Where is the international community?

One of the things that I think is surprisingly missing is the international community for the classic Settlers games, meaning the first two games in the series. These were very different from the games that followed, The Settlers III abandoning the core road feature and everything going pretty much in the way I didn’t want things to go based on the first two games (and in my case especially the second game).

What I think is causing this is the small gap in the early years of 2000 that there was only Widelands. There was no S2 modding community, there was no open source project like Return to the Roots that would have kept things alive for it in the international scene. Transport Tycoon Deluxe, released around the same time, did have it’s community following since the late 90’s thanks to TTDPatch constantly providing new features and improvements to the game, later OpenTTD taking over and now we have a fully open source clone of TTD. And I think the same should happen with The Settlers II.

So here I am, finally adding a community support on this site. It has actually been there for a few days now, but I first wanted to get familiar with how it works and if it brings the useful features. It didn’t bring everything first, so I fixed things a bit, adding support for forum uploads for an example. As a design change was also forced I ended up again sorting the pages into new locations and now the menu should be quite nice and easy to follow.

I also included Return to the Roots content on this site. RttR is a bit interesting beast, technically it is very nice, but my personal feelings about their site are not strongly on the positive side. It looks too old school, it is based on custom page engine and it still prioritizes German language over English on many parts of the site. There have been some improvements but things such as appearance in Google aren’t things that are going to get fixed anytime soon (you can see the link, but no title, description etc.). This site instead appears on Google in it’s full glory and is ranked quite well.