. Since the Outpost is not considered a Base you can Dock with, store some vessels (3 max), there is a building on there that acts like a Combat Control Computer with the choices Attack, Defend or Att&Def, just like a CCC. Attack waves from Outposts now attack with a ratio of 1.2 as well, and counterattack if attack, making it a decent temporary base of operations for Corporations and individuals alike. StarDock bank and the Bounty Office are still missing its display but we'll get to those next.

The functioning buildings should translate automatically to all games, old and new.

Be advised that Class0 Port at Terra, Alpha Centauri and Rylos stations are up in new banged games only.

Now that the map is finally in place, what we would like is for players to go ahead and play the game, allowing us to root out all remaining bugs.

As of this moment, the Differential Scanner is still not in (but being worked on), Transwarp is still unavailable but should be next, and some building and StarDock facilities aren't functional yet. NPCs still won't attack and cannot be attacked yet (disactivated for testing purposes, but they are coded in).

Of course, there may be knick-knacks here and there that may not be online, or faulty, but that's why we're doing this test.

I'm sending out a newsletter (finally) to get as many people here as possible to do this so we can finish the gameplay elements and tweaks.

You are all invited to play TWR's new game style: Pirates! The game focuses on your ability to quickly gain experience and destroy other player's ships May the best trader/pirate win!

We've decided to remove a couple of game types from the system, notably the King of the Hill and Double Domination. These two game styles weren't played much in the old design and we just may reintroduce them in a different way later on.

The Starmaster is now in the game (we had already added the Constellation class combat ship and the CargoTran very early in the 1.1 testing). The Starmaster is a great ship for minelaying with the best mine carrying capacity in the game, good fighting capabilities and great shielding. It cannot however fit a Planetary Scanner, so not so good for scouting or assaulting enemy bases.

The game is in a state where it is playable. Though certain items are left to put in, we wish for all players to get stuck in and play so we can debug the new game further, which will allow us to activate the remaining features i.e. some of the building activities, the large Map and the NPC combat itself.

With a couple days of good testing and reporting, we should be able to activate the remaining features and finally have a complete game on the new robust platform.

We're happy to announce that Arty and Vadis, as we were supposed to finish up the new version update and close down the older TWR version last week, saw that they could quintuple (5x) the efficiency of our server and client code, allowing for alot more players on the server with no lag by changing some simple bits of code here and there.

Suffice to say, I approved the move to push even further the V1.1 launch to get that in there. Now that this is done, Vadis will be able to finally insert the final elements to the game, namely the main Map, map related elements, and the actions of the buildings.

Since we did this, V1.0 will close whenever he's ready. It was supposed to close last week so we figure there's no point in giving a new date and let players hack it out without knowing when the games will end. :D

Another great advantage of the new code is that it no longer matters how large the Maps are, or how many players are playing per game, it won't slow anything down anywhere, so we can set up a new Mega Game without influencing any game, or it being slow or prone to lagging.

Testing will help finishing up the debugging process, but we're quite happy of the results so far.

As advertised in our latest newsletter, the V1.1 game is now open for business right now. You can create games on this version, and we'll be spending the next few days doing debug as you guys play, and including the remaining game features listed below as we are sure the code is solid underneath.

The whole process should take a number of days, but not very long, especially if many of you help out by playing and reporting problems.

Additionally, for the time being, if you Give Up a game, you can get back into the same game afterwards, as a temporary means to help in testing games.

This is the list of features that remain to be activated after Vadis is satisfied with the current gameplay. We'll be showing progress on these as we go forward in this last phase:
[list]
[*]Location List [b][color=green]Completed[/color][/b]
[*]Planetary Combat [b][color=green]Completed[/color][/b]
[*]Building effects (Citadel, CCC, QCannon etc...) [b][color=green]Completed[/color][/b]
[*]Federation Starships and Jinbadi ships [b][color=green]Completed[/color][/b]
[*]Differential Scanner [b][color=green]Completed[/color][/b]
[*]Transwarp [b][color=green]Completed[/color][/b]
[*]Photon Missiles [b][color=green]Completed[/color][/b]
[*]New Ship Purchase [b][color=green]Completed[/color][/b]
[*]Planetary Trade [b][color=green]Completed[/color][/b]
[*]Purchase of colonists (colotickets) [b][color=green]Completed[/color][/b]
[*]Large Map [b][color=green]Completed[/color][/b]
[*]Game logs [b][color=green]Completed[/color][/b]
[/list]

This is a list of non-game items that are left to adjust to the new engine through the web site:
[list]
[*]Game Tutorial [b][color=green]Completed[/color][/b]
[*]Affiliate program [b][color=green]Completed[/color][/b]
[*]Game Manual [b][color=green]Completed[/color][/b]
[*]Game Info and other web site adjustments [b][color=green]Completed[/color][/b]
[*]Classic game style [b][color=green]Completed[/color][/b]
[*]Pirates game style [b][color=green]Completed[/color][/b]
[/list]

You will see that these will be checked off very quickly, so keep informed.

I am now opening the testing phase of the future new version of TradeWars:Rising, thank you for sticking with us and here are all the information:

1.1 is a full rewrite and we are for the first time using the full server disposition. The 1.1 website is not fully working yet (profile) and it is normal if you wish to test 1.1 you will need to register a free account using this url (please read the whole post before registering)
[URL]http://www.tradewarsrising.com/?page=register[/URL]

This account will not affect your scoring in anyway once the testing of 1.1 your 1.0 account will be ported to 1.1 with your score and everything.

This is now the part where I play the bad guy. If you register just to play you should wait, if you enter the test game and disturb any testing you will have to face consequences. You should only register and enter the game if you are willing to play-test play-crack 1.1, the reason for that is to make sure we can debug time in a good time so everyone can enjoy it.

Also that way we wont have bug emerging at full release because people assumed we knew about those bugs.

What is working in 1.1 ?
- Everything you see that is not related to the map/navigation.
- The genesis is the only item or buff to work.
- You cannot buy other avatar yet.
- Log are not visible yet.
- No combat.

Trust me that leave a lot to test once I'll know the rest work fine I'll introduce new module and we will just test them. it will be a two stage test, this is the first. All bug report should be posted in the bug section and try to really test the stuff with other people.

I'll try to create if it is needed a master bug list so everybody will be there able to test them or avoid them and test something else.

Thank you for your support we couldnt have done it without.

Sylien Games was invited to talk at the IN09 conference, Ontario's (Canada) Digital Media's major yearly event. I was there representing our interests (by ours, I mean Sylien's and every fan that wants to see TWR and our project fly high), and spoke on stage in front of a large number of industry profesionals, mainly from Ontario, but some were from the States and Europe as well, in a capsule entitled IN SHORT: Ontario Game Spotlight.

Obviously, most of my talk was about TWR and the much anticipated and upcoming V1.1 design tools. 3 other panelists were there talking about their stuff (I was told that I had by far the most interesting story to tell and the most appealing product presentation. :D ).

So while Vadis and the rest of the team was continuing the dev and artwork requirements for the next launch, I was doing that, followed by an interview for Convergence Digital culture magazine (at [url]www.videoGAMEScanada.ca[/url]) and a dozen contacts of fascinated businessmen who wanted to extract our secrets from me. Not sure exactly when the video interview will be out though. I have to ask the journalist a few followup questions to get that info since he wasn't too sure the exact dates on site. If you all want, I can provide that info so you can check me out talking about us live... lol

I had to tell them that the secret was the Tradewars community - you guys.
Obviously, not something they can duplicate... hehe.

