What's going on here?

[🜲 PoLiX]

For years, nearly 11yrs now, I have been pestered to bring back SSForum. Until February of this year, I ignored that call completely and didn't even play the game anymore. Occasionally logging in just to keep my account alive and see how much the population had dropped.

This past February, while talking to a friend from another game, he mentioned wanting to create his own fan discord or forum for it. I offered to help if he really wanted to go for it and he asked me what experience I had. After we talked about my history here and with a few other games, he mentioned SubSpace looked so decentralized and was probably doomed to die. For the first time in 11 years, I felt a bit of nostalgia about the game. I also felt some responsibility for that decentralization by shutting down all my sites back in November 2014.

I talked to a few people that month about why I had truly left, expecting them to tell me it was stupid, but many agreed they would have done the same thing. They weren’t mad nor did they blame me for my actions but told me the community was far better now than it was then.

I did leave due to my grandfather’s passing, but it had nothing to do with the cost of the license or server. That was just an excuse as every time I shared the reason that I wasn’t active, I just got all sorts of grief about it. My grandmother needed help and that was my focus, not this game, not the websites. Once he passed that went up 10-fold, hell, 100-fold. People just focused on the game and told me “That sucks, but I need your help” or “I don’t care, I need <insert some little truly insignificant thing>.” I didn’t see why I was spending money or time on a community who seemed to care so little about each other. Not that I expect it to be all touchy feely (I am totally not that type of person), but I expected at least a little sympathy and “well, once you have a few minutes, that’d be great.”

As a NetOp I saw the worst of the community daily. People getting banned for all sorts of vile stuff (racism, child pornography, cyberbullying) on top of the regular stupidity, and I had already begun to question what this game’s chat channels were enabling. The stuff we caught was only on the surface; I was sure of that. Once I stepped away from NetOp, people told me all sorts of things that were going on, they just didn’t want to share it before because they didn’t want their “friends” to get in trouble. My line in the sand had far been crossed, and I was no longer interested in being part of it all. I made the decision to shut down my sites, came up with a reason that in my opinion was hard to argue with, and walked away. I was no better than the other liars, but at least it was my last.

Flashback to February and I decided to restore some centralized web community for the game. There were sooo many projects, I didn’t think SubSpace was just SubSpace or Continuum anymore. I decided maybe it was best to come up with something to categorize everything the community was building for this Massively Multiplayer Online Game. TheMMOG.com was born and had some traction. Then began the pouring in of messages and requests to “bring SSForum back”. The database truly had multiple corrupt rows and even tables of data. Some I wasn’t sure I could drop without causing issues with functionality of the software or addons. Some it just checked if they were there, not even using them ever it seemed.

I spent the last few days (almost 12hrs yesterday alone) working through the database removing data, restoring it from old backups I used Disk Drill to find on old hard drives, and I was able to get a functioning database. I ran Invision’s upgrader to bring the forum from version 3.4 all the way to version 4.7 with a lot of headaches, but in the end success. A normal 30-minute upgrade took me almost 6 hours. I was able to save it all in the end and now have a fully functional database and cleaner installation.

This will be here for the community to do as they wish with, hopefully positive. Read the history for nostalgia, post new posts (I know Samapico and others made many bug fixes on DCME), or connect with old friends in PMs. The domain has auto renewed for years, the server cost is minimal, and the software license, while ridiculous, I’ll just cover. Maybe I’ll convert to free software, maybe not.

Anyways… Enjoy!

[Death+]

👍






🙃

[🜲 PoLiX]

Reading posts in our private forum, I feel less and less guilty about it all. Multiple posts about how the community was just becoming toxic and crap.

Luckily, I think most of those individuals have left. Not all, but most.

[⛊ Drake7707]

Wow blast from the past, well done on bringing it back 🙂. Haven't touched the game in at least 15 years😅. I saw @Samapico pushing some fixes for DCME and making an installer recently, good job 💪, I haven't touched vb6 in well over 2 decades, I wouldn't even know where to start anymore.

[No_Remorse]

Thanks for brining ssforums back to life, Polix. It's been really nostalgic and a bit eye opening as to how much of a fool i use to be lol.

 

Nice to see some familiar names. Hopefully this brings some more people out of the woodwork as well!

[🜲 PoLiX]

On 9/16/2025 at 12:40 AM, Drake7707 said:

Wow blast from the past, well done on bringing it back 🙂. Haven't touched the game in at least 15 years😅. I saw @Samapico pushing some fixes for DCME and making an installer recently, good job 💪, I haven't touched vb6 in well over 2 decades, I wouldn't even know where to start anymore.

