[sector24]

To be honest I don't consider Sourceforge and similar projects to be successors in any tangible way. If you don't own the intellectual rights to the project, you can't make the sequel. You can certainly make something, but when everyone is a volunteer the odds of any project going all the way to completion go way down.

As far as the seeds go, I do understand how they are supposed to work. However, the way Stardock talked about them it seems like only certain seeds have valid resources surrounding the starting areas. Since not all seeds are valid, we have to rely on them to provide them for us. Technically you can delete the seed altogether and create a totally random map, or use a manual brute force attack to generate all maps and then manually check which ones work for you. I think that's only for people who want to play Elemental: War of Boredom.