CTRA isn't dead guys, before Christmas I started work on the 4th installment of the server management concept. There are some things that bothered me over X-System:
Firstly tiered servers/licences or not for everybody. There hasn't been any new landmarks/features for some time, and for all it's web/ingame integration it just doesnt reach far enough. Also, the fact it was limited to 1 operator gave 1 group too much of a responsibility to bear.
The last point came about because server management tools need a machine to run on. I know Franky has done an excellent job integrating LFS Lapper into his server hosting, and lapper is a great tool in it's own way, but I want to move things on a bit. More inter-server integration, on a mass scale, for both pickup and league racing. A sort of CTRA/spdo/LFSWorld all rolled into one, combined with all the in server power of X-System but, well, more developed... X-System is old, it was developed in a rush because the servers where down without it, and it's featureset has room for massive growth.
So imagine an LFS where all the feautres of X-System and more where available to every server operator, imagine every server operator integrating neetly into 1 web portal with all the backend support for leagues, licence systems, wrecker handling etc that you could ask for.
Blue 2 is an opt-in system for server operators, with every feature being an option, further, it is not necessary to be running the software to handle it - it is a distributed computing network being built on neural network concepts, with several big teams and Franky having expressed an interest in running one or more nodes it should have sufficient capacity to handle the entirety of LFS, It is X-System for everyone.
So imagine if you will, that whatever server you go on, you have features of X-System appropriate to that server. Perhaps the server has set rolling restarts on, or has enabled warmup laps (great for league races), or maybe you are taking part in a 20 server x 24 hour race and you want to know your aggregate position or your team (on the website spectator tool) wants to send a message to just their driver who is not on voice chat... Or maybe you just want to know when your friends are online [on another server] and message them...
This is what I aim to achieve with Blue 2. I am to launch it toward the end of this year, currently I have a stable multi-threaded core application handling some basic web-configured rules and next up i'm tackling the neural network side of things. It has a long way to go before I am even ready to start testing.
CTRA might be dead, but CTRA was only edition 3. Edition 4 is coming, it's called Blue2 and it will be for everyone who wants it, and I hope ultimately open sourced. I'm hoping it will do what I always hoped CTRA+LFS World would do, to enhance the core LFS experience, without screen spam and without taking anything away from the game or getting in the way. I want it to only enhancing the pleasure of racing in LFS.
There where mistakes in X-System, and I wont be repeating them. I shall make new ones instead.