SPHERE

Sphere's site, spheredev.org had about 10 active members December of last year. But in late December, spheredev.org went silent. Due to an error by the VPS company that owns the server spheredev was hosted on, the server was wiped. The last available backups, from late 2011, where found to be lost as well. Spheredev.org was the last surviving Sphere-dedicated site, hosting the engine's wiki and forums. Although spheredev.org will return eventually, there is currently no site for Sphere. Some of the long time users have banded together on Google+ and Facebook, as official Sphere pages were made on both before the fall of spheredev.

Sphere, as used currently, is old. The last stable version, 1.5, is from 2008. After that, all development of the original engine ceased. An update to the original engine, Sphere 1.7 was recently being developed, which contained the newest version of Spidermonkey (the JavaScript engine Sphere uses) and replaces several old libraries Sphere relied with new replacements. Development of 1.7 has been on hiatus since mid 2011, and may or may not be finished.

In addition, a mostly-compatible rewrite, TurboSphere (http://sourceforge.net/projects/turbosphere/) has been in active development since early 2011, and can currently run some original Sphere games.

Although the newest stable release is 5 years old, there is still life in the engine. There remains a close knit community of users, ready to answer any questions one might have. Even though spheredev.org is down right now, this is a temporary problem, and the community can still be found on Facebook and Google+, and can help with any questions you have. Even with 1.7 and TurboSphere pushing development forward, Sphere likely will not be what it was ten years ago. But reports of Sphere's death are at least somewhat exaggerated.