This thread is semi-irrelevant now because I already took the actal Empires server down a little bit ago, but I figured it's worth posting about anyway. So yeah, at the end of this week, EPIC's Dedicated box will expire and won't be renewed. In the past this has hosted Empires Servers for public play and test, various community servers for other games (TTT, OpenTTD, etc), Empires development stuff, all the web services associated with Empires and of course, the EPIC Teamspeak. The new developers have taken on all the web related services and the Empires box hasn't really had a place in the game for a while with other servers having far more active administration teams. Having said that, I did get a few disappointed messages when I took down the Empires server a couple of weeks ago because I didn't feel it worth going through all the hassle of updating Sourcemod for the sake of a couple of weeks. I've also handed over the Empiresmod.com domain to the new developers as well, hence the forum downtime in the last couple of days. I want to thank everyone who's played on our server over the past 5 years or so, as well as further back from when I used to help run Napalm's servers (Ghost server, Napalm's funhouse and G4TC). Lastly, we still seem to get a fair bit of traffic in our Teamspeak 3 server, it seems that a lot of community members use it for playing various games with their friends or whatever. Unfortunately, this will also be going down. We'll be moving to Discord at the end of this week. The address for this server is: discord.me/epic or https://discord.gg/qc3ggxt We're still trying to get our head around Discord so it may take a while to set up the server properly.
PS - I'd still like to hold an OpenTTD game during July, so if anyone has access to a server or has a really good internet connection with a PC they can leave running over a weekend (and can give me some way of setting it up) then that could work to. It's pretty low overhead.
I have a sad feeling about this even though I knew it was coming and even though community members, at times, competed Epic Server and VIPER Server against each other, behind the scenes you and I became allies, helping each other when needed. I want to thank you for that. I also want to thank you for the time, money and effort you put into Epic Server for many years. I know first hand what it takes to do this and its no small task. Thank you for all of it. R.I.P EPIC Empires Sever
End of an era. I still remember how you back in the days changed the research times server side on Napalms, 30 minutes before EPIC(?) had a PUG. That was my first lasting impression of you. :D
I don't remember this actually. Also, apparently I haven't fully given over empiresmod.com yet but that should happen soonish.
The end of an era. I'm thankful we had a mature person (albeit one who liked crysis) at the helm for many years preventing (along with viper) the terrible servers that plagued the game before from getting a stranglehold on it. I hope it continues. also discord is shit
This is fantastic news, I had pretty much given up on the idea of another OTTD game like the good old days.
Cheers for hundreds (or thousands) of hours of fun. Is there anything unique in the map folder that should maybe get preserved before it goes altogether?
Not quite the Domain ownership still needs to be handed over, preferably before the domain expires in March.
The last EPIC server was a lot more "slimmed" than previous ones we had with 200+ maps. Realistically speaking, any map our previous server would have had, I'll have on one of my install backups. I have 2.24d, 2.25 and 2.30 backups, my final Pre-Steam backup (2.31), Pre-Steampipe backup as well as a backup from a week ago or so. So if anyone ever wants a map or whatever just give me a shout, chances are I'll have it somewhere if it came out more than a year ago. There's also a lot of custom stuff knocking about in those as well.
Oh, I didn't see that post lol. Late edit: Everything is handed over and the epic dedi seems to have been taken down now.