Out of the bunch however, I was able to connect with really cool people who will be able to bring some value to the product and company, bringing it to new heights down the line. I even was able to chat with Juliette Powell, who is doing fantastic things with an innovation think tank whe started a few years ago. Cool 'cause she used to anchor for Much Music for a while, a very popular music video show in Canada a few years back.

Obama Girl was there, though I didn't have the opportunity to meet her. Yeah, all I really wanted was to "meet" with her. Not sure if I had anything business to negotiate with her at the time. She's really beautiful (and she's quite bright it turns out).

Anyway, just thought I'd share some of the things I do on occasion to help develop Sylien and get the right people involved. This one was special since I was speaking so it gave Sylien alot more credibility in the business world, and of course put the word out on Tradewars Rising etc...

Cheers!!!

Just after Vadis finished changing the server structure for scalability and the soon-to-be launch of V1.1 (see previous Update post), a major corruption appeared in the map database. Unfortunately, this one was general and was spreading.

In order to save the users and games, we had to wipe the info contained in that table... which means players have lost all information regarding visited sectors. In fact, its like your games haven't been explored at all (even Terra and StarDock sectors are now unknowns). This also means that any Set destination buttons leading to sectors that are now "unexplored" will give you an error until you re-explore the sector. Just to be clear, the delete did not affect what is inside sectors (planets, stations, items, ships etc...) but what your Captain has explored about the universe. So no planets were lost and no kittens were hurt by the delete either. :)

I blame it on a pulsar that blew up and screwed up with every ship GPS (Galactic Positioning System), making the memorized starmaps worthless... Ok, so this is my feable attempt at making the map going bye-bye a feature. Sue me! :P

Good News.

As always though, I am also the bearer of good news:
1. Current games are still playable and noone, as far as we know, lost any other type of data.
2. We were expecting this sort of thing happening (and was hoping it wouldn't) since we noticed the escalation of corruptions after V1.0 launch, so V1.1 is almost done (give it another 2 weeks and the dev is done, may need a bit more time of testing and debugging, but perhaps not). V1.1 is built with the express purpose of being VERY robust and with corruption chance being what you would expect of a pro game design.
3. The new update will allow you to design your own content, most probably we'll even open up the possibility for you to make your own strategy game on that version without extending the dev time further.
4. We've already given a month of extra time to Premium members in thanks and to compensate for these unpredictable and temporary issues, and if other annoying occurances happen, we won't be shy at giving away more time.

Let's hope this type of corruption doesn't happen again before we release V1.1. As always, we're there working hard to make it happen as quickly as possible, putting 2 extra code helpers on duty with Vadis to get it done properly and ASAP.

As you well know, we are hard working on V1.1 in order to fix all current version bugs and flaws as well as giving you a much improved gameplay experience (and more features). We expect to be fully done in March (testing and all) and to allow you to play on the new version (and new server too).

No current game will be lost and there will be nothing reset so no worries. New games will be created on the new code/database system is all. :)

Here is a short list of things you may expect. I've also attached a few module pictures in development so you can see what we're doing a bit:
- No more screen refreshes
- All bugs and flaws fixed at the same time
- Faster gameplay, less lag and very fast response time from the system.
- Keyboard shortcuts for movement, combat and map, inventory etc.. .
- One-click intuitive buy & sell at stations
- Brand new multi-opponent combat screen for full combat control and giving the defender notice of impending doom
- New Creator Tool, better faster map generation
- New speedy chat system
- And of course all of this is compliant with the game generator idea in view of letting YOU design and use add-ons in this version, and having them show correctly in your game variant

To popularize the RTS game style a bit and show to people how fun that game style can be, we're organizing a special RTS event next week.

I call it, TWR Galactic Rumble I. Here are the details:
- RTS Tradewars Rising game series (Public Open Ranked)
- max 15 players per game, 10 Clusters & 20 Sectors each
- First game will start on February 11th at 8pm EST.
- At game end, players are assigned points depending on their ranking (best gets 15 points, 2nd 14 pts, and so on).
- In the NEXT 4 days, every day at 8pm, games will be run for increasingly large amounts of points (15pts max on day 1, 30pts on day 2, 45 on day 3 etc…).
- At the end of each game, points are compiled and a scoreboard is put up.
- At the end of the 5th game, overall point rankings are calculated as well final results posted.
- This is just for good ‘ol fun... and some mayhem…

In order to set this up properly, I need to know how many players want to participate in this so I know how many games to set up each day. If more than 15 players are interested, I’ll set up two concurrent games (or more if we have more interest).

If we have several concurrent games running, they will be designated as A, B, C etc… and your points in each “lettered” game doesn’t carry over to another “lettered” series so if you play in an A game, then the next day play in a B game, you’ll have two sets of points that will NOT add themselves up. In the case of multigames, we’ll therefore have an A winner, a B winner etc… For fun and if the winners want to, we can set up a game just to see who’s the Grand Champion later.

Oh and I’ll make sure to leave a couple spots free in each game for players who want to join in to grab some points midway, just to add to the chaos!

Just reply to this post to tell me if you’re “in” so I can do a head count.

Invite you friends and specify if you want to play in the same games as them.

And remember, the games START at 8pm EST Sharp, on February 11th, so I suggest participants be ready at 7:45pm to play and join the lobby as soon as it is up and running. At 8pm, the games will start with or without you.

Only Premium Members can join in these games.

Sylien Team

To start off with a bang, we have organized a sequel to the popular Mega Game we did early last month to energize the community and to create a single huge fun event for all serious players to enjoy:

Mega Game II - The Thug Vadis' Hideout

The game is twice as big as last Mega Game, which means 4 x bigger than the maximum size galaxy players can normally make using the Create Tool. In this one no corporations can be formed and the condition is to obtain 100 million Credits first. Here's the twist: most of this money CAN be obtained from a known source: ThugVadis' hideout, a planetary stronghold where lots of Credits were deposited. The Thug himself is carrying lots of cash and has a 20 million Cred bounty on his head, but he'Ll be slippery and flying a stolen Federation StarShip. Not an easy chicken to catch. But we'll see which strategy the winning players take to win this one.

Prizes are tight. Only the first 3 positions get something, either some extra Premium time on system or an iTunes gift card.

Only Premium players can play (no free players allowed), so all players will seriously compete for the 1st position, that's for sure!

More information can be found in this thread:

[URL="http://www.sylien.com/forum/showthread.php?t=1814"]http://www.sylien.com/forum/showthread.php?t=1814[/URL]

We are happy to announce that Version 1.0 of the Tradewars(R) Rising product (and underlying creation/design game system, of course) is finally completed.

This means that players can now upgrade their account to Premium in order to access all features available and full access to all upcoming updates (and there is a doosy coming up in perhaps a month or two).

- Play more games
- Create public games, use the design tools
- gain status and bragging rights as you accumulate player rankings, awards and more Creation rights with profile items, and showing in the scoreboard.

Whatever you decide to do, we'll be happy to have you on board as we dev Version 1.x (we've been doing that for the last 2 weeks already).

