BattleMaster Turns 20

[Anaris]

On January 1st, 2021, BattleMaster will turn 20 years old.

On that same day, we will be completing the transition of ownership and control from Tom Vogt to the current admins, Vita and me.

Short-Term Changes

• Today, I will be transferring control of the battlemaster.org domain to my account. This may involve some slight disruption as the changes propagate through the DNS system, so please be patient.
• Between now and January 1st, Vita and I will be finalizing the setup of the game and its ancillary pieces (wiki, forum, bugtracker, email) on a new server we own and control. This will be mostly transparent from the outside, but it does mean that aside from emergencies, other code changes will be more or less suspended between now and then.
• On the 1st, at a specific time we will decide on and announce soon, we will switch over from the old server to the new, putting the old server in maintenance mode and copying the up-to-the-minute current database to the new server. During the switchover, which shouldn't take more than a few hours at most to propagate the DNS changes, the only game-related space that will be reliably available for everyone is the Discord.

Medium-Term Code-Related Changes

• Most things will not change. BattleMaster will be the same game, and Vita and I have been running it for several years now. The biggest changes will be for our convenience, which we hope you will see in the form of a slightly faster progression of code updates.
• We are taking this opportunity to make a fairly significant behind-the-scenes change that should further improve the ease of updating BattleMaster (warning: dev-speak ahead): On the new server, the game will be set up within a Symfony framework, using a LegacyBridge in order to be able to access parts of the game that are still set up entirely in the current, non-framework, scripts. Over time, we will be able to convert pages from the old format to the newâ€"by and large, you should not notice much difference in them except the URLs.
• The PayPal donations will be directed to me, and continue to be used primarily to defray the monthly costs of running the server.

Non-Code-Related Changes

This winter, Vita and I will be working out some principles and practicalities for expanding the community's say in how the game is run. Details and timing on this are still very much TBD, but we are interested in community governance and what it can bring to the game and its players.

There will also be some additional announcements in the coming days and weeks, as we have some other somewhat-related projects to kick off.