The future of Blacknova Traders

[PS]

Friends,

Blacknova Traders has had a difficult time in the last few years. Much of our code bridges the gap between PHP3 and PHP4, and must be carefully coded to run on a huge variety of platforms. That level of testing, precision, and forethought has slowed development of a number of incredible new features.

In order to be able to write the best quality software to power BNT, BNT developers need the best programming tools available. Today, the best PHP available is PHP 5.

PHP 5 has been deployed and tested in production environments for three years. Unfortunately, web hosts have been slow to adopt PHP 5, which has made it difficult for BNT and many other PHP projects to fully embrace PHP 5's features.

Now a growing consortium of PHP projects have joined together to push for wider PHP 5 adoption. By all embracing PHP 5 together, the projects involved in the GoPHP 5 effort are sending a message to web hosts that it is time to embrace PHP's future.

Blacknova Traders is now part of that movement.

After much deliberation, the BNT project is committed to the following path:

    * As of today, changes to BNT which use language features found exclusively in PHP 5.2 will be considered for acceptance.
    * This policy effectively means that all future versions of BNT will be incompatible with PHP 4.
    * We will continue to support the "Classic" version of BNT (release 0.55) until our next two releases (0.60 and 0.65) are out.

The BNT developer community agrees that this change is best for the future of BNT. We are excited by the potential that PHP 5 brings, and we look forward to building better software for the community.

By taking this bold step, we will be able to deeply improve the quality of BNT, and add incredible new features at a much faster pace. It will also help reduce security issues and configuration problems for admins deploying BNT - possibly increasing our installed base worldwide.

As always, the development team is actively looking for new developers, testers, and translators. If you love the game, and want to help, we can use your help, no matter what level of experience you have!

Thanks for your continued support and encouragement,
The Blacknova Traders development team

[Hound Dog]

This is indeed great news, php5 is almost ready to be superceded by php6 now and it is shocking that many servers are still using php4, i have recently forced my host to upgrade by threatening to leave for a host that provided php5/mysql5 they setup a new server and moved my account over to it(they didnt upgrade the apache tho and thats still 1.3 lol).

If i can help out the bnt development in any way i can i am all too willing. Although i have been working on my own fork 'DeadZone' Work on this is now complete, I would love the chance to pay back bnt in any way i can (while it is still fresh in my mind)

I would consider myself intermediate with php but i have been writing software since 1981 and consider myself an advanced programmer. i believe you have my email addy