At this point we're calling all playtesters to do their best to find as many unknown bugs as possible in the game. In just a few short days, we hope to fix most of them, and tag the rest that cannot be fixed in this version (if any) for the next upgrade. We have started working on version 1.5 of the code and database, an upgrade that will allow us to fix many of the current system flaws and greatly improve gameplay so some issues may be put on the list for the next version if we can live with them for a while without any major issues.

Currently, all individuals who had merit to gain Premium promotional time have received it (you will receive an e-mail or e-mails shortly detailing why you are receiving any and how much) already and should have Premium accounts at the moment. Those who do not right now will have to subscribe to the service when it is operation on the launch date itself (unveiled later) and for the time being will have limited access for this final test run. Scores and awards were reset (system will NOT be reset again at launch time). Some players that are considered too good to stay at scores of 1000 for TB games were upgraded to 1,500 points so as not to mix with newcomers and to start playing among each other more and get a better challenge.

At this time, the RTS variant still needs a bit of a tweak to be ok but it should be done quickly, then we'll announce that it may be played. Since bugs are on the engine that generates both TB and RTS variants, fixing the TB also fixes the code-bugs on the RTS. When we announce the fix of the RTS, we'll call for a massive test run of that as well in a separate news.

Depending on the amount of bugs or issues that you all come up with, we'll set the official launch date and send it to you all via site news and newsletter. Since most of the testing has been done as we went along, we expect the final debug run to be a small amount of days only so be ready.

If you are an RSS feed enthousiast and a Sylien Games / Trade Wars Rising fan, you're in luck, we just set up a nice RSS feed that you can set up with your browser or your favorite RSS reader (google's is decent and free). The necessary links are available on the [url]www.sylien.com[/url] web site (look for the orange square icon near Recent News).

Enjoy!

Just a quick not to inform everybody that Vadis and Arty are currently developing the newest updates of the game on a separate test server. We are still making some necessary fixes and corrections on the current game server, of course, as we want your experience to be good as we dev offline.

What this means simply is this: when next we apply a game update, you will get sufficient prior notice, knowing what impact will happen to your games or accounts etc... (if any part of the update would change your strategies and such) and we will also be able to provide you with a definite list of features, changes and bug fixes the moment the update is applied, in order to inform you of exactly what is different and fixed or updated. Isn't it going to be nice for a change?

Another cool thing about this is that we'll probably take on a number of players as testers as Vadis needs them on the test server, who will be able to get a first look at what's cooking too. Please don't push in line okay? :)

After a 3 day downtime period, the games are back online. All the changes we have implemented that are visual to you have been noted and explained in the last news and upgrade articles so I won't repeat them here.

If you're wondering why many of you are dead... that was my fault. I apparently changed something I should not have in the database that caused you all to have your shields removed, so a single hit by anything would kill you. Thankfully, Vadis fixed that but many Captains suffered the Death Plague fate. You may flame me for this. :(

The good thing is that the game is way more awesome than before, and still free so no real harm done right?! :D

Enjoy!

in TWR, extra ships, ships in tow (follow mode) or just left in space will be visible, attackable and in certain circumstances, claimable (steal) very soon.

It could happen as soon as in 24 hours or so, so best be ready and hide your extra ships ASAP.

This is part of the final revisions we are making to make the game and web site system a complete Version 1 product. No more Mules left in space in a dozen cool locations for trading, inaccessible to anyone but yourself yet still seen on scanner...

This of course was always our intentions but since the "invisible ships" worked well in gameplay for so long we left this dev point for last (and at one point even thought of leaving it that way for this first version). To enable this however, players will only be able to Switch ships while Docked in a dockable station (like StarDock) or Landed on a planet.

Also, all ships Landed or Docked will be invisible (they are hidden from view), so you can hide your stash of ships from spying eyes. To access your Docked or Landed ships, select SHIP, then you'll see another SHIP button appear in the console. Click that and all your Docked/Landed ships at that location will be listed.

To ask a ship to Follow you, you can do it from Docking or Landed positions (when buying a new ship at SD, the ship will already be docked) as well as in space. If you find a floating ship not piloted by anyone, you can't just ask it to Follow you.... it'll defend itself if attacked.

One of the best things about the Internet is that there are loads and loads of web sites that talk about games. Many are popular, most are just not worth the visit. To make the Tradewars(R) Rising experience as best as can be, we need as many players we can get. I've been posting the site on many forums and game sites out there. Most of the good ones have very specific criterias to satisfy and I'd rather tinker with them when we are ready to make a big splash, which is really, really soon. :D

In the meantime, I'm posting on many smaller sites to see what will happen. One of them allows us to publish a voting link. Here it is, and if you like what we're doing, I hope you will click on the link and Vote for us... lots. This may attract a decent amount of further players, for free.

[URL="http://mmorpg.top100arena.com/in.asp?id=25930"]http://mmorpg.top100arena.com/in.asp?id=25930[/URL]

There are many other sites out there, and you are welcome to post news about us and link back here. If you are an Affiliate here, you can use your own Affiliate link you can find in your Affiliate page to attract players in here, but get Referrals from it to boot).

If you know of any good sites you frequent and that are not on the following list, please let me know, I'll take a look, if you haven't already put your Affiliate link there already! lol

Already targeted sites by Sylien Games:
[url]http://mmorpg.top100arena.com/[/url]
[url]www.bbgamezone.com[/url]
[url]http://www.bbsgames.net/[/url]
[url]www.mmorpg.com[/url]
[url]http://www.freemmorpglist.com/[/url]
[url]http://www.xtremetop100.com/[/url]
[url]http://www.gtop100.com/mmorpgmpog[/url]
[url]http://www.freemmogamer.com/[/url]
[url]www.mmoginfo.com[/url]
[url]http://www.mmorpgtop.com/[/url]

To ensure the most exciting and active games are played by newcomers and to further encourage more players per game (fun games are good for experienced players too), the Play page of the web site is now designated "Featured" space for public games.

For your game to be shown there, you must have, for now, at least 6 players in it. Otherwise, it still shows in the public area but only if you click on the blue Search All link to get all the available public games.

So my advice to all game Creators who wish to make great games (either to get more Creator Fame or for the excitement) is to invite as many players as possible to your games. There are many ways to do that: regular e-mails, forum pms, e-mail invites through the optional Create pages, chat systems etc... To help you out, we'll be adding some tools to the Create pages gradually to ensure that everybody can have a game listed in the Play page if they want their game to be Public.

Note: for now the minimum number of players to show is 6, but this number will be eased up gradually toward some magic number. Again, this is to ensure the best games possible are presented first and loudly. It of course rewards those Creators who can gather lots of players to their games and make them real fun.

Cheers!

We've just reactivated the TWR RTS module (can be found in the Create page) for anyone to try out. Only one such public game can be made at a time, Private RTS are also available. The game Creator starts the game when he wishes it (ideally when the game is full or people want the game to start...)

The objective is Melee, which means if you lose all your bases to your adversaries, you lose (Game Over). The last one standing wins. Ranks is based on who lasts longest down to who is first destroyed.

It is a bit different than the TB style. You start with only 5k Credits, you always start with a base somewhere in the galaxy and heartbeat is every minute. Building times are in minutes instead of days as well. Turns are irrelevant so use the ship you like to do what you will.

