I just realized I've actually been working on this project for over five full years now.
What have we achieved in the time? Well, the technical side of things is rather usable, although it is heading for a rewrite to be actually usable and nice.
Five years the content development has been stuck in the dark swamp of random, but now we've finally got the thing under much required control. For the second time in these five years I'm feeling confident about this thing. The first time I was just young and inexperienced.
I've seen people come and go and my vision of timeframes has really blurred in the process of this project. You can find countless examples of this on the forums if you dare dig deep enough.
This project has given me a lot to apply outside of this project and I've also managed to apply a lot I've learned here. Life long learning seems to be the latest buzz around.
What kept me going these five years? Well, simply enough I'm just a stubborn person with strong views on things.
This random rambling slowly gets me to the point: What do you people out there actually know about me? Anything you'd like to know? Any memories you feel like sharing from over these years?
So a combination of get-to-know-a-dev and nostalgia trip it is! Truly in the essence of my favorite section here: offtopic!
Five years and still going
Five years and still going
This message used to be meaningful.
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SpamMaster
- Novice
- Posts: 79
- Joined: 18 Sep 2009, 22:29
- Location: Spammiland
Re: Five years and still going
How did you discover the project? Did you want to help as soon as you saw it? Did you think at first that it would fail? Do you believe, now, that it will ever be done?
I've not even been here a year yet, so I haven't got a lot of memories to share. It's still pretty much the same as it was when I started - oh, it's got magic now, and squirrels and new logheads, but nothing like how much it's changed in five years.
Five years is along time. It's survived this long, so hopefully it will survive a while longer.
I've not even been here a year yet, so I haven't got a lot of memories to share. It's still pretty much the same as it was when I started - oh, it's got magic now, and squirrels and new logheads, but nothing like how much it's changed in five years.
Five years is along time. It's survived this long, so hopefully it will survive a while longer.
Have a spamful evening, sir.
Re: Five years and still going
SpamMaster wrote: that it will ever be done?
This game will never be done (you can always make improvements)
memories of my first attempt at pixel art from when I first joined this game
Pixel Battalion
Re: Five years and still going
http://wiki.themanaworld.org/index.php/User:Rotonen
That is a true story, although I should probably update my field of study a bit since my majors and minors slightly changed.
I came over since I was looking through free-to-play MMO games to fill in my boredom due to the excess time I had back then. It could have been a random lucky Google hit or then it was http://www.onrpg.com/ which led me here originally. It must have been 0.0.6, it was mostly written in C with Allegro and it had SoM graphics as placeholders. Also the map editor was really horrible and did only 640x480 full screen back then. It has no relation to the nicety of tiled we have these days.
I registered at the forums, I played it for about two minutes, discarded it and went on. About two months from that I actually came across to read the web page, discovered it was open source and felt it gave me a better chance to go complain about things. I noticed they had an IRC channel and I came in bashing and trolling. After about half an hour I got the position I still hold.
And yes, it will get done. We're doing things the right way this time. Of course once we get the gameworld done and alongside that the gameplay bit by bit in each content release, then we will have to keep on developing the story and content further and further as long as there are players out there. If we don't keep on taking it further, people will lose interest and we will have to shut it down since no one is interested in it anymore. Any of these concerns are still probably a decade or so ahead of us at this pace, and I'm being optimistic with this assesment.
Our current server, the hunk of junk circa 2004 eAthena, was originