I hope those people who say "We'll just need to code a new FLserver and all the limitations are gone" know what would be involved in such a task.
As an example, just getting a workable opensource Broadcomm WiFi driver for Linux took almost 2 years, and involved a fair amount of very talented programmers.
Why ? Because in order to not infringe on any intellectual property and copyrights, such a task needs to be divided into 2 seperate tasks :
a) One group who, without dissassembling the FLserver executable, write specs for the new FLserver code, based on observations of what the current exceutable does machinecode wise at specific points in its execution (debuggers running during execution, register inspction, messagepassing inspection, protocol inspection are OK, dissassembling the excutable into source code is not).
b) Another group who, based on the specs written from the first group, code the new FLserver executable.
I don't know how many individual actual active players there are on the DiscoveryMod servers, but if we say that in total there are 5000 persons willing to play Discovery FL online, thats a very small community to draw programmers from, in the sense of rewriting the FLserver from scratch.
And still there will be the question whether Microsoft can bring the "deriative works" question into play in a court of law, if they so wish.
Even the current "hack" of the FLserver code used on Discovery RP 24/7 to support more than the official 128 player limit, could be seen by Microsoft as an infringement of their Intellectual Property, since that involves modifying the original FLserver exe.
So a rewrite of the FLserver executable is not something I see happening - ever. Feel free to prove me wrong with actual code, but for the love of Sirius, stop using the "we just need to rewrite FLserver" as a solution to any and all limitations the current flserver has.
Cpt. Miller, of the BHG|Core vessel "Miller's Draft"
Out of bats, Out of bots, Out of torps - Down to harsh language...