Colonist building requirements (colonist requirements only) have been halved and Coloticket handouts are different as well as colonist availability.

Stealing, the ISS, the Corporate Fleetship and corporations in general are not available tasks since this is a fast paced game with everyone in the same level playing field playing for survival and dominance.

There are other small differences like genesis torps are of specific types and you can buy of 4 types : Mountain, Ocean, Earth and Volcanic only. Only the Merchant Cruiser and Colonialist ships can carry these genesis torps, and they are way more expensive since you know what you're going to get.

Have fun, test and comment in the forums about difficulties, balance issues or anything that may improve the game.

Lastly, RTS creators (public) get Creator RTS Fame for their game which is managed by the following equation: fame = 25 x #players/maxplayers + #players . This fame is calculated into the overall player fame, which of course get calculated into your Overall Score.

I'll be updating the FAQ for more details on Fame scores and score very shortly.

Game information:
- Classic game of 6 000+ sectors (100 Clusters of 60 sectors each, or more)
- Two hidden Class 0 stations: Alpha Centauri and Rylos
- Hundreds of players (as many as possible)
- Corporations and Alliances are allowed
- Scattered wormholes, 50% ports, 40% connectivity
- Start with 5 000 Turns, 2 000 Turn per day regeneration. Turn bank of 5 000
- Prizes are awarded (see below) to winners
- Start at Terra in a Merchant Cruiser with 50 000 Credits

Prizes:
- Winner gets a $25 iTunes Gift Card
- A $15 iTunes Gift Card will also be drawn and awarded to one of the top 25 players
- Game end statistics will be posted and regular updates on the game progress will be made

How to join in?
- Make sure you are in any Trade Wars® Rising Turn-Based game Thursday, December 11th at 8pm Eastern Standard Time.
- Shortly after, we will send an e-mail invitation to Join the TWR MEGA GAME to all players currently in any TWR game on the site
- The invite will contain a link and password which will allow you to Join the game and get ready
- The TWR MEGA GAME will start Sunday December 14th at 8pm EST. If you Join the game before that time, you will be entered into it but will be unable to do anything except Chat (0 Turns), but you will be able to see who is in the game and who is not.

So get stuck into games to make sure you get the invite and then have a blast playing against hundreds of opponents all at the same time.

Tip: it would be wise to set up alliances and a Corporation for mutual support prior to this game, if you can, though winners won’t necessarily be part of a Corporation, in the end, there can be only one winner!

TELL YOUR FRIENDS, make an alliance or corporation with them against everyone else. Have fun!!!

Here is the URL to [URL="http://www.tradewarsrising.com/?page=joining&game_id=197"] JOIN [/URL]
You'll need to password found in the e-mail invite to get in though (its: [COLOR="Red"][B]twr1[/B][/COLOR] but don't tell anyone! shhhhhht... LOL).

P.S.: entering before Sunday 8pm EST means you have 0 Turns so can't move or do any action while in-game.

Disclaimer: By participating in this contest, entrants release and hold harmless the Contest Sponsor and respective representatives, and assigns (collectively the “Releasees”) from any liability in connection with this Contest or, if declared a winner, the prize(s).

Sylien Team

We founded this company with a simple idea: Engage and Inspire. In other words, we wanted players on our systems to feel like they were part of the games and that they could positively and truly contribute to the product with their creativity.

We saw this by engaging you all into the testing process of this game system and TWR very, very early on (much earlier than any other game out there being made). Now we have been offering players the opportunity and tools to create great TWR fan sites linked to this one through games as well as inviting you to contribute to the content by writing stories, making videos, audio and whatever fancies you. The most recent effort by Rebelscum (entitled StarDock: The Beating Heart of the Galaxy, found in the TWR Storyline section of the forums) is a great example of how normal players can contribute (and in this case be even advertised because he did such a good job at capturing Sylien's vision of things as well).

We are very proud of our achievements so far. I hope you all feel that we succeeded in integrating you in some way into game history in some way. We will certainly continue to try to provide more ways for you to directly contribute.

The Beating Heart of Sylien Games is in fact its community. Without your input, energy, creativity and experience in gaming we would not have been able to come this far, and very soon launch our first Version of TWR to the world in an official fashion.

Thank you all.

It has been confirmed that on November 1st, the Sylien dev team will do a heavy overhaul of all TWR systems in order to fix the remaining system bugs as well as integrating the remaining player account systems. After this our systems will be completely ready for a "soon after" official launch for Turn-Based, RTS and the eventual RPG variations of games. On top of it all, we will introduce a surprise we've been planning for the last bit.

Be AWARE that during this period, the game will be at the very least "off-kilt" and whatever Vadis decides to do during that time to make everything work, he'll do. It might be impossible to actually play games except in the dedicated Test games.

Here's the downside: to best do this and for a solid autonomous system, we will have to reset all player info (scores, medals, badges, scoreboard statistics etc...) and modify some of the current systems in a way that it will be impossible to retain or manually modify any player information. Of course, this did not seem necessary until we found out that to remove the annoying bugs and to ensure others like them would not come back, that we had to change certain things internally that would make it impossible to keep some data. So after we're done in early November, everyone will start fresh as a new registration, except for the Beta Badges which can be applied across the board.

Following the overhaul and modifications, we will have a short period of final testing on all aspects of the system, making sure everything is running as it should, removing remaining bugs as we go and then officially launch the whole system to the world as Version 1 (we'll do another reset then to clear up everything for a fresh start).

Please be aware that anytime past November 1st, we may erase any and all games on our system in order to find the last intractable bugs we have on the system and also to do some heavy debugging of the Creation/finishing process.

The exact date when this will first happen is not known yet, and to be efficient we may even do it several times in early november.

Through the process we'll also be able to put in several extra systems that have been doing wierd things relative to the scoreboard, for example. Bugs like vanishing games, games not displaying properly, game results not getting posted in Profiles or scoreboard etc... will need all to be corrected if we ever want to publish this version properly.

Hence we are warning you in advance. :)

Take this opportunity to consider every game you are currently in to have a time limit and you don't even know when the game will "end". So those playing in games have to race against the clock too. :) FUN!

If the game finishes before the first erase, you get scores etc..., if not then the game gets deleted and nothing more happens.

If we can give you an advance notice on the approximate time of the first erase when we get close to it, we'll do that. But as you know, Vadis does what he can, and sometimes to correct something major, he HAS to do something NOW, since he's more or less the only guy working on this part of the code. Let's support him and all others involved, and have fun with the added strategic implications!

The requirement to be amateur is now 1300, it was 1500. It will be easier now to go to amateur better for the new comers since people that know better are in other but you still have to play between 2 and 4 game depending how you score before getting there.

It is time to get rid of exploits once and for all, and win some beta medals in the process that you will keep for as long as you play.

I am looking for volounteers, with at least a small experience of the game to a better one to play in 2 different game.

They will both have the same size, no ally no team but one will be low turn and one will be high turn. I will ask each player once the game is done or during to send me information on how they play:

- strategy to get money
- to map
- moving
- turn usage
- exploit usage
- strange stuff
-> a game report if you want.
-> dont try to out smart what I said with a stupid report.

Anyone doing a game report that is ether telling me I played like that and it was fine or I play this way but it was way unbalanced will get a spacial BETA MEDAL that they will keep once the game is ready.