It's been entertaining in Cheese's dev discord server. Everyone bitching about it being VB6, trying to get visual studio working, reading the old code for bugs, ya. I did promise to spend some time this fall converting it to VB.NET like I did some old mervbots and couple other small projects. Will see how it goes 😅

[🜲 PoLiX]

I apologize if anyone has been spammed by e-mails. Server has a setting I need to find that is limiting the number of e-mails the forum can send. Only ~400 / 5000 members have received one. If that e-mail brought you back to some nistolgia (as it seems it has), please be understanding as I try to reach the other 4600 people.

I won't send another Bulk Mail until I get it all fixed, but you will see another e-mail.

[★ Purge]

Good to see this restored, though I preferred the old look of the forum! 🥴

[🜲 Samapico]

On 9/16/2025 at 3:40 AM, Drake7707 said:

[...] I haven't touched vb6 in well over 2 decades [...]

Same 😛

There was some hubbub about some maps crashing, I got a bit fed up and dug up the code to figure it out. With 15 more years of experience coding in general, it was much easier to find the issue. I also found some old threads on here that were clearly the exact same bug, posted in 2010.

I had started a side project of a new editor in C++, too. It was mostly a playground to play with simple OpenGL rendering with simple shaders. You can check it out at https://github.com/samapico/scme. So far it's able to open maps, display the tiles, move the camera, zoom, and edit tiles on the map with a simple pencil-like tool. Can't save yet.

 

On 9/17/2025 at 10:53 AM, PoLiX said:

[...] I did promise to spend some time this fall converting it to VB.NET like I did some old mervbots and couple other small projects. Will see how it goes 😅

Honnestly, converting it to VB.NET probably wouldn't help it much, it's pretty spaghettified at this point...

[🜲 PoLiX]

6 hours ago, Purge said:

Good to see this restored, though I preferred the old look of the forum! 🥴

In what way? There is a lot missing i don't like either. Probably a skin and mods for that though.

[Cap'nCloak]

I'm kinda happy to have caught the Email Spam... SS was a great period of time in my life loooooong ago and enjoyed getting stuck in the OG paper rulebook

I truly, deeply and madly miss the OG Chaos with negs and suicides.. when that went away... seemed to me the overall quality of pilot went into the woodchipper

It was a long while ago Gonruken/CarsonOGin and I returned to the game to duke it out... ended up blowing up a few hundred folks over the course of a 3-hour long duel between us.. but still.. nothing like sneaking up on a levi laying a field and watching his rating hit the trashcan... ahh...

--CC

[🜲 PoLiX]

3 hours ago, Cap&#x27;nCloak said:

I'm kinda happy to have caught the Email Spam... SS was a great period of time in my life loooooong ago and enjoyed getting stuck in the OG paper rulebook

I truly, deeply and madly miss the OG Chaos with negs and suicides.. when that went away... seemed to me the overall quality of pilot went into the woodchipper

It was a long while ago Gonruken/CarsonOGin and I returned to the game to duke it out... ended up blowing up a few hundred folks over the course of a 3-hour long duel between us.. but still.. nothing like sneaking up on a levi laying a field and watching his rating hit the trashcan... ahh...

--CC

Glad someone it. I felt bad, but just trying to get it out there far and wide. Can't seem to get forum software and e-mail server to agree, so they keep erroring at each other, lol. 😂

[🜲 PoLiX]

Number of clicks from all the e-mail spam... positive? I'd like to think so

[Witchie NL]

10 hours ago, PoLiX said:

Number of clicks from all the e-mail spam... positive? I'd like to think so

Its what got me back in here ^^. I have to say, thank you for spamming the mail adress. Always great to revive some awesome nostalgia.

Great to see my brain remembers every single username above here ^^.

Ive been logged on a few times in the last year or so ever since i noticed Spider NL (who used to live 3 houses away) still being present in many logs.

Atleast 3 of the users above here have inspired me to persue a carreer in IT and Technology.

Drake and Samapico, the DCME mapbuilder is epic and got me introduced in mapdesign, graphics and modding in general. I think ive spent a thousand hours building and redesigning maps.

Death+ and Polix, you guys i used to look up to being the system/netops back in those days motivating me to keep on learning and improving.

There are tons more i need to thank like minegoboom for infecting me with the C++ virus or Spider NL/Killerbot NL (both RL friends) that used Java for TWCore.

Ofcourse Vigilante or Jericho24. for enabling me to continue growing and learning step by step. Player to mod. Mod to eventhost. Host to supermod. Supermod to sysop/admin.

