News W3D Hub's 2017 Roadmap - Plans for the Future

[OWA]

Hi everyone! We're already a month into 2017 and it feels like this year is flying by already! I just want to take this opportunity to let you know know some of the stuff that we have in the pipeline for the coming months! We've just upgraded our forum to IPB 4.0, which brings with it a whole new realm of possibilities that we will most definitely explore!

Strike and the gang have been working hard to make this forum upgrade a reality for everyone to enjoy and now that we're finally here we can start focusing on the future a bit more. We're proud of the work that we do here in this community, but now we have even larger ambitions that we want to carry out in order to make this place bigger and better than it has ever been before.

Here's just a few features that you can expect to see over the coming months:

• Tiberian Sun: Reborn: We are currently fully committed to completely re-balancing and overhauling Tiberian Sun: Reborn in order to make it a much more enjoyable game to play. Work is currently underway and we'll try and release some more information when we have more things to show! Wallywood is at the helm of the project once again, with myself moonsense715 and TeamWolf all committed to helping push the release out. The 10th anniversary of December 31st 2006 may have passed, but rest assured, Reborn will see a lot of love this year.
   
• Red Alert 2: Apocalypse Rising: Development on AR is simmering along nicely, although a few of us have been redirected onto Reborn for the time being. Rest assured though, once Reborn has been overhauled, we'll be training our eyes back onto AR once again, with some great new features that will change the way you play C&C mode forever!
   
• Expansive Civilian Warfare: We're aiming to publish ECW to the launcher publically with the view distance executable fix as soon as we can, although there are a few complications that we need to overcome first pertaining to that system. We're putting in the work that should hopefully allow us to install, run and update this great project from the launcher fully, so watch out for it!
   
• Red Alert: A Path Beyond: APB will continue receiving updates as per usual. Not much to report on here, but the next point should provide more info on what other APB-related things we'll be doing to in infrastructure in order to keep it running smoothly. As always, big kudos to pushwall for keeping the engine running on this fantastic project.
   
• Players & Stats: we have a dedicated team working on upgrading the stats system for APB and porting it over to Reborn, which should help boost player counts, but we'll also need your help to spread the word and tell the internet about the awesome games that we make here! At some point in the next few months, I'd personally like to put together a media pack with screenshots, posters, banners and other things so that we can tell PC gamers about the fantastic work that we do here. I feel that APB and Reborn aren't being played as much as they could due to a lack of awareness, so this year we'll be looking to tackle that problem and bring more players into the fold.
   
• Download Manager: We'll be plugging in IP.Downloads to handle community mods, custom skins and other files, just as it was back when we were at BHP. Hopefully we can rely on you guys to make some great content for the entire community to enjoy across all of our projects!
   
• Discord Server: FRAYDO has been working hard to set up a community Discord server. For those of you who don't know about Discord, it's a text and voice chat application that can be used via a client or web browser. This won't replace our current TeamSpeak server, but will sit nicely alongside it, in order to provide an accessible place for the community to gather. We understand that not everybody is comfortable with voice chat as well as installing TeamSpeak, so this is our solution to those of you who want to chat and play games together.
   
• Integrated Chat: We want to work on integrating a chat box into the forum. We haven't decided whether to directly plug in IRC or our upcoming Discord server. We've still got some details to work out on that end.
   
• Bug Tracker: The bug tracker is noticeably absent from the new forum, but it will be back at some point.
   
• Advanced Tags & Prefixes: The old thread tagging system from the previous version of the forum is also missing, but we have plans to return it soon!

These are just some of the great game updates and community upgrades that you can expect to see this year. We also have a couple of extra things that we're keeping close to our chests as well. We've got to have a couple of secrets right!

I also want to take this opportunity to sincerely thank akhero47, as without the donations that he made to the community, these upgrades would probably still be on hold. So a big thanks to him for all of his help! As ever, if you guys feel like contributing to our community improvement projects, feel free to drop us a PM. We'll have a proper donate button up soon that will allow this system to be a lot more seamless and we will make sure to let you know what your donations go towards if you contribute. We're very fortunate that we have people like Strike who are willing to keep the lights on for us, but as they say, every little bit helps!

As a final present, I want to let you all know that the Reborn forum theme has now been completed and is available for you guy to use! I put in some hours over the weekend to get this up and running as soon as possible, since I know you guys love dark forum themes! I'll be prioritizing the APB theme next! You can access the theme by clicking "Theme" at the bottom of the page. I have also made it the default board theme for now as well.

Thanks for reading guys and I hope you're all as psyched for 2017 as we are!

- OWA & the W3D Hub Staff

[FRAYDO]