Those two games will start in about a week or so so if you are interested post your name here.
The goal is to try and remove all exploit/abuse from teh game !

I did not write any news in a long time but a lot of work has been done, like the chat prepping the server for the last few items, getting the new ships.

Everything should come in one after another very soon making the game more more a real TradeWars. The FleetShip image is now up and the last but not least ship of V1 will be the Interdictor Cruiser.

We Also have putted the new server online, some might experience desynch for some time (cache, dns, ip) etc etc... but everything should come back to normal on that, it also means we can now carry on with the work.

The new chat is in place as you have all seen it. To have it work you need to allow cookies and javascript, if you have flash you might have sound but I did remove them from teh small version of the that.
You can pop the chat in a new window once logged in into the site using that link [url]http://www.tradewarsrising.com/chat2/[/url]

It is now official and approved by Facebook: the Tradewars(R) Rising game application is now online and ready to server the players!

In essence it is a reduced duplicate of your player profile, thus allowing you to show off your ranks, awards etc... to fellow facebook visitors to your site AND it also sports any game you are currently in, which means friends know exactly in which games you are (like in your profile).

Also, any friend of yours that also has the app installed on there will get notified if you use the application to join another game (yep you can do that) and stuff.

Pretty cool tool. We may change it and add to it as we go so don't be surprised if it changes a bit.

Just put this URL in, and it will go through the installation process:

[url]http://apps.facebook.com/twrgame/[/url]

NOTA: Those of you who want to heavily promote this project, and help out, this is a good opportunity for you right here. Also, there is a TWR facebook Group I've started a while ago and I am looking for a couple of dedicated players to serve as active admins/moderators on there. If any are interested, please PM me and we'll talk. :)

After weeks of planning, working on the code, and contacting individuals from the old classic Tradewars SySop community, we are proud to announce the start of the Sylien Affiliate Program.

The Program's purpose is to allow players to use cool assets we made to connect their favorite website, website community or blog with their created Tradewars(R) Rising games or simply to help out in spreading the word about Tradewars(R) Rising throughout the net.

Joining is free, and you get all resources, including banners you can put on your sites, an iframe in which all the games you have Created can be shown to visitors on your own site/blog and a special Affiliate page where you can track your referrals and how many affiliate Credits you have accumulated so far (when we go commercial, 30% of our revenues from your REferrals go to you).

Links to the program can be found in your Profile and on the main game page along with the Top Affiliate, new affiliates and relevant statistics.

Have fun!

It has come to my attention that there is increasing interest in investing in Sylien Games lately from people in the community. This is excellent news as it shows that those who are closest to the games we are developing really like what they see with Tradewars(R) Rising and see a definite future with our small innovative company.

This is an exciting time for us all. We are also getting some offers from outside companies to engage in game projects as well at the moment, signaling a turning point in Sylien Games history. Though for the most part, those projects are rejected to keep our focus, we may engage in projects that would further our goals of becoming the foremost browser-based multiplatform mmog company out there. :)

We will possibly raise some more funds, very soon, to market TWR in order to get more substantial financing sources to drive everything forward. Any interested investors that would like to get further information on this, please contact us through e-mail or even forum PM and I will be able to provide further information to you. Be advised however, that we are not looking for small investment chunks and this is not a type of investment for the faint of heart.

I need help testing the mine activation and planet sharing with all possible condition.

neutral
ally
enemy
team player
team ally
team enemy

Also if you could check the different colors for planet and players :P

I've tried to test it all but i cannot seem to make it happen and some people say some stuff do not work here and there.
Here is the test game
[URL]http://www.tradewarsrising.com/?page=joining&game_id=273[/URL]

So if you can be kind enough to test under everything in teh same game and tell me what works and what does not I'll be able to move forward with it.
Thank you.

I've work all night non-stop to give you the new play page, I believe it is better but why would you ask do that ?. Well first I wanted a game refresh that does not refresh the page and we all know how my skill allow me not do little things like that but not much.

Also the old page is now dedicated to search by default it will show EVERY game and when I have the time I will HIGHLY... UBERLY enhance the search engine on it.

Also on the new page you do not see the game below your rank but you do see the one up your rank. Open games are always on the second spot. The last thing I will add on that is for new comers a special welcome's zone with 3 games : tutorial, training no pvp, training pvp.

Any comment suggestion are welcome

Once you create a game you will see a form that will allow you to send an email to 10 of your friend, The form is using a secure SSL sending so it is safe. I've tested it and it seems to work fine as I received the email on one of my email.

This is one of many little change/add-on that will happen on teh site this week be on teh look out for them as some will be really cool and user friendly :D

More detail on everything has it go in this thread!

Good news, we just put up the new web site introduction pages whose purpose is to explain what the site and game is all about (and what is what) to new players. You can only view these pages when you aren't logged into the page, which is excellent for new visitors who wish to learn about what is going on here, but not annoying to those who come to the site to play. :)

At the same time, we just activated the Affiliate pages and registration process. You can now all register as Affiliates through any of the links provided for you in the site (Profile page, right column of all main pages, etc...). From now on, you can post the games you have Created (public and private ones) on your favorite web site by simply copy and pasting the HTML code found for that purpose in your Affiliate resources page (find this one in your Profile while you are logged in. If anyone registers into the site by first clicking on one of your games within the provided tool, it records the person as a Referral for you. When we go commercial, you will get a 30% revenue share of any purchase made by any one of your Referrals. Pretty cool huh? For more info, read up in the FAQ and the Affiliate pages.

This is a news to let everyone know that at any given time during the week-end the site/games might be down. I am preparing the new way of entering game that will allow you to enter more game at the same times BUT also it will allow the server split.

I will not give a number yet as I am still unsure how the system will work but we will see.

This is to warn everybody that in about 2 weeks maybe a bit less ALL THE LIVE GAMES at that time will be erased. I think it will not take us more than that to set up the live/test server but by doing that I'll have to restart all the games.

When the game will be erased there will not be a winner no matter how close they are to winning because it would had more work to a score that will be erased once we are ready to launch the game.

This matter is not open for debate nor do I want to hear anyone complain about it like it happen every time.

Also you may have noticed I do not put much work in bug fixing since I have not a single idea what is going on with all the game and the is delaying me a lot. So I'll finish a few things put the server together and then start debugging you can still report the bugs but I can not assure that it will get fixed.

Thank you.

Due to the apparent complexity of the current Score system, the surprising bugs within, and our general fiddling with the Scoring system in the past months, it has been decided that we will reset them all to 1,000 before implementing the cleanest Scoring equation ever. No chance of calculation fudges in this one.

But don't fret, you will not lose any of your Awards, Badges, Ribbons or Medals in the process.

Plus it will reset nonsensical Scores that have been frustrating some players trying for the top position on the scoreboard (and we want to see how it goes with players).

The reset should happen within the next couple of days at most.

Oke so I'm about to bank a game using the new trading and planet stats, using them means all the older game will have messed up production.

The actual number have not been posted yet and the description of the planet will get updated if the numbers seems good.

I invite everyone to join that test game and give feedback.

You can now bang a classic style game, I hope the open ended style game will be enjoyed a lot, the goal is to be number 1 with 50M more points than number 2 player.

Enjoy it, if you have any question or remark do not hesitate.

