To my surprise and disappointment today I discovered Lost Heaven Multiplayer also known as Mafia 1 Multiplayer project has been cancelled. I wasn't able to access its website for weeks, and thought it was a problem on my side until I looked for informations and found nothing but this post, written by Romop5 in a popular mafia modding forum:
As for our website, the domain has expired. If you asked me why I let it happen, I'd replied with this:
1. The project is flawed, messy organized and has risen into a huge portion of source code.
2. The fact that we are bugged probably implies that LHMP is an unpopular project, being played only by a few Mafia fanatics
3. None of developers (counting me) cares anymore. The development has been dead since Sept 2015.
As you can see, it doesn't make much sense for me to pay for domain and VPS and let others think we are doing something. Unfortunately, we don't.
Although perceived as unsuccessful, this project has given me a lot of experience from various kinds of programming arts.
Now the main purpose of this topic was just to announce it and make it more visible, since I know I'm not the only one who was wondering what happened. Now I can only say it's a pity, I was looking forward to it a lot, and had fun playing it during the first public tests. I don't know how Romop5 could call this project unsuccessful, as they were working on it until few months ago. If he needed help in the development he might have announced it before letting the website expire and seek help from the community, if the project was on hold, as he said he was busy with his last year in school he might have kept working in the free time at anytime, I think nothing would have forced him to update it constantly, and if he really wasn't interested anymore, he could have open sourced it, maybe nothing was going to happen, but if nothing it's a chance for someone to keep working on it, and not letting others losing faith and dropping all the work that has been done. Last but not least I'm aware of the fact that a developer might be disappointed to see that less players than he expected are playing in his multiplayer, but can we still deem this as a failure? As long as there is still one and only one, playing in a multiplayer are we allowed to throw everything in the garbage? I don't want to criticize him more, but I really wish he would change his mind and step back, as this looks nothing but a not very pondered move after a sudden thought.
