History of Promisance

adapted from Quietust's history of Promisance

Creation

Promisance has a great deal of history behind it. The initial versions were written long ago by Paul C. "Blackhawk" Purgett, being largely based on Swirve's "Earth: 2025" but featuring significantly faster paced gameplay. By early 2001, special customized versions of the game had been produced by EZClan and Nuitari. In mid 2001, after some disputes with EZClan's administrators regarding release of the game's latest source code following several suggested bugfixes, QMT Productions was founded and work began on their own version of Promisance.

QMT Promisance

In October 2001, QM Promisance 3.0 was released to the public, largely based on EZClan Promisance 2.62, under the GNU General Public License. Main improvements over the EZClan code included adding functions to replace copy/pasted or directly include()'d code, reduced database bandwidth usage, and overall code cleanup to ease modification. QM Promisance subsequently became the dominant version of Promisance, spawning numerous derivative versions, to the point that Blackhawk himself used it as the basis for his own Promisance 4.0 release.

QM Promisance 3.0 was written when PHP was still a new language to its developers, and PHP itself was not yet fully mature; as such, it relied on environment options (such as register_globals) and coding practices (such as concatenating input values directly into SQL queries) which are seen today as insecure.

QMT Competitors

From QM 3 many versions of Promisance were spawned, including Redwall Warlords, Frost and Flame, Valhall, Fire Emblem Empires, and many others. Each version added on new features, themes, and gameplay elements. These games had a strong community of players and developers in their day but have since faded into obscurity.

QM Promisance 4.0

QM Promisance 4.0 was another complete rewrite, this time following more strict coding standards to ensure greater compatibility with various hosting environments and future versions of PHP, as well as adding features which were not feasible to implement in the original codebase. The last version of QM Promisance 4.0 was released in October of 2014.

NeoPromisance

NeoPromisance is a full rewrite of QM Promisance 4.0, with the goal of adopting modern web technologies. The game has a separate API and front end architecture. The API is written in Node.js and uses a Postgres database. The front end is written in React and uses Redux for state management. Many game systems were rewritten from scratch but the game retains the same core gameplay as QM Promisance 4.0 with some adjustments for balance. The NeoPromisance beta was released in October of 2023.