The SWGEmu team announced yesterday that it’s going ahead with plans to launch a fully playable test server for the Star Wars Galaxies Emulation Project sometime in the first quarter of 2009. Galaxies is fun again, chaps.

The move, announced yesterday in a special Christmas message on the team’s message board, confirms that it will be running an official server called Sun Crusher, an allusion to a weapon in the Star Wars universe. In addition to the official server, the SWGEmu team says that it will allow other, fan-provided servers to tap into the project. The team will provide server requirements—capacity, bandwidth, etc.—for those interested in running fan servers.

In the words of the team itself:

Our #1 commitment is releasing a fully functional, identical SWG (with bug fixes) emulator. This “vanilla” release will be maintained by SWGEmu for the foreseeable future. That said, the majority, if not all, of the SWGEmu developers are excited to take pre-cu and fulfill the potential that SOE never got around to doing.

And there you have it, a fully playable test server come next year.

Pic: Flickr