For anyone who doesn’t know, ICS is the Ironclad Combat System. v1.0 of ICS was developed by MrBunwah Murakami…about an eternity ago, in Caledon. When ex-mayor of New Babbage Shaunathan Sprocket asked me to build a navy for New Babbage like…4 or 5 years ago…I ended up rewriting ICS v2.0 from scratch (and later v3.0) because v1.0 was…inadequate. It then quickly supplanted v1.0 (with MrBunwah Murakami’s blessing) as the standard combat system for the Steamlands.
I haven’t actively had any interest or time in working on ICS for a couple years now. Too many other, more important (paying) projects to work on. I never had a huge interest in ironclad combat to start off with, I just developed the system as a favor to New Babbage originally and built a few ships as examples more than anything else. As far as I know, it’s still pretty heavily used, but I haven’t been paying much attention to anything in the Steamlands for a while (see: those other paying projects).
I’ve tried to pass the system off to a couple of other people since then, and everyone I’ve shown the source code to has walked away from it, saying it was too complicated for them. Apparently most shipbuilders are strictly builders, and not much in the way of scripters.
So…if anyone is a pretty decent scripter with an active interest in taking over development of the Ironclad Combat System, I’d still like to hand it off all of the source code to someone who can take care of it. Most of it is open source already, but a few key components are kept hidden, namely the core.
I might be able to work something out with that. ICS is prety slow going these days and I probably would not be able to put serious time into it for a month or two, however I could do some work on it next year.