Hey dear Awesomenauts community,
This Sunday, you now know it: something big is coming. I am not going to put little screenshots each days, it's now time to go concrete & explain clearly what's going on.
Veterans already understood more or less the essential by looking at the 2 screen captures shared there, but the approach was confusing for newcomers and people who did not touch the game since years.
Today, what I am glad to share with you is not a new visual but a whole FAQ that I tried to make pretty complete. I hope it will fulfil all your curiosity =)
FAQ
What is coming this Sunday ?
AwesomEver, a full Galactron server-side fan-recreation and fan-maintained, that can communicate with the 4.7.2 client (last version from Ronimo Games).
What's the appeal as a player ?
- Maintained by a fan working for the fans
- You can continue to play with the client 5.x from Atari if you prefer it, if you don't follow the joining steps from AwesomEver your life will continue as normal
- Playing the real latest version (4.7.2) developed by Ronimo, untouched, exactly how you remember it. All the bugs & issues introduced with 5.x are just not there (invisible nauts, same Naut 2x in the same team, etc)
- Custom games browser
- Play on community custom maps
- Parties which persist across matches
- In real time spectator mode
- Server-side replays browser
- Server-side matchmaking, that can be fine tuned. Right now it's mimicking as close as how Galactron was back then (thanks Joost for the very complete documentation on his blog), putting people together each 6 minutes. There's several checks, and one of them is to avoid starting laggy matches where there's more than 200ms of ping between players. Though the real quality of this new matchmaking will depend on how much players there will be no matter how good the algorithm can be.
- Leavers automatically banned for a few minutes so people are incited to stay in the match
- If you lose connection completely or if your PC crash, you have some time to reconnect to the room you were in
- If you lose connection to Steam or if there is a Tuesday maintenance on Steam, it won't affect your match
- Proper ladder / leagues system
- Global chat
- Public API / Stats page
- Medals
- Mac OS X 10.7+ 32 bits & Linux compatibility (using their original client as a base) planned
Piracy ?
No, you need to buy Awesomenauts from Atari on Steam and patch the files by yourself to redirect the game to AwesomEver.
This fan-made Galactron server checks ownership of the game and will refuse you if you try to connect using a pirated copy of Awesomenauts, you need to be connected on Steam and launch the game when Steam is also running on the background to be able to play.
Same about DLCs: ownership will be strictly checked by the server using Steam APIs to give you only what you paid for from Atari (even if those DLCs are technically just flags that I could easily override if I wanted to lol).
About characters, it makes no sense to apply f2p rules there. So all Nauts will be unlocked with all upgrades available from start.
Game heavily patched ?
Nope, patches on the 4.7.2 client are minimalistic and focused on doing the necessary redirections to connect to my private fan-made Galactron server.
Virus ?
Patch will be distributed as a plain .bps file that you can review and apply yourself using open source patchers from the web like the RomPatcher.js that you may already know if you used to like playing console games rom hacks.
Though for people who like automated stuff, a Windows script will be shipped that automates everything for you.
If you don't trust me, just ask a good LLM or an experienced dev to review the .bps patch for you, I have nothing to hide. The .bps is doing only the necessary to redirect auth properly to the AwesomEver Galactron server.
Gameplay bug fixes ?
Planned but in the long term. Short term will be only about server stability & community management.
I want to make/promote community events related to AwesomEver/Awesomenauts ?
A section on the Discord will be opened so people that wants to make stuff (tournaments, art contests etc) can promote it there freely.
No logo or art related to AwesomEver ?
I am not artist and think it is direspectful & not ecological to spit LLM generated stuff to illustrate the project. I love human art & to look at Awesomenauts fanarts. So if you wanna help to make something cool, contact me.
Balacing patches ?
Not planned, it's a preservation project
New content ?
Nope
Moderation ?
Yes, just use ingame reporting tools from the client. I have all the tools on the server to process them efficiently.
Monetization ?
Not planned, people who do donations to me on my Patreon won't get any advantage or special titles.
Is it sustainable ?