Due to certain cases of harassment and misbehaving in the public chat, we have decided to close the chat for a short amount of time. A person came in and created accounts to harass Vadis, myself, Sylien in general as well as the players that were online at that time.

Of course, you all know this is unacceptable behavior and if you do spot such things happening, please report it to myself or Vadis immediately so we can take measures. Same goes if a griever, harasser or griever causes troubles in the forums, of course.

The chat will be back online soon.

Thanks to Artyom hard work we have the new display version of the game, looks the same but is way more slick.

We are looking for any font/color bug in it. Post everything in the bug section of the forum please and any other comment here.

You will discover than most of the annoying part like text erase at refresh have been removed and other. I wish I would write more about it but I have so much in my head I have a hard time focusing on the writing so I will let you discover it.

So I've fixed the TradeWars RTS, way more fun to play but still needs some tweaking I need player to test it, As of now:.

- Each cluster got a Terra at the first sector

- You need a lvl1 Desert to create a Mountainous
- You need a lvl1 Ice to create a Oceanic
- You need a lvl2 Mountainous to create a Volcanic
- You need a lvl2 Oceanic to create a Earth

- Desert and Ice are restricted to lvl2 buildings
- Mountainous and Oceanic are restricted to lvl4 buildings
- No buildings restriction on Earth and Volcanic

- The Merchant can hold I-O-E one of each
- The Taurian can hold D-M-V one of each
- The Orion can hold E-V one of each

All this may be tweaked even further to make the game most enjoyable possible, I'm still unsure what to do with the possibility of creating more or less infinite planet... I'll let you guys play a bit before deciding what to do.

Enjoy

The HTCIA (High Tech Crime Investigation Agency), Ottawa chapter invited Sylien to speak about crimes prevalent in mmog games and the methods available to crack down on perpetrators.

Myself and Vadis were there to speak. It was an interesting talk with in attendance mostly law enforcement representatives, high-tech industry security people and some others.

The subject was "The Virtual Crime Business", essentially talking about different game models (mostly social games, like multiplayer and mmo), how people get scammed, stolen accounts and virtual assets. We spoke of the liability of letting players upload images (pornography), scripting and of course what tools are available to track and apprehend perps.

Let's just say that there was lots to say about the HOW people can exploit games to steal, cheat and otherwise be nuisances for everyone, and not so much about the Solutions to the problem and how to track perps. Hope it would be different but really the door's wide open there.

The crowd was happy and we'll probably be invited again to perhaps help making the enforcers and legislators start something that may turn out to be some sort of solution to the Internet Crime problem... (I don't have much hope, but you don't get results if you don't try... lol).

This is a simple warning to let you know that if you make games that are not playable you'll loose your creation rights. For the moment 1 person already did that. I'll let you judge of what is a playable game. If there are more games deleted, there is no arguing please.

Try to make games that are unlike those already created please. I'll delete games if they are too similar.

--> Lehmund: it will be good to test how a simple directive to players will manage game variety at this point, and tell us if there is a need for a system to moderate this...

A quick note to let you know that an unexpected error occurred in the databases of the TWR site and game this yesterday, and that showed itself again this morning. The last time it happened, we lost some information in the database.

It is important enough that we need to take the site and games down, possibly for a few days (all games will unfortunately need to be cleaned). We don't know the extent of the problem but we know that it is related to an infinite loop that happened due to certain parameters of the Create tool used by players recently.

We will advise you when the services will be back up again soon.

You can now create public RTS games but there is a trick about it, I strongly suggest you read the news if you are to create games.

- For the moment there is a limit of 3 PUBLIC games in the hubbing mod waiting for players.
- If they do not get players after 15 minutes they will be deleted.
- If the creator of the game is not in it and other players are, the creator will loose his privileges to create public games since you need the creator to start the game.

With the front page chat you should be able to get organized when you want to create a game and see if some people are interested. By the way I believe ie6 does not support the chat very well.

The following changes have been done to the web site:
1. When you log into your account, you end up in the Profile page, where you gain immediate access to your Joined and Created Games, plus profile info etc...
2. We've pretty much completed adding all of the Awards and they seem to be working fine. Badges, Ribbons and Medals can be won, and upgraded. There are a few info tweaks still to be made, and some more Awards to be added over time. Check it out.
3. Play page: Thinner game capsules allow for more games per page and you only need to mouse-over them to see full game info. Makes it easier to see all available games to play. The search filters help filter them out further if need be.
4. New top banner buttons: You can easily sort Turn-Based, RTS and RPG games (when we have some) in the Play page. Also the Player page has some extra buttons to display either the Scoreboard itself, or the Compare section, which will display comparative information (this we'll get back to a tad later).
5. Scoreboard: Some minor changes to the scoreboard. You can now sort highscores for Turn-Based or RTS Scores, and soon you'll also receive Fame and # created games data in there to sort through.

I'm about to start the RTS system, it will create game manage hubs and stuff like that.

We might experience a shutdown of the server when I'll be turning it on if the loop is not done well enough.

Once it is ready you'll all be able to enjoy a fast past RTS. Even if the system is online it doesn't mean the RTS style game is fully ready, it will need testing.

FYI do not complain about the fact that you can not see people entering in your sector something is coming up fast.

Woody is our first public sysop, I hope you will enjoy this game as I'm not the one that made it :P.

For the moment the moding is limited but in the future we hope to have many people do many things with there games:D

----

New moneyrun game is up. Player made. 1200 daily turns and you start will little to nothing. Low sector to Cluster ratio and low port count. Should be fun for those up for the challenge.

Woody

The Affiliate program is ready for testing, what does that mean? You can create your own game and you can post them on your website using a simple single line.

I am currently testing the tool with our own Nezoic :D. Check out what he did at [URL]http://twr.nezoic.com/[/URL] . So yeah the system is up and running and need testing so I am looking for sysop, or future affiliate/sysop with a running website to display there game.:cool:

Note I'm saying display all the hosting is done on our side. All the people that will register trough you will be tagged as so for the future Affiliation system.
I am looking for a small group of person with active website. If you think you are up for the task post here, any comment will be appreciate to:p

The new gui is in place at 80%, since it's 2:40am I'm going to bed, do not forget to clear your cash and press F5. I think you will understand very fast why we went for that type of UI.

I still have to replace the DScanner icons and spread the items on the display and fix a few other things here and there but its mainly in place to enjoy. 4tune did a really nice job on designing it props to him :D. Props to me for the rapidity with witch I've putted it online :p. it was on my desk around 7pm today.

I did not had time to check the tutorial to see how everything fits but I'll make sure to give it a look tomorrow while I finish placing everything.

The creation tool is now in closed beta, if you want more info I suggest you give a look in the forum I've posted something about it.

I'll start working on the moding tool it will take quite more time to do but will be as cool. for the time being we will have to test the creation tool witch is the first step in getting you guys to make game.

I have no time lime for public beta but I'll keep in touch on that.

Still very sick but still very kickin' I present you a nice update to the game, fairly tested by our owns if you have complains turn to them :p.

So here is a list of what has been done:

- Full Combat Computer capacity online
- Full Quasar Cannon capacity online
- Full new trading system
-- allows for buying all resources/stats at SD

- Fixed the buildings menu
- Fixed the ally of ally going trough defense
- Fixed planet col drop capacity
- Fixed new ship empty stats
- Fixed ship price

Many things are on the work and I rather not speak about them since I'm still sick.

