I just started working on something similar to this. I was wondering what different strategies people would have to come up with if you could have pvp in FTL, fights would certainly go differently. I looked around to see if the was a multiplayer mod and found this post in
Multispace, So I started working on a game "heavily inspired" by FTL in Java with multiplayer and moddability in mind (so far what I've been making is a clone of FTL, but things will change as more stuff gets added, simply adding multiplayer will force things to change quite a bit).
I just finished my 4th year in college (going for a dual major in Computer Science and Math) so I do have an idea of what I'm doing. I've also spent the past couple years modding minecraft (some mods I've made/worked on are: Metallurgy, Atum, Aquaculture, Agriculture and Creeper Gauntlet), so I've been using my experience with Forge to make this as moddable as possible (engines and augments are coded using the same system mods would use).
I started working on this about 10 days ago, and as of now I have 4300 lines of code, Ships and Weapons are read in from json files I have most laser, missile, and ion weapons in (still need to add fire and breach chances), ships have working reactors, weapons, shields, helm, oxygen, engines, medbay, and jump drive; crew can move around the ship and mann stations (repairing systems will be added soon); I have a "api" for creating augments, the shield charge booster and automated re-loader are both in and working (and each one only took a few lines of code to add after I got the augment api working); There are sectors, stars, and events, though they aren't randomly generated yet and I have not rigorously tested them. Today I'm working on crew pathing and door control.
The biggest thing missing is graphics, the whole system so far has been text based. It's not that I can't do graphics programming, I've made several game prototypes with graphics, but I find coding graphics and the game engine at the same time distracting, and I wanted to focus and getting functionality into the engine first.
I'm now at the point I would like people to work with, I figured this thread would be a good place to start. I read through half of the original Overdrive thread to help get an idea of what people wanted out of something like this. I would put the code on github if I could think of a name for it other than "FTL Clone". For now if anyone wants to look at the source code I put it up on dropbox,
Link. There might be problems as I'm in the middle of rewriting crew pathfinding, but everything seems to be working right now. If anyone want's to help let me know.