Hey. As you may know the Test Drive Unlimited servers were recently shut down.  As the successor (TDU2) pales in comparison in many ways, the actively playing community of TDU fans is looking for an alternative.

I, however, believe the alternative is still TDU1. And after talking a bit with the community, they would too, were it still possible to play. The obvious problem is that the servers are now shut down.

This is why I'm contacting you, you were the lead online developer of Test Drive Unlimited, and Test Drive Unlimited 2, and the only plan I can think of requires the help of someone who worked on the original server coding.

The plan I have in mind is to create a new server, with nearly the original code, including some changes to better the online experience. Changes such as more players per connection (originally only 8 players could connect to each other, I was thinking more along the lines of 32, or maybe even 64), synchronized time and weather, modifications to the map, etc. This new code would then be hosted on a community funded server. Then each player would just have to alter Windows' Hosts file to redirect TDU to this new server when it attempts to connect.

The reason we need someone who worked on the original server is that while we could potentially reverse engineer the game itself to figure out exactly how it interacted with the server and possibly build ours from there, this isn't exactly a viable option considering the amount of variables. We need the help of someone with the knowledge of how these variables work, and who could assist us in the coding process of creating the new custom server.