Due to the fact that there are many things that need to be rewritten, I am ensuring comprehensive rewrite by commencing a new site from scratch on the Sun server. Information will be ported over piecemeal and rewritten to correspond to the new architecture. This rewrite will likely take several months, but will cover everything that needs to be redone at every level of the site. Over the coming weeks, this list will expand as I port code over piece by piece, and introduce new elements to the site. Until this rewrite is done and playtested, there will not be deployment to the production site.

The schedule in the first post was becoming a mess, and also creating more work unnecessarily. I'll just reply in this thread whenever there is a major update. Here's a list of the major updates so far:

• Core PHP architecture ported to new system
• Core MySQL data storage methods ported to new system
• phpBB3 and main site rationalised to consume a single codebase
• Introduction of replete constants code, to allow modularisation of many more parts of the site
• Core module architecture finalised
• TitleBars module completed
• RandomQuote module completed
• News module completed, with storage in MySQL and full interface to manipulate
• AdminTools module commenced, with tool to manipulate core MySQL definitions table finalised
• ArtistTools module commenced
• ArtistTools - Background Submission tool finalised, able to create new projects, attach the entry in the background table to the project, auto-assign owner, attachment, and feedback
• ArtistTools - Background Submission tool instructions finalised

Just a quick update on this. I've been coding up the key architecture that will drive the new site. Pretty much everything "foundation" is done now, so it's just a matter of porting code across. First though is the work that's to be done on maps, scnearios, and combat eras, which will all be available for the community to develop (though I will do initial development). In May-June I'll be taking a couple of months holidays from work, so it should all be finished off by August or so, if not beforehand

Quick update here. I've moved the code to another architecture (OOP), which is much more robust than the modular method I was using. Code goes in extremely quickly now, with a piece of code taking about 10% of the time it took with the original code base. I'm currently doing contract work to pay the bills, so I can afford more time on the site, but that's all dependant on how long the contracting goes for. Hopefully it is ongoing, as I need only put in 15-20 hours a week to comfortably pay the bills now.

On another note, I'll be forming a company with a couple of gun coders in the next few months, and this will be one of 3 private projects we work on, so there is a strong possibility that multiple coders will be working on the site by the end of the year. This is one of the main reasons I have moved to an OOP architecture, as these coders are used to working with C# and ASP.NET. One of the coders is happy to learn PHP and work directly on the site, the other coder is quite busy at the moment but wants to move towards Flash and iPhone apps. The new code architecture should allow for simple data delivery to incoming requests from other applications, so hopefully in the future the game will be available not only on the web, but also via iPhone, and installed applications.