I used to start continuum in 1996 as a 6yr old kid. Now nearly 30 years later i have my carreer and income to thank for it. This game has done more for me than any fortnite will ever do for any kid nowadays.

clan: Zanddijk. A deathsentence to many players since our entire class was playing the game and we never came alone :D.

As an interesting sidenote. Going from player to Mod to SysOp in SSC Desert Storm i still have ALL the old serverfiles ready to go. Even rolled back some of the later versions to the most popular one it had (ballgame/flagturf) and added a load of .LVZ's to animate the map further than it has ever seen online.

I might reconsider putting it back up if there are still people willing to host it. Comes complete will all the MERVBot plugins and creditsystems. Might even have the original subill database.

 

Sorry for the long post, have a potato.

Edited September 20 by Witchie NL

[Fenix]

A blast from the past! I had forgotten I even created an account here all those years ago - but got a good chuckle from the reawakening e-mail calling me out for making "SOOO many posts (2 to be exact)".

I still play SubSpace to this day and actually went though a huge burst of nostalgia earlier this year by going through all the saved game versions on the SSDL backup and even making a local backup/reconstruction of VIE's SubSpace website (I have weird hobbies).

[🜲 PoLiX]

I am glad people are truly appreciative of the spam. I guess it wouldn't really bother me either.

[⛊ Drake7707]

On 9/19/2025 at 1:09 AM, Samapico said:

Honnestly, converting it to VB.NET probably wouldn't help it much, it's pretty spaghettified at this point...

I would agree, I remember having to cut so many corners and make optimizations to make DCME performant on hardware at the time. None of those are necessary anymore, I mean, I remember starting DCME on a winxp laptop with 256mb ram and a celeron CPU. Now you can just render everything without a hitch and keep everything in memory without issue. On one hand making use of standard win32 drawing api's is probably the reason why DCME still works today, but that wasn't exactly fast compared to hardware acceleration like DirectX. It also had some scope creep issues, I remember adding shit just because 😅, further adding to code bloat. I did make an effort to make it not spaghetti but yeeahhh

 

That's about the only documentation I made

I wonder if ChatGPT/Claude/LLM of choice can port old vb6 code to modern day equivalent, it would save a lot of time for anyone willing to port it and it's mostly just semantics anyway, it should be good at that.

Going through this post 

is saying a lot😂. I remember being so fed up with SSME that I thought "I can do better", especially as I had dabbled in map making tools before and as a very slacking university student at the time I had a lot of free time. 2005 was not a good year for me for several reasons and making DCME was a good escape from reality.

 

[2pac]

Yurrrrrrr good spam is efficient to bring back folks that forgot about the game, prittk needs to give the source code so we can better than game, I talked to Quiglybobo he is trying to recreate the code somehow but it's a mission 

[🜲 Samapico]

On 9/21/2025 at 4:31 AM, Drake7707 said:

I would agree, I remember having to cut so many corners and make optimizations to make DCME performant on hardware at the time. None of those are necessary anymore, I mean, I remember starting DCME on a winxp laptop with 256mb ram and a celeron CPU. Now you can just render everything without a hitch and keep everything in memory without issue. On one hand making use of standard win32 drawing api's is probably the reason why DCME still works today, but that wasn't exactly fast compared to hardware acceleration like DirectX. It also had some scope creep issues, I remember adding shit just because 😅, further adding to code bloat. I did make an effort to make it not spaghetti but yeeahhh

 [...]

That's about the only documentation I made

I wonder if ChatGPT/Claude/LLM of choice can port old vb6 code to modern day equivalent, it would save a lot of time for anyone willing to port it and it's mostly just semantics anyway, it should be good at that.

Going through this post 

[...]

is saying a lot😂. I remember being so fed up with SSME that I thought "I can do better", especially as I had dabbled in map making tools before and as a very slacking university student at the time I had a lot of free time. 2005 was not a good year for me for several reasons and making DCME was a good escape from reality.

 

Working on DCME also kept me busy for a while, and it got me deeper into programming in general.

As for a remake, the one I'm (very slowly) working on is kind of a side project where the fun is to redo those things with 15 more years of experience. Just converting it would be kinda boring 😛

 

Side note, I just uploaded 3.6... I thought I was done, but people with 1440p monitors and larger were getting crashes just by scrolling around or zooming out. So this should be fixed now.

[🜲 PoLiX]

Just wanted to say I haven't forgotten about things here... just with the Government shutdown my mind has been elsewhere. Being excepted I still have to work for IOUs. Financially sitting ok for a few more months, but just been trying to work on physical things around the house to distract my mind. Got people on my crew not as financially comfortable, so working to try and help them all day. Just drains me mentally by the time I get home and I don't want to look at the computer screen anymore, hah.

Will get back to things soon.