Games - Star Wars Combine

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	Games - Star Wars Combine

The Star Wars Combine is a free online player-based simulation revolving around the Star Wars universe. First conceived in 1998 it was the brainchild of Frederic Weymann, Jehan Snyers d'Attenhoven, and Mario Dominguez and grew out of the demise of the 'Star Wars Sim' that had existed since 1995. Since its inception in 1999 it has been in a constant state of development, having passed to the hands of d'Attenhoven, a student at the Free University of Brussels.

The Combine is not affiliated with LucasArts in any way, and stands as an entirely fan-developed game. One of its most unique features is that it is developed largely by its players, and in February 2006 it had around 2750 active members.

Gameplay

Originally realised simply through roleplaying, in February 1999 a Java-based client entitled CombineCommander, or CCom for short, took over much of the gameplay and allowed a client-based game. By April 2000, the game had grown and evolved to the point where two new programs came in to replace the old client, ICIS and Holocom. These would serve as the main force behind the Combine until the loss of several key ICIS developers and slow development forced the administration to begin looking to adopt a new client, if the game was to envelope new features. In late 2003, Darkness was released, replacing the downloaded components of earlier versions, it is a PHP/MySQL based web client that allows far more immersive gameplay than its predecessors. An additional advantage to using a more open development platform was the ability to add new developers with far less time spent on training.

Factions

One of the Combine's greatest strengths is its broad diversity of factions that players can join. Each faction is player-created and while some encompass the canonical world of Star Wars such as the Rebel Alliance and the Galactic Empire while, others exist solely in the Combine such as the Eidola Pirates, the New Anzat Order, and the Falleen Federation. There are typically 50-100 active factions ranging from medical factions, to pirates, banks and droid producers. Each faction is comprised of at least 10 players banded together to pursue their in-character goals; however there is no limit to the number of players in a faction and some larger factions include over a hundred members.

Economy

The Combine boasts a self-sustaining economy that overarches just about every action in the game. Players are now required to mine raw materials through mining factions and then process them through individual production factions in order to build ships, vehicles or any other in-game entities. These are then bought, sold and destroyed between the player-base. The ability to produce ships, droids, vehicles and other assets is in its final stages of testing, and expected to be released by February 2006.

Combat

One of the long-standing thorns in the Combine's side is its lack of player-vs-player combat usually seen in other MMORPGs. Originally not wanting to release any form of combat that could be seen as potentially biased to particular factions due to an incomplete feature being abused, the development team has recently begun releasing and discussing quick-fix patches to allow some form of retribution between players.

Academics

In addition to its gaming aspects, the Combine is also a significant academic tool and testing ground for new ideas. It has been host to several studies by students studying psychology, and it has been used to test emerging web technologies in a fairly large-scale environment. Several studies have been conducted in the past two years and include a study designed to test the feasibility of web services designed to allow 3rd party management of characters and the associated trust/security risks, such as cheating. A number of faction websites currently use web services to provide streaming feeds of the Galactic News Service (an in-game news service) to their members, and the Galactic Market uses web services to verify accounts.

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