Hmmm, running out of titles there...

All forum posts today are curtousy of Marc. Let's start with these good news from :

We plan on getting game-capture up on the site ASAP. We're having some nasty delays with the site of late, but we have been assured that a major overhaul is in the works. Thanks for your patience.

Very nice. Let's continue with some more good news:

We are planning on a stealth-enabled Starfury to be available in the game. The Black Omegas were specifically Psi-Corp ships -we won't have the player flying a Psi-Corp ship, but one with similar capabilities.

And for conclusion we have this post, where the nature of the evolving universe is explained a bit.

I've been slacking lately, so much that Jeff e-mailed me and told me to get off my lazy butt and get to it. And they don't even pay me... <*sigh*>. :)
Ok, let's start with a big post by Jeff telling us why the game won't have 50 people in multiplayer games:

Answering you number of players question on why it is so difficult to do 50 players and the like. One main concern is the amount of data that needs to be transmitted across the network. With our game, the multiplayer portion will be keeping track of many more ships than a typical lucas arts game and most other games that I know of (I can't think of one game that is trying to accomplish what we are trying here). When you are keeping track of whole fleets, the positions and orientations of all the ships in the fleets plus all projectiles spawned from those fleets can really bog down the network.

We are doing a lot of things to make this playable. I don't want to go into the technical details about it, but suffice it to say that we are making each client in the game do most of the work and by only sending messages across the network on certain occasions and letting the client handle most of the movement and the like. Once you see what we are doing, you will understand why the limitations are in place.

Sorry I can not be more specific, but I think Dan and Ken would have my head if I said more :)

To which Dan replyed:

Well said, Jeff. ;)

Next, we have this little sub-thread that basically tells us that the game will change every time we play.

Some info on a mac release in this post from Marc:

Let's put it this way: the option is open, but nothing has been set in motion yet for a Mac port.

And some more interesting info on the game in this post from Marc once again.
First about the color of Jumpgates:

Blue is inbound (from hyperspace) amber is outbound (from normal space).

Then about the cast for the cutscenes:

> also will Bruce Boxlieghter and other stars of the show provide
> voices for the game?

Voices and faces. The complete cast has not been finalized (contracts need to be signed), but we are shooting for most of the majors and have reasonable expectations of getting them.

And, finally, about the time the game is set in:

Yes, the game takes place in that time (2262-2267).

Phew! That's all for now boys and girls...

Lot's of info on the forum today. Here are all the official Sierra lines:

Randy and Jeff had some comments regarding a hyperspace discussion:

We just finished putting in Hyperspace as a matter of fact. As of right now, if the jumpgate is open, you can enter Hyperspace and get lost till you turn blue in the face

I'll say two things as an answer: Hyperspace is navigable and available at any time...but, you are in the EA military and will be expected to follow orders. You don't HAVE to (there are no rails in this game), but just like in life, there are consequences to your actions. In an evolving universe this means that you get to live with your choices. I'll add - don't worry, you'll see a great deal of the universe in each game.

To understand better what they are talking about read the whole thread, you lazy bums.

On another thread Dan told us some more groovy stuff about the physics engine:

Yes, your fighter will 'bounce' off when you tap something that has a comparable speed and direction. However, if you hit it hard, you will be toast. And it may be possible to carefully deflect an asteroid, but it would be very risky

For all those people interested, the First League based on the Babylon 5 Space SIM is nearing completion, we are calling ourselves The Interstellar Alliance(ISA). I know some of you are going "a league so early?", well we started this early so that we could take our time and setup this league right and dont do a rush job. We are about 50% done with designing our pages and are in the process of setting up message boards, Government pages, Roster system and various other sections of the league. We are looking for people who have HTML,Javascript,CGI experiance to help with the development of the league.

If your interested check out http://starfury.org and e-mail me and my XO if you wish to help out with the site development.

Ares ISA CO starfury@starfury.org
Dial'ek ISA XO and webmaster dialek@starfury.org

Update, November 5th This wasn't answered by anyone from Sierra. But it hasn't been corrected too, so it's probably true.

Some news slipped by me... I saw this on ISA:

Q: Have you thought about running a battle.net type service for this game and if so will it have the rank listings like freespace did?
A: YES! But no word on rankings
Q: Can you give us a ballpark range of when the game will enter Beta testing? And will Beta Testing be open to people?
A: January and Yes.

Dan answered a question on the forum giving us some concrete multiplayer info:

We're expecting to have up to 8 on internet dial-up and 16 on LAN. Fairly typical limits, but we'll be doing some unique things with multiplayer to make it more interesting.