Hi
First off, yes the domain name expired but I have just renewed it. It expired for completely financial reasons ... I havn't been paid my wages this month and i'm struggling to get by. Luckily I remembered that Chris Raemisch had kindly donated some money to my paypal account and so I was able to renew the domain this morning.
The STCC broadcasts spawned the public licence system quite by accident, and many people found it confusion to differentiate between the STCC league and it's broadcasts and the STCC public server system. This confusion arose because of the way that they came about, it wasn't planned at all, the public servers where originally just practice servers for our league racers and we inserted some 'lower' servers with an access system to filter out the best guys to drive with our league racers.
What happened was the public servers proved more fun than competing alongside our stars
and soon it was the servers that became the biggest part of the STCC.
What's happened now is the servers have been rebranded to CTRA (Computer Team Racing Authority) and are run and operated by UKCT (UK Computing Team). UKCT always have had huge involvement in the series, but this seperation of the public server system from the STCC league we hope will clear up any confusion.
The STCC league has had to take a back foot whilst we sorted out the public servers, which with the advent of patch X havn't worked. We've still been holding the league races but we havn't been putting together the broadcasts. I say 'we' here very loosely, the STCC and CTRA are both 'we' type affairs, but when it comes to the techy stuff it generally falls down to me
.
When the new CTRA X-System launches and has proved stable I will return to work on the STCC broadcasts. I dont think I can eclipse round 7, we had developed tools and software to run on the old LFS that just dont work anymore and so some features like the scrolling ticker bar are going to have to go whilst I have so many broadcasts to make - it's simply foolish to take more time out to redevelop all this stuff.
At the end of the season I will take some time out of running STCC to prepare for season 2. That's my plan anyway, I will develop the tools I wish I had this season, and replace the ones that no longer work.
I also have lots of cool ideas for new things with the CTRA X-System that are not going to be in the servers when they go live. There's lots of stuff that we want to do that, because of the sheer mammoth workload of all these broadcasts and just getting the base system ready, ontop of having real lives, we just cant do yet.
So to answer all questions: Both the public servers, rebranded as CTRA, and the STCC league & broadcasts, are all still going to be a part of LFS.
The main reason they are both absent at the moment is simply because both projects represent a significant amount of my own time and involvement in LFS and I just cant remake it all overnight.
Oh yes, and LFS Companion is well and truly dead.