Want to show your Profile off to friends? Impress your significant other with your strategic prowess (or lack thereof)? Perhaps you want to show friends in which game you want them to join so you can cream them?

Then use the Share Game link present in your Profile page (and TWR landing page).

These are our share tools for now (we will add more and refine these over time):
[list]
[*]Copy/paste your Profile link anywhere or use provided links from our systems to integrate your profile to your favorite site(s).
[*]Add a graphical and customizable signature to your favorite forum, containing your TWR statistics.
[*]Add your TWR profile summary to your Facebook page and Orkut pages (not ready yet, work in progress)
[/list]

Enjoy !

6:10am and still putting citadels online, the Colony is now working so is the citadel lvl1 or just Citadel, due to the update I had to run heart a lot this night, that means free resources for everyone!!!.:cool:

I hope to finish the citadels during the day, there is no much left to do on them but a lot of testing in the code:D

Once they all will be online, I'll start creating new games. That is a big step in the game I think, I hope you will enjoy it.

You have now access to a few share feature for tradewars that you might enjoy a lot. I only add time to make 1 signature model but more will come in the future with a 'sig generator' where you will be able to choose from a few option. Your sig link to your full profile.

You'll find some useful link also, I'll add more in the near future as more option comes in the profile.
I'll be working on a slimmer version of the sig. same width 525px. the one I've made height is 100px and I'm not sure yet how small I'll go.

I invite you to check it out ^^.
Little add-on to say I've putted the logout!

If any of you have already developped a Facebook application using FBML, we're looking for you to do ours.

This would be a short term contract starting immediately (or close to).

We'd be providing design documents, graphical mockup, you bring the coding skills and experience.

Contact us through the usual channels.

Colonisation games have new win conditions. The game should be faster now.
You are required to have 5 level 4 citadels.

Yup, like the title says, we'd love to have a couple of good 2D/3D graphic artists on board as Henchmen (Sylien team helpers from the community) to do a few pieces for the Trade Wars project. There is no money involved but if you have talent and want to be immortalized in the TWR credits (as well as having a special Henchman badge and some free time on the commercial game version etc...) then just send us an e-mail through any sylien.com e-mail or PM to me.

We'll hook you up for some artwork tasks, and you can have fun creating for the game.

Any takers? :)

We just created a new Facebook group on Facebook for you all to enjoy here:

[URL="http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=8049388298"]http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=8049388298[/URL]

We're working on some cool stuff to integrate into Facebook as well within a couple of weeks or so. We'll give you news here, as well as in the Group. I'll give you news when further development has been made.... :)

The game has reach another stage of development and this one is a huge step!.
Dying can be now avoided using the brand new Dscanner and you can now protect your asset trough superior firepower but that's not all.

In this new version of the game you will discover some small fixes and update like:
- no more using items at Tera or StarDock
- the chat is not case sensitive, capitals do not matter anymore
- constant view of the minimap
- new player list
- new mine cap and damage in sector
- planet defending themselves
- planet ratio, 1.5 if you are on the planet, 2.0 if you have a cit lvl2 and 3.0 if you have both
- new outpost wave size **** I RESERVE THE RIGHT TO CHANGE THE WAVE SIZE AT ANY GIVEN TIME aka game play may change during online play ****
- full central UI for the shop working... almost, just need to put the button on :p
- New player tag, blue for good red for bad, and no alignment yet, that make sens:p
- New navigation map aka quick map.
- new partial GUI, the rest will be implemented over time as the new functions appear

Game Compatibility
- -FireFox1.5+ :D
- -Internet Explorer6.0+ :rolleyes:
- -Opera9+ :D
- -on mac I think if someone could please confirm.:confused:
-> it is suggested to clear your cache, if you do not know how ask in-game for help and you can always try the F5 on your keyboard

The next feature to come in the next few days are :
- the infamous multi-ship, allowing you to own more than one ship, teh towing of those ship. As far as I know, NO trade in, meaning you are gonna stack pods... this might change it will depend on the work.
- a brand new _FULL_ tutorial
- and more fixes and updates :p

We've started gathering a decent amount of surveys from all of you and are cumulating more. Those of you who haven't filled out one yet, look into the mailbox of the e-mail you registered in for an invitation to fill out the Survey. Doing this will greatly help us.

So far we've received lots of helpful comments and data from some of you, however only 7% of the whole gang filled it out so far. The more people fill it out, the better ! Plus you get a free time cumulation which will show up in your profile to boot! Make sure that you click on the link within the invite e-mail sent to you though, otherwise we won't be able to tell who filled it out (it will be noted as anonymous), so no bonus free time to those who do this. :(

Thanks ! :D

As of tonight you will be able to join 6 different games, 3 regular games and 3 test games:D . That way it's not a bargain to play the test game.! I'll also introduce test game stats with awards... ...as soon as I get the awards to display:p .

A new test game will soon be up and it will be just to demonstrate the skin power of what we are building for you. I really want to try it even doh I have a lot of work:eek:.

As you may have noticed our new website is almost fully up! It should be fully finished in about 2 days since I'm taking it slow, but once it is done I'll go back on working on the game.

I know you have all been waiting for me to come back to the game. I'm sorry it took so long to dev the website but it took epic proportion, maybe someday, sometime I'll post the story.

[URL="http://www.sylien.com/forum/profile.php?do=editavatar"]If you haven't I invite you to put an image in the forum[/URL]. It will be used in your game profile. Make your profile way cooler when people look at it.

The score are working even if you might seem then odd. Lehmund will post something about that tomorrow to explain a bit how everything works.
I'll be putting the compare function on the website ether tomorrow or after tomorrow.
Plus I'll add the buddy list! It will allow you to find your buddies game and all. Now it is time for me to sleep.

Night' all.

A few threads have appeared in the TWR discussion forum over the last week or so starting with []. We've introduced a Credits, Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) and today a solid game reference Manual.

These will all be modified and added to over time as we progress forward. All three will also appear shortly in the Help section of the new web page.

Why did we set it up like this? Well, since players will be allowed to design their own game, they will need to have their own manuals, FAQs and Credits to lay out right? The Help section will be able to show these documents for any designed game that is sufficiently balanced and fun to be marked as Official.

One piece at a time.... :D

Hello,

As you can see, we have a new web page... finally. We had a short delay to get the added security layer on there so you can't log in or register just yet, but you can look around at the site, and play the Guest Game.

The Guest Game lets you play for a while but it is on a temporary account that goes away after a short time. It is just to get visitors into the game and check it out before registration. The Tutorial game (a few tweaks and it will be available as well soon), will also be available to people not logged in.

Over the next 48 hours, a bunch of stuff will be activated, including a complete and accurate player Ranking system and Player Profiles which will let you compare and rank players against player throughout your TWR games. So if you compete well throughout, you can be in the top 10 players, and maybe #1 ?

Don't worry about the Greyed-out areas, these areas are supposed to be grey as they will be implemented later on when we have done more additions in-game (game additions are next on Vadis' plate).

Have fun with the new site and features.

