Back in 2008, GarageGames/InstantAction launched instantaction.com, a browser based gaming platform. Vaguely similar to Steam, all you had to do was install their plugin, visit the site, and it would download and launch any games they had to offer.

Fallen Empire: Legions was also launched on the InstantAction platform during 2008. However as it wasn't a great commercial success, the number of updates to the game slowly dwindled. However one big pain with the game is that the only dedicated servers available were public servers, so if you wanted to host a private match it would be hosted from your home connection - not great for most people on ADSL/cable connections.

At the end of 2009, I decided to reverse engineer how the InstantAction site and their games worked. After a few weeks of effort and help from a few people, we managed to get a Legions dedicated server running with players being able to join the game - we could finally have proper matches running on dedicated servers.

Thanks to the game being scriptable with TorqueScript, we continued to add more features to Legions. We added tournament mode, new game types - Hunters and Rabbit, stats, along with quite a few other tweaks.

Sadly in March 2010 the version of InstantAction which hosted Legions was shut down whilst they were trying to save the company with a new version of the site and platform, with games such as The Secret of Monkey Island: Special Edition and Instant Jam. This all came to an end in November 2010 when InstantAction announced they were shutting down.

This is the Python powered bot which acted as a bridge between the Legions game server and the InstantAction XMPP server. Various features such as commands to control the server, and stats reporting were added over time.

It required pyxmpp (version 1.0.1), Python libxml2, and ran under Python 2.5.

Mabel - For your help in getting all of this running, and all the features you added to the game.

BugsPray - For Hunters/Rabbit, we finally had some new game modes!

TaylorBalbi - For hosting the US servers, and for all the work you put into the stats system.

Also thanks to the other people who helped, and to those who contributed to the costs of the running the dedicated server to host the game servers.

Legions continues to live on as Legions: Overdrive, a free game available at legionsoverdrive.com.