Hacker's Corner

2009 has been a big year for HackWars. Earlier in the year, we decided to open source our codebase. This has lead to many individuals within the HackWars community contributing to additional game-content. This has culminated in a huge release that just went out, spearheaded by DraconisRavenix and TerribleTrioJoe. This brings to HackWars: * 1500+ New NPCs * 150+ New Items * 38 New Networks * 30+ New Missions/Quests (with many more to come). 2010 Should prove to be an amazing year for HackWars. If you played HW early on, or were getting bored with the lack of content updates, now is a great time to discover this unique game once again. Visit: http://www.hackwars.net to see what all the fuss is about. Johnny Heart (Hacker-In-Chief)

HackWars Is Turning Two!

Visit us at,

http://www.hackwars.net

Two years ago we launched a revolutionary MMO that encouraged players to learn how to program as a play mechanic. It has been an interesting and exciting time for both devs and players, and this newsletter marks a relaunch we have been preparing for quite some time.

The most important change in the HackWars architecture is that we have moved towards an open source development model. If you played HackWars early on in our dev cycle, read on to learn about some of our exciting new features. If you enjoyed HackWars, but felt that you would have liked to have contributed more to the dev process, come on back and give it another shot.

Here's what we've been working on:
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Quests

One major upcoming feature is a complex story-based questing system. 100s of quests are slated to be released, and that's just the beginning.

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Randomized Hardware/FireWall Drops

Since the early days of HackWars, there has been a major revamp of how we approach item drops when you are fighting NPCs. Collect rare and valuable hardware from HackWars' many challenging adversaries.

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HackWars 3D

We're developing a fairly powerful OpenGL 3D engine, built on the in-game scripting language. This is a work in progress, and could definitely use some help from the community.

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APIs, APIs, APIs

Build video games in-game, write to your computer's virtual file system, build fully functional CMS systems, zombie other computers, and that's just what we KNOW HackScript can do for you. For the coders out there, HackWars now offers infinitely more possibilities than it did early on.

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Game Credits

We also are plotting ways to keep HackWars afloat financially, so we've opened a web store! In the store, you can purchase game credits which you can then use to buy cool stuff like FireWalls and AGP/PCI cards.

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REDISCOVER HACKWARS

Hack Wars Needs You!

HackWars wants to be one of the most interesting experiments in MMO history. We are moving to an open source architecture, and need players and contributors who want to:

- Help build complex architectures in Java, such as HackWars' 3D graphics-engine, server, and scripting-language.
- Help develop in-game quests in HackScript.
- Help plan stories, quests, and other in-game content.

Come Join the Hacker Experiment at:

http://www.hackwars.net

Cheers,

Johnny Heart.