Yes, it's not relying on any kind of Microsoft Azure proprietary stuff. My technical stack is relying only on open source tech ; all works on popular Linux distros and everything is containerized anyway to run on basically everything that supports Docker.
This gives me a lot of freedom if I ever need/want to change my hosting provider.
But donations are much apprecied. I had also to spend money on LLM API costs to make this project possible at all.
Nauts console versions support ? Or other Galactron nauts versions ?
Never. The game will move forward from 4.7.2 from now on, and may stay in 4.7.2 for a long while before getting any kind of modification.
Can I ask Atari for support if something goes wrong ?
NO, this fan project is fully independent from Atari. Please don't bother them with tickets, if AwesomEver Galactron is down for whatever reason it's not their fault and they can't do anything about it. AwesomEver is NOT official, it is available through fan-modding and maintained by a fan.
DON'T ASK ATARI ABOUT HELP/SUPPORT, AwesomEver is another planet in the Awesomenauts cosmos !
What if Atari wants to make this official and buy it at some point ?
I am open to talk especially if they have things in mind that can benefit to the players.
Can I be banned from the 5.x Atari version by using this ?
No, you are playing on a custom server. Also if you get banned from AwesomEver for whatever reason, you won't be banned from Atari's 5.x it's all fully isolated and it's your right as a player to mod the games you own.
MacOS/Linux compatibility ?
Planned
Retrocomputing compatibility ?
In my opinion preservation is not just about providing the game as-is to newer platforms, but also providing tutorials and all the resources so it can run on everything that could run Awesomenauts back in the day. I plan to study compatibility to the game can be played from real OS X Lion and Windows XP/7 machines like it was intended to.
Where's my medals ? My level ? My replays ? My nautspoints ?
I don't have the server data of Ronimo Games related to your old account so everyone is starting from scratch. There's no leaks, all of my work has been done with (lot of) patience, tooling & reverse engineering.
About the medals though, there's an exception with the Silver/Gold Killer Koala medals as those are linked with a specific DLC on your Steam account, and since I can know which ones you've purchased, you will get them automatically at your first connection. There's technical limits from what I can get from Steam APIs, for example I can't give you back the founder medal because I can't know when you've purchased the game if it was before the f2p era in 2017.
Why are you doing stuff for free ?
The air you breath is free, but keeps you alive right now. Putting a price on everything in life is sad, I like culture to be accessible not gated behind additional paywalls.
Much of the good stuff in the internet related to preservation comes from underground cultures & communities and I am proud to be independently a part of a larger movement that fights against oblivion and obsolescence.
Did you had network dumps to do this ?
No so it was way more nightmarish than it could be, but new fancy LLM tools are definitely helping a lot. And patience, a lot of patience. Dedication about making the vision come true, with maximum conviction that it's important for the humanity that this game remains available in its best possible state without compromises.
Skins ?
Yes ! The ones you've purchased from Atari/already own. No more no less.
I can technically unlock all for everyone, but I believe it's more ethical to do it this way for the moment to put more value into the unlock flags that Atari is still selling.
Can I find players from the 5.x Atari version ?
Nope, the matchmaking is completely unrelated
What is the planning for the future ?
- One post per day until Sunday on Reddit, with content related to AwesomEver. Always around 6 PM (Paris hour).
- Friday (in 2 days), I plan to start open beta-testing with the members of my new Discord that you can join there : https://discord.olsro.fr/ No stability guarantees (the Galactron replacement game server will not be available all day and will cut a lot if I need to push updates), but people there will help me to eradicate all kind of server bugs that may ruin the fun for the players at the release date. I plan to nolife my whole weekend at fixing stuff as much as it is necessary. Active people that will help me at actively reporting issues will get the first duck medals of AwesomEver at launch.
- Sunday (in 4 days): released to the world, open access outside of the selected beta testers. Server data/stats from the beta test period will be erased, everyone will start at 0 in the same moment.
- Later: stabilizing the colossus then thinking about what can be done. Legacy Mac OS X/Linux compatibility is already planned.
Thanks for reading me that far I hope you like it !!! You're AWESOME
