Welcome to the Freestars homepage. This is merely a placeholder until we setup a proper home page.
Freestars is being written in C++ on the Windows platform. Unfortunately, it doesn't yet compile in Linux - but this is being addressed. To see what how progress is moving along, you can see the Freestars Sourceforge project which has just gone live.
FreeStars consists of two programs - the client (such as nash's client or GStars), which displays results and allows the player to enter the orders, and the server, which processes the results of all the players' input. We are using XML for the turn files and rule sets to facilitate other clients being written; eventually an encryption module, compression, and some form of rule set verification will be added for turn security.
Initially, we will not be writing an AI. However, since the file format is open, if someone wants to at a later date, they will be able to. Currently work is focused on the server, file formats, and analyzing Stars! behavior to match it as closely as we can. While we've been inundated with desired changes, those will have to wait for version 2 since Stars! is very well balanced and we're hesitant to change that. This is what perhaps what sets this particular project from others that started off as a nominal effort to clone Stars! and ended up branching off into a completely different game, such as Stellar Legacy.
Omnivore (Brian Lee Price) provided the initial impetus for this project around 2001 and 2002. Since then, LEit (Elliot Kleinrock) has taken over as the head and lead programmer of Freestars.