Welcome to 2023 – new mods, enhancements and other exciting news

Hey all,

the time has come for another round of updates. “Wait, what? But last time it took you over two years to post another update”, I hear you yelling in my head already.

Yes, you’re right – it did. But the rate this community is growing at has increased immensely, and that is honestly amazing.

 

We’ve got a fresh load of new mods made by our community (or previously undiscovered ones):

1. Choum has sent us a lot of mods translated into the French language: Custom Jafs, Location Finder (and its Multimod variant), Manual Countermeasures (and its Multimod variant) as well as Multimod itself. He has also sent in the french movies converted into Widescreen format, just like the ones we already have in English.

Thanks for your contribution, Choum! All of these mods are now available in the category “French Mods” (previously called “Jet’s Mods).

2. Atheist Antichrist has continued making amazing Pirate ship mods. All of these have been bundled into a separate category now. Keep it up, man! Please visit our Discord to get a personal round of congratulations! 🙂

Mods available from Atheist Antichrist: 

– Advanced Patcom Pirate Skin
– Pirate ‘Vette
– AA_Ships_Only (+ Black variant)
– Pirate Enhanced Mod (+ Black variant)
– Pirate Ships All-In-One v.1.0.1

3. Brandon0sh also deserved a separate category for all of the great mods made by now.

Mods available from Brandon0sh:

– Advanced Patcom -> Bastille Destroyer Mod (new version)
– Heavy Corvette -> Corporate Cruiser Mod (new version)
– Stargate Universe FTL LDS Sound Effects (which we sadly can’t put up here due to copyright reasons)
– Tug -> Custom Corporate Interceptor (Executor) Mod

4. Last but not least, Evzhy has delved into the game logic to create some truly amazing stuff. You can get all of it here:

Mods available from Evzhy:

– Custom Jafs Plus – an even more enhanced version of the original “Custom Jafs”
– Director Mode Patcher – a DLL patcher that lets us get rid of the Director Mode, saving a lot of time for speedruns etc.
– Enhanced traffic creation script – get crazy with traffic until the game crashes

 

Speedruns? We’re doing speedruns now?

 I-War 2 was finally accepted into the game sections on speedrun.com! Thanks to JeffersonClay (not the real one) and Brandon0sh we can now submit times for the full game, segmented runs or single acts.

You can visit the section on speedrun.com here.

At the moment, there are only times for Act 0 and Act 1 submitted. Speedrunning EoC is still in its early stages so the details for submitting runs, making sure players don’t cheat, which mods would be allowed or not etc. are still being discussed on our Discord in the channel #speedrun-tips-and-bragging. Please join if you want to be a part of this!

 

Progress on the new website

The website rewrite has now officially started. Currently, i-war2.com runs on Joomla 3.x with a lot of plugins. I was still very inexperienced when I did the last rewrite, so it’s a terrible system that just needs to go away forever.
I have now bought converter software to migrate all of our articles, images, attachments, downloads, comments, forum posts, users and much more to WordPress. I have been developing WordPress themes and plugins commercially for many years now so this will be a much better basis for the new website.

What I already know:

– Private Messages will not be migrated over to the new website. I suggest backing those up manually if you want to keep them.
– Submitting mods will be much more automated. At the moment I am the bottleneck for any new mods since I have to manually add them to the website. I will write tools to let you do that by yourself. 

The new website will soon be available on https://beta.i-war2.com – although it will probably take a few weeks to have something to show there.
The website code will be made open-source on https://github.com/lichtmetzger/iwar-theme – you can send in feature requests there, if you want.

As for the deadline? Hopefully sometime this year. Joomla 3.x will be end of life in August, so I have a soft-deadline. 🙂

 

That’s all for now!
-schmatzler