Discovery Freelancer Website

Discovery Gaming Community, our main message board located at http://discoverygc.com, is back online. We are setting up the new server right now so there may be issues with downtime, but in general you are free to post and use the forums as usual.

Thank you for your patience during the downtime.

Today, on June 14 2008, Discovery is celebrating its 3rd birthday. Three years is not a very long time compared to human life, but quite a lot for an independent gaming project that started out from (almost) nowhere. A forum with only a few members, and plans to create a Freelancer server with a small mod for it.

Since then, we’ve come a long way. Server has grown to become the largest Freelancer server available online. Board changed hosting, server changed ownership, new people came, while old ones left. We’ve exceeded the 128 player limit, and reached the record 197 players simultaneously online. The mod received a genre award at ModDB.com Mod of the Year-2006 contest, was downloaded hundreds thousands of times from various sites, and was even stolen by a rogue server and re-released under another name. Everyone within the community can tell many more interesting stories on what was going on… and I’ll just reveal some celebration plans for this month.

First of all, you are welcome to participate in Discovery Screenshot Contest. Sure, there will be prizes – but it’s not only about prizes! The best screenshots can be used to promote Discovery on various websites, including ModDB, and you can help to showcase the mod from the best point of view. Second, you all know about the recent Discovery 4.85: Reunion announcement. Very soon, I’ll post Q&A article revealing much more details on what we are planning to do. And answer more questions that you may ask yourself.

Good flying, and stay with Discovery!

Discovery Freelancer v4.84, officially released on December 9 2007, has reached a total amount of 85,000downloads from our site (according to Webalizer stats) and 11,500 more downloads from Mod DB. We did not count downloads from other sources that host the new version of the mod. So, 4.84 has reached 100,000 downloads in 3 months of its existence, which is really impressive.

Another impressive number is displayed on the screenshot above (click to see full version): there are 177 players online at one time on the Discovery 24/7 RP server! This is probably a record number for any Freelancer server, ever; to achieve it, we used the tool released by v0dk4 that allowed to surpass the 128 player limit of original Freelancer server.

We are also glad to announce that Discovery Wiki is back online after years of extinction. You can visit it by following this link: www.discoveryfl.com/wiki. The resurrected Wiki will contain information about the mod itself, about our server, its factions, upcoming role-playing events, as well as info about other Discovery servers that their admins will be able to edit themselves. Also, the Wiki will play an important role in organizing development of the new version of the mod, providing safe ground for sharing information between our modellers and other community members who contribute to the mod.