Welcome to the new UnknownWorlds.com

Welcome to the new UnknownWorlds.com! After several months of work, we have a new home on the internet. And UnknownWorlds.com is just that, a home. It is more than just a company website. It is a meeting place for discussions, a place for us all to talk about the games and technology that UWE builds and the experiences you create with them.

It is a little known fact that the previous UnknownWorlds.com represented some of the development philosophy of UWE, before much software was even created. Max ‘Max’ McGuire, our brain and Technical Director, wrote the entire Content Management System himself. (A CMS is what delivers website content behind the scenes). Every news post, every banner, every forum link was created using a system written in house by Max. He went on to write UWE’s very own Lua debugger, Decoda, instead of using existing industry tools. Later, this same ‘can-do’ attitude contributed to the decision to create Spark, the engine and tool-set that drives Natural Selection 2.

As good as it was, that CMS was over five years old by the time it went down for replacement last Sunday. The tools available for forums, news posting, and graphic design have evolved, and so it has come time for UnknownWorlds.com to evolve as well. From the outset, UnknownWorlds.com was a place for you to talk to us, not for us to preach at you. The ‘Community’ tab occupied pride of place on the NS and NS2 pages. Almost two million forum posts have been made until today, many of them by developers.  This site evolution will improve our ability to come together as a community and discuss… Everything!

The site is new, it is shiny. Just like a new game, this means there will be bugs. Lots of them. Things might not be working perfectly today. It will take some time to get the site and forums fully functional, so be cool! Some known issues include:

  1. The original UnknownWorlds.com went live accidentally for a few hours between Monday and Tuesday US-PST. Any posts made to the forums during that time have been irrecoverably lost.
  2. If your original username contained funky characters, those characters may have been altered. You will need use the password reset link to have their username emailed to them.
  3. If your password contained funky characters, those characters may have been altered. Therefore, your username and password will not be working. Use the password reset link to set a new one.
  4. Icons, such as Constellation, are not yet working properly and may not show up where they should.
  5. The Wiki is being overhauled, spam protection and other features added. That is not finished yet, but will be soon!

UWE is a tiny little company, and creating a new website was a relatively huge undertaking. The following people have spent countless hours over the past few months getting our new home ready for today:

Lukasz “AceDude” Nowaczek – Web programming, general wrangling – @lnowaczek
Todd ‘Comprox’ Calder – Forum admin, community legend extraordinaire – @Comprox
Michael Heald – Design guru of FullyIllustrated.com – @michaelheald
Kenneth Jensen – Graphic design – @frijec
Tim Gunter – Programming @ Vanilla Forums – @icyliquid
Luc Vezina – CEO @ Vanilla Forums – @lvez
Charlie “Flayra” Cleveland – Our fearless leader, he was responsible for organising this whole thing – @Flayra

From everyone here at Unknown Worlds, thank you! And everyone, welcome. Now let’s go discuss, post, argue, play, mod, map, compete and generally wreak creative havoc!

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