EDIT: This is no longer really applicable.

(I wanted to make this a comment, but I'm long-winded as usual, so it's a forum post. :P)

Over the past month and a half, I have found it increasingly difficult to set aside time to work on this mod. This hasn't been due to a lack of time (though I have been doing a lot of other stuff), but more of a lack of motivation.

Part of the problem is the immensely demoralizing effect of not being able to track down that nebula crashing thing until I asked Lucas for help (some of you may recall that I was almost ready to throw in the towel before I thought of asking him) - knowing that the mod refuses to work for no apparent reason isn't exactly helpful.

A much bigger issue, however, is that I originally started working on this mod because I liked the way it was improving the game and I wanted to help make it even better. Basically, I wanted to improve my own gameplay experience with the pleasant side-effect of improving it for other people too. You can't improve what you don't have, and between being sick of the AI and being unable to get a genuinely pleasant multiplayer match out of the community, I can honestly say that I haven't started SR2 up for weeks, and I haven't enjoyed starting it in months (partly due to the crashes). I can't play competitively, not well enough to stand a chance against anyone I can find, and I can no longer find people willing to play non-competitive matches. (Or enough people that my lack of skill becomes less problematic in a competitive game - 6-way FFA is one thing, but 2v1 is the best I've gotten lately.)

There's also the matter of basically single-handedly developing an increasingly complicated mod with increasingly complex plans for its future - since last September there has been precisely one commit on the GitHub repo that wasn't by me, and I'm afraid I'm not as unstoppable as dolynick. :P

The bottom line is, I'm making my 'retirement' official, effectively shutting down all RS development. This has been coming for a while now, I've just been trying to ignore the signs, praying something would kick me back into action.

I'll still be lurking around in the forums and on the Discord, being helpful and what not, and I'll try to force myself to finish the nebula fix (and I'll keep the various downloads up to date in the unlikely event that RS has more patches left in it), but I don't expect to do any actual modding past the next update. (No, I don't have an ETA on that one. I still need to fix nebulae, remember?)

The past couple of years have been nice (on average :P), and if I have any regrets they're mostly about SR2's own failure (let's face it, if the game had received half of the attention it deserved, I wouldn't have so much trouble getting a match going in one of the its largest mods) and about butting heads with Alar so often. I've learned a lot here, and even if I never play SR2 again, I don't think I'll be forgetting about this place any time soon.