We did a lot of investigation, I don't want people think we just threw our hands up, a couple devs (I won't name names) beat their brains out on it for months and made some progress here and there. But as we started to dig in deeper some of these things really smashed our hopes and dreams:
- JTL is a space game, the ground game is not really 3d, so we need different spatial indexing tech
- In space, projectiles "tick" (they move in a direction with a velocity) and they collide with another object, on the ground you can't dodge a rifle shot, in space you can dodge a missile.
- Since the game was written by different devs, some subtle things are different like the coordinate system is not the same as the ground game (i.e. x/z/y etc.)
- core3 was not designed for "ticks", we might be able to hack it in but it would be a nightmare
- In space nobody can hear you scream!!!!
Now all this said, it
CAN be done, its a lot more work than any of the current devs can afford to dedicate.
I personally lack the drive/interest/passion to make the space game work. It was "ok" to me but never inspired me, I'm a MMO guy not a FPS'er or 3d Space kind of player.
I would be happy to see a new "SIG" (Special Interest Group) form around JTL in the swgemu community, if we can find a couple talented and passionate devs who would like to leverage our CI/CD pipelines, test hosting etc then I'd be more than happy help and support.
No matter what happens we are progressing towards 1.0, just at this point we do not see a path that includes full JTL emulation for it.
We will hit the 1.0 milestone (no dates yet) and then launch a new server that will include on-going content expansion and other things the "new" server community will be passionate about.
We have numerous ideas in this direction, and for me personally this is more interesting than waiting 5 more years while we try to reverse engineer more of JTL.