Z-Net Discontinued

Friday, December 20, 2013

It's with heavy heart that it's now come to this point, but it's time for me to move on.

I've enjoyed coding the projects, but despite my efforts I never got to experience the joy of adequate users acceptance or community. My most recent post was my last ditch effort to try and provoke community interaction and seems to have failed.

So at this point I can declare Z-Net I officially done. I hadn't worked on it in a while, despite knowing of some issues to address. I just couldn't get interested in it. And this was in large part due to it failing to meet my minimum expectations of population and community. Instead I chose to focus my efforts on Z-Net 3 because it was at a stage that made it more fun, and its base design goals would seem to directly address some of the issues I felt contributed to the lack of population.

As for Z-Net 3. As my recent post has indicated, there's just not much interest in that either. Perhaps in the future there could be. But for now that project is being shelved. I may work on it, or I may not. If I did, it might be with no plans of release, or I might just re-purpose it.

For me personally, I'll be trying to find new projects to keep me interested. I have a few in mind in addition to interest in some new hobbies. So I should be fine.

This site will remain for now. I'll consider re-purposing it as a brand/team for future projects, who knows. For now it will remain as is.

I'm also choosing to leave Z-Net I online for now. Just don't expect any moderation. The chat room will remain disabled. And I'll no longer offer support for it at all.

Thanks to all the loyal users throughout the years!

10 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hi!, sorry for all this trouble. I'm a brazilian user, and I've been on Z-Net for about 3 months.
Unfortunately, it looks like our community is really small, and only a few people keep loging and playing. Most of the players play only Mortal Kombat and RPGs, and that really discourages...but sometimes, I do find people to play a lot more of games. There are still people who log almost everyday, that play Dragon Ball, Yuu Yuu Hakusho, Super Tennis...
Hmm, I think it's early to give up. I think what Z-Net lacks is just divulgation. Unfortunately I've contacted everyone I know who's interested in Super Famicom/SNES, and they don't really care about the console anymore because of actual consoles(damn). But there should still be people around the world interested, that don't know about this wonderful software you created!.
Maybe you should create a Facebook page, I heard most people are on Facebook now, so Z-Net could reach more people.

This is my thought. Good luck, DarkAkuma!. =)

DarkAkuma said...

To early? Z-Net I has been out for almost 2 years now. How much longer should I wait to see a increase in the average user count over what I saw in the very first month?

I've seen the complaint of lack of diversity of the games users play before, but the claimed list of games being played is always different. It's just perspective. The real issue that makes it seem that way is the low population. Without more users, you just see the same people day to day, and understandably people like to play only certain games. People do switch between games, but not always several times a day.

And I'll still maintain one of the huge problems is with the way users act towards the games being played. Logging in, seeing the game list, deducing "no one wants to play anything I'm interested in", and quit. All in the span of a few seconds. Completely unwilling to host a room and wait for someone to play the games they want.

Modern consoles certainly are contributing to the decline in emulation on the PC in my opinion. Same with mobile. It's such a shame too, as neither can offer the kind of quality experiences as real computers can.

There actually is a Z-Net facebook page. But its sole purpose is just to have link pointing to the real website. I refuse to do anything more with it as I don't care for facebook. Its pointless stupid, and contributes to people being lazy. It's like a website that's trying to replace the real internet, for no good reason. The Z-Net facebook page was just made to provide a search engine boost to the real website. Search engine rankings are based off how many links exist on the internet to your website/page. Which is why despite all of my work on spreading the word on ZNI existing, as I've always said its the users who need to step up and really make things happen. All they need to do it get links out there on websites, forums, video descriptions, etc. It realy would make a world of difference.

Honestly, I'm not as bummed now about the failure of ZNI. I'm more bummed about the lack of interest in Z-Net 3. It really could have been just what was needed. But its hard for me to remain interested in working on something that seems like no one cares about. =(

ThunderChief said...

HI Dark Akuma, I've only recently started getting into Z-Net I. I'm a developer fresh out of college and a little overburdened by work. But a buddy and I have been working out a few kinks to do a youtube channel of let's play videos. We're on opposite coast and using Z-Net I was a surprisingly smooth way to play. I'm not sure if you care, of if this offer is too late but I'd like to offer as much help as I can.

Unknown said...

Is the server still online? When I try to connect it gives me an error saying the server disconnected me.

DarkAkuma said...

Yes. IRC servers like GameSurge rarely go offline permanently. While I may no longer be active/supporting on the project, there are only a few specific cases in which it would permanently no longer be accessible at all. Those cases are mainly controlled by me, which I currently plan/vow to not have occur.

If you're having issues connecting, or staying connected. It's just odd connection issues. Maybe your local connection, maybe a net hub between your ISP and the IRC server hub your connected too, or the IRC hub your connected to itself. In such cases I can't really advise you on how to solve things beyond saying just try again later. =/

AlocksMasao said...

Well man, nowdays the only big community for old games is Super Smash Bros(n64), and arcade but bah. Also is being very rare find speedrunners...
The project probably started too late... if you had zbattle.net users right when closed, you could have a better feedback i guess

MasviL said...

DarkAkuma: you should put your skill and passion in Retroarch project. ATM it lacks effective netplay. What do you think?
http://www.libretro.com/

Anonymous said...

Not good to see Z-Net to be discontinued. But really what did you expect when you launched it considering that the now dead Zbattle not had many more users before it was hacked or taken down ?

I understand that you have tested a unreleased version which can run at least one Nes emulator and another for Sega Genesis. Why not launch that beta-version or whatever phase it is in, unsupported and let the users use it as it is?
Another alternative could be let some other site like Snesot.com etc to host that version or the current if you don't want to do anything more.
I understand that you have tested a unreleased version which can run at least one Nes emulator and another for Sega Genesis. Why not launch that beta-version or whatever phase it is in, unsupported and let the users use it as it is?
Another alternative could be let some other site like http://Snesot.com etc to host that version or the current if you don't want to do anything more.

Anonymous said...

Hello DarkAkuma!

First of all, thank you for creating this awesome program that allow us to play multiplayer games online via snes, just as Zbattle used to be.

I can connect to Z-Net, but I have two friends that can't, because a message pops up saying "You Have Been Banned" "Unable to join", so my question is Why does this happen? They are just trying to connect, do you know the reasons?

gabriel said...

do you have surce code znet ?

Post a Comment