can confirm, i adminned for goonstation in the back of class while "taking notes" in community college. then i went to art school and had less time and became a furry. all things exist yet some are latent
There's also an open source remake efforts (multiple, really) to move the damn thing away from a crumbling taken over engine that almost got open sourced but then was snatched up by some enterprising guy. Said engine is called BYOND, and it's from before 2000s, literally.
And absolutely can confirm after playing as a teen around in places and even contributing a bit with shitty code. It is an abomination built upon thousands of tiny random contributions shoved in while the author was off from school or work or whatever.
And yeah, furry culture is a pretty present thing there, despite the efforts of random 4chan types...
Anyways, active remakes with actual playerbase around them:
- Space Station 14
- UnityStation
Both are in C#. One is obvious as to what engine it uses (Unity), but the other is a custom engine that had its rendering pipeline rewritten way too many times (and is currently in process of yet another one). The latter started from an abandoned and then open sourced effort to create a fancy shiny "new SS13". But rather quickly reverted to more classic look and feel, then even closer.
Now Space Station 14 is a combo of two projects - the custom engine and the actual "spessmen" part with content and etc. The launcher/client for it supports other content fillings without any issues, for anyone who is playing. So you can just... Make a game and put it up on the "hub" and people can play it just fine without any extra stuff.
And so... someone is now making an "OpenDream" which is a cursed but interesting thing... It basically takes the BYOND's "Dream Maker" language and... runs the damn game on top of SS14 engine as a server :D
It's not compatible with BYOND's networking, as it's just a "game" implemented on top of SS14 engine and hub and networking protocol. But it is compatible with the codebase and this is just amazin because they are now running modern stations with more and more features actually working.
Which is great because it means that stuff won't just get washed away by the waves of time when BYOND finally croaks its last.