Hello Trade Wars Rising fans,

I'd like to thank the community for their support of this project. It has been fun (and exhausting) for the Sylien Team, but I think we got the start of a great thing. And it is all thanks to you guys who are supporting us. It doesn't look like it but there are a handful within the community that are putting alot of hours in helping bring this "bigger than what you can see" project out there. I'm naming Omega, RocketDad, Ghecko, Jonathan Bost and a few new volunteers. Plus there are all the testers. I won't name you all because there are too many.

Now something interesting. A new member (but veteran Tradewars player), called Eewestcoaster has posted something about the game and its origins in a public space, here:

[url]http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/460294/trade_wars_rising_a_classic_reborn.html[/url]

He has asked me if it was ok to do this.

The answer is YES. The more there is talk about Trade Wars Rising, the better to help us grow from a small company/community to one that can accomplish goals with more than one coder (thanks Vadis for all the hard work, but we need more guys like you... lol.)

See here for a post about the subject for more details on how you can help like Eewestcoaster did:

[url]http://www.sylien.com/forum/showthread.php?t=454[/url]

First of all, congratz goes to Zegelmorph who won the Iron Fist game recently. As it turns out, Vadis had forgotten to activate something that both made the rankings not show the right data (in the ? page) and the code not recognize the Zegelmorph had achieved the goal of the game: retaining control over 30%+ of the Rich Cluster for 24hrs minimum.

No worries, even though you cannot see how you placed during that game right now, all rankings were saved, including the first game we made. All of this stuff is put in our database and will show in your brand new Profiles in the new page ! Give it a day or two more and we'll have the new one up for you all to see.

For the currently running games, things will probably happen in the same way. We'll announce the winner, unless Vadis gets the time to encode a way to notify winners automatically by then, perhaps in the new web page. But for the future, all of these things will be automated and changes to your profiles will be made immediately so you can already start bragging about won games.

'till next time.

Finally !

The King of the Hill games are here. Being satisfied with the combat system, it being debugged sufficiently, the addition of a real-time feedback system (logs), new cool graphics, new interface elements, and lots, lots, lots of backend work making things more optimized and much closer to completion, we finally went in and created some new competitive games.

Now, we've taken our good time to make this right, but remember that these are still Beta games, meaning that they are unfinished.

Vadis will obviously continue to code but the new bits will be tested thoroughly in the Test World game before being implemented in the competitive games. That way we should minimize the occurrences of nasty bugs when trying to compete for 1st place.

Now that the games will be running smoothly, Vadis will be implementing our fantastic new web site, which will end up being the official look for Trade Wars Rising interaction when going public, so he'll be spending slightly less time adding stuff to the game for a couple of weeks. But don't worry, it'll be well worth it as we'll be implementing Full Profiles for you all, that you will be able to build up over time, and be ranked in general as players etc...

Hope you like the update / upgrade.

One of the most important milestones for Sylien Game is the addition of the combat and feedback modules into the game. To commemorate this, we've started "King of the Hill" type games for the players to enjoy. With now over 1500 registered players without any advertisement efforts, and the doubling of our e-mail newsletter lists, we suspect our excited membership will grow organically up until the next major update, when more of the same is expected.

Next step would be to change the current [url]www.tradewarsrising.com[/url] web site to the official and final release web site as we continue to add more ships, items and gameplay modules into the game.

The game engine that runs it all, and that will eventually allow players to design and show off their own strategy games is almost complete as well.

We have decided to use the domain name [url]www.tradewarsrising.com[/url] instead of the old [url]www.tradewars.com[/url] from now on. The old URL will still work for several months but it will eventually become a site for all Official Trade Wars games.

I would therefore invite all visitors and players to change their bookmarks for Trade Wars Rising to [url]www.tradewarsrising.com[/url] now.

Just a bit of news to tell you that a brand spanking new Trade Wars Rising web page will soon be available for your use, which will in fact represent the final launch web page for the game.

We're still in the visual and functionality design phases of the revamp but I assure you that the result will blow your mind! :)

The web page will include search engines for games, player profiles with statical data, badges, awards, a game Bang utility, private user web pages and lots more.

We'll be sending you a Newsletter announcement when the new page is ready and running.

Your friendly neighborhood Spiderdesigner,
Lehmund

I welcome all our guest to join the guest game to see where the game is at. Everyone can play for 2 hours after what your asset will be deleted from the game :confused:... If you like the game register or if you think you rather wait a bit more come back in a week to make sure you join the game when it is ready for you :D

A note to tell all players that we'll need a few days to track down and crack what has come to be called the "Booting Bug" where some players get kicked out of games for no apparent reason, or seemingly at random and must Rejoin the game to continue.

Players only lose the ship they are in, and if they rejoin, they keep what empire they have accumulated so far.

As you can imagine, this may be frustrating.

So for the next few days, or until we find the problem in the code, parts of the games are going to be deactivated in order to isolate the problem.

We will post a news again when the bug is found and solved. We should resume full featured play in no time with your help.

HELP: if you get booted out of the game, DO NOT rejoin the game. Post your game state in the Bugs and Fixes area in the Forums so that Vadis can track down this thing. The sooner found, the sooner we can reactivate the features and add more modules.

Thanks to you all.

Lehmund

I've just banged the first game that will have a winner.
It is a colonisation game. You'll find all the winning specs in the info once I've wrote them down. You'll should see your score and rank ASAP as I'm working on that right now

This game will not see updates unless they are tested and approuved in a test game. It wont be rebang unless it is unwanted (server failure, etc...).

I hope you will enjoy the game :)

Re-opening of the games. You have now access to the chat/console.
if you need help with the console just type /? or /help and you will get it.

This is the first of our biggest update yet. We are working on making the genesis torpedo available and making all the citadel/port level available for the week-end.

Hope you will enjoy it

Just a quick note to say tell you all about a few changes to the Trade Wars general concept we're building here.

1.The name will change to Trade Wars Rising, which is a more general and inspiring name than Tournament or Revolution. Plus there are other reasons behind the change which shall not be revealed... Nyahaha.
2.The game Trade Wars Rising is actually just a small bit of the software we're creating, which allows players to create their own game variant to Trade Wars Rising, with its own name, style and even graphics if you like. All games generated this way by players will be playable by other players so you get lots of different types of games in there. Sylien will also create some other mods that are special too for fun, some as Tournament modes, some as standard games.
3.Other minor changes to what was planned originally.

The idea here is to give the game the most flexibility possible. Even though the general platform won't carry the Trade Wars name itself, it will allow for a large variety of balanced games on our system, and the flexibility of doing what we want with these games as we won't possibly infringe on trademark issues etc... So we certainly think this is the best approach for the product and what is to come (yep there is more that we are not telling you.... teeheehee).

Have fun and watch for more news coming up.

Hey,

We just did a revamp of our web sites, combining the Sylien GameClub with our corporate site Sylien, into one community site. This site will build up over time. Right now we wanted to bring it back to a simple yet neat design for all visitors to enjoy. Right now, you are getting some dynamic stuff, like latest forum posts and polls, but later on you'll be able to get a glimpse of what is happening throughout Sylien Games and our products at a glance. We're working up to that over time.

You'll notice that you will be able to register and log into the site, like you used to do with the Sylien Game Club. This registers/logs you into the community forums as well as the Trade Wars Rising product (more on the name change... again...), thus making it very easy for you to navigate from one place to another seamlessly.

Explore, play, enjoy!