Welcome back and welcome to GrangerHub’s forums @peoro ! You have presented a reasonable question.
We have started Stellar Prey as a new game separate from Tremulous (but inspired by Tremulous) in part to not be held back by backwards compatibility so that we can go much further in terms of new features/abilities, in part to have more freedom on a new brand to go into a new creative direction (we aren’t making an unchanging carbon copy of Tremulous only giving it eye candy, though we are including as an optional game mode we are calling Legacy mode, that is very similar to 1.1 vanilla Tremulous game play, but our two new main game modes, Competitive and Casual, are both going in very new directions), and in part better market the game to potentially a lot of new players with an up to date website and infrastructure. Though we still plan on offering support for Tremulous on the side for as long as it is still around.
We are pursuing Stellar Prey separate from the Unv project, as we have a different management style and vision for the Stellar Prey game and for its community than the management style and vision that the Unv project has for its game and community.
Currently the Tremulous playerbase is just large enough to support about one server at a time. Unv has much fewer players than Trem has at the moment, even after already being developed for many years as a new game. We still believe that there is tremendous potential in Tremulous’ fundamental style of game that has not yet been fully accessed, and currently it seems that no other project is approaching that. Regardless, if this style of game is going to become successful again, essentially the community is going to have to be rebuilt mostly from scratch.
Of course we welcome exiting and old Trem players to give Stellar Prey a try when it is ready, and that can make a good core for the community, I think many current and old Trem players will appreciate what Stellar Prey will have to offer, but it is also very important to factor in attracting and retaining large numbers of new players that never even heard of Tremulous before.
The short and simple answer is we are choosing to spend our spare time this way for the fun of it, we believe we have some pretty good ideas regarding this project, and we’ll see how successful this project turns out. If it catches on and becomes popular that would be awesome! Regardless, we are having a good time in the process, and that in itself is a good use of time especially for a free and open source project. Not to mention, one of the cool aspects as a free and open source project, anyone interested in contributing to this project, is free to offer their contributions.