XNova becomes Wootook!
You can now visit us by adding wootook.org to your bookmarks!
The XNova project changes its name to be more in the present day, it is also because those who, since 3 years – more than 4/5 of its life – are making the project what it is now aren’t those who started it and we are wishing to wipe out these chaotic starts.
After 3 years and a half, tens of forks and at least as many translations and a fully renewed team, it is now time to refocus the goals of the project.
Looking a bit in the past…
Ath the start, the XNova project is launched as an OGame clone, in a few months tens of players are enjoying the game on multiple game servers, a community is built. Shamefully, the database is destroyed by a wrong database maintenance handling made by the admins of this time, this first website and the game servers wiped out.
The Next-Gen project was then launched to build a game engine easier to manage and easier to extend. It’s at this time that Hoegarden and I came in. It was a very challenging project, the team grows through 12 persons lead by Garfield, the one who launched the Next-Gen project. Time has then made the motivationless members be less active. Those who have launched the original project didn’t really want to rebuild something from scratch, they made tantrum, not even talking about the board wipeout, and then the hosting blackouts due tu unpaid hosting bills. The ones who didn’t really want to make it disappeared and the team then reduced to a handful of members.
Later, when the team was counting few of us, the Legacies project was then launched, its goals wad fixing the security issues of the 0.8-SP1 version, which was the latest available version at this time, full of SQL injection flaws, remote code inclusions and CSRF issues. This new project brings new contributors into the team, including Deahstar and Winjet, who now make part, with Hoegarden, the current XNova Support Team. The main goal of this fork is to bring a more reliable version before the Next-Gen platform comes.
The project reborn
2 years later, while repacks, forks and reboots are expanding on the web, with few successful tries, the XNova project will stop to create the Wootook project.
The changes
It is more than a name change, the goals of the project also changed. When XNova made the flood and brutish game its main tactics, with the only goal of making a clone of the Ogame gameplay, Wootook aims to build a more reflected tactics, a development strategy and cunning against other players. Wootook is designed to not restrict game developers and players to coose an unique gameplay or rewriting the whole game.
Wootook is a game engine, it means that it is a platform able to run multiple gameplays on an unique platform without having to change one file on the version you just downloaded. Currently, only one gameplay is available, it is the one which should have been the 2011.1 version of XNova:Legacies. For example, it is quite easy for an experienced developer to build an entire gameplay for a pond-conquest by hordes of racoons game or a nut production management game for enrages squirrels, all based on Wootook, it’s at your option to do it or not 
A little toch of tech
Technically, Wootook will not use an exteranl framework in its first version. Wootook is a middle course between the current XNova:Next-Gen and XNova:Legacies. The game is organized in modules, it uses object-oriented programming and event-driven programming. The MVC pattern implementation will be added in future versions, but it will not be implmented for now.
Wootook is the development version of XNova:Legacies started after the 2009.4 version and backporting core functionalities from XNova:Next-Gen. It is still made up of 2/3 of the XNova 0.8 version source code, everything else has been rewritten from scratch. The final goal is the global refactoring of the source code of XNova to make customizations easier, with an easy-to-extend source code.
The forum boards
The XNova forum boards is maintained, but has been moved to wootook.org/board/. We will reorganize the sections to ease the navigation and add dedicated sections for a game server.
We have made a platform migration, there may have some partially translated messages despite all the fixes I made to the migration script I downloaded. In this case, you may contact me or a moderator to try to fix the problem.
The game servers
The testing server will be maintained and will become a permanent server, opened to anybody and it will use default speeds.
Another server, using high speed configuration will be launched with a monthly rebbot and gameplay variations for tests and fun!
