The future of Spellborn

Hello there! It’s been a while since we’ve posted some news about the game here - and no news is always good news, it means that things are just going the same old way.

However, over the last few months some very big things have been happening behind the scenes. Now, I’m going to be very clear - there is no new content coming and it is unlikely that we will ever create new content.

What came first

In order to understand what the news is, I’m first going to give some background information. The Chronicles of Spellborn is an old game - you might even call it ancient and when we brought it back from the grave, we did so with the software, tools and systems that were used back in the day for the game. All of those tools have remained untouched for many years and we were glad that we were able to get things running back in 2019. In order to get the game to run, we had mirrored the setup as well as we could to what would have been used in 2008, which meant that we were using some ancient software at the time. At the time, some of that software had already ran its course and security updates were no longer available or being made, but for some key software there was still support.

No more support…

We have, however, passed the point of support for all the software that we currently use to run The Chronices of Spellborn which meant that the future became uncertain, to say the least. Our current game server was running and as long as we could keep it running we would be safe. However, all hardware ages and we knew that there would come a point where it would no longer be feasible to keep it running with the same software and the same hardware. At the end of last year, we were informed that the current game server would need to be phased out this year, so we were forced to look for an alternative.

Uncharted territory

At that time, I made the decision to go ahead and start investigating into how the future of The Chronicles of Spellborn could be safeguarded. As the operating system that we ran the game server on was no longer supported, finding a webhost for a new server became impossible - except perhaps for at best some shady providers. So, during the last few months, in secret, I worked on getting the server side of The Chronicles of Spellborn to work on modern software, a process which took quite a few months and many strange errors, random disconnects and bugs popped up that needed to be resolved. An example of this is that the error handling of the database server had changed significantly, which ment that a lot of database parts needed to be changed, one by one.

The breakthrough

However, a few weeks ago I was finally able to run around in the world of Spellborn with the server side running on modern software! This ofcourse means that the future of Spellborn is safe - for now - and that we could start to look for a new server to run the game upon! That search for a new server has concluded and we were able to rent a new dedicated server that can easily run The Chronicles of Spellborn.

To conclude

So, to conclude: the future of The Chronicles of Spellborn is brighter than ever: we have been able to upgrade the server software to run on newer operating systems and database systems so that we can run the game for years to come. A new game server has been set up to replace our current server and we are introducing a (closed) beta on the new server to test it before we transfer all progress over to this new server - more information about this can be found on our Discord server.

• Kevin and the Spellborn team!