Future of FL

[Pollux]

Future of FL

26th November 2022

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Introduction

Hello everyone,

As many might recall, a month ago we launched a revival attempt that targeted nostalgia by bringing back many older game mode features. This attempt was planned by a few older members of the community alongside Conn and simply didn’t work out. It’s clear to us that in order to make progress, we are going to tackle long-standing problems and many years of tech debt that FL has built up rather than relying on any easy or “quick” fixes. We simply can’t rely on factors such as nostalgia to make FL sustainable. As such, we are going to have to make changes to how the core game mode works in order to remain competitive with other servers who offer similar experiences to us.

What now?

We want to give the CityRP server another attempt at revival, it deserves at least one focused attempt after being around for so long. We’re going to do a u-turn on all the recent nostalgic-focused changes and instead continue building on the foundations that our economy update created earlier this year which proved to initially be quite popular. This decision may be disappointing to some older members, however, the past month has proven holding onto nostalgia will only prevent us from making meaningful progress and simply result in the end of FL.

We plan on shutting down our CityRP server for now while we work on major changes. We’re not yet ready to announce an exact relaunch date, however, it is likely to be early next year. We’ll be releasing dev blogs talking about features which we’re implementing as they’re finished.

Some of the things we’re looking at:

• Complete re-write of the inventory system, allowing for unique item data and more inventories (such as car inventories, property inventories etc…).
  
• New player guide system, to make it easier to find out what there is to do and how to do it. Will be located in F1 menu.
  
• Entity interaction menu to make the gamemode easier for new players, menu to do things instead of having to remember 100 commands (this won't replace commands, but rather be an alternative).
  
• New weapon system, using the inventory refactor to deliver a better and more rewarding experience than before.
  
• Deco V2, with player deliveries and menus to show the status of what is going on (e.g missing materials for industries, time till next stock etc…)
  
• Taking another look at basing rules to ensure we have a nice middle ground between realistic bases and massive pink metal bases.
  
• Vehicle handling changes to re-balance all the cars, as some aren’t great right now.
  
• Client-side optimisation to minimise local performance impact from entities such as farming and weed.
  
• Much more which we aren’t quite ready to announce just yet.
  

We’ve also updated forum rule 2a to try and combat toxicity on the forums. We always welcome criticism as long as it’s constructive and not attempting to spread hate. We’ve recently seen a lot of unconstructive, toxic negativity on the forums which doesn’t help anyone. We hope we can create a more healthy environment on the forums with this change.

Please note that there is more we want to get done, however, we have to prioritise what we work on to ensure we can re-launch at a reasonable time. Nothing above is guaranteed either, but we’ll try get as much done as we can. Our priority is always going to be to make the new-player experience better and remove a lot of tech-debt FL has built up.


Summary

We’re going to be taking the server down while we work on some big changes to relaunch with. It’s too soon for us to say an exact date, but it’ll likely be sometime early next year. We’ll be posting dev blogs showing off our progress on an irregular schedule while we’re down. We’ll be closing the server tomorrow until our relaunch.

FL has only been around for over a decade because of the support many of you give us, which we are very grateful for. We thank everyone who has stuck around with us so far and we hope we can deliver on our plan to revive the server. We hope to see you when we re-launch in the future.

If you have any questions, feel free to ask in this thread. Please keep it civil, as toxicity doesn’t help anyone and only serves to demotivate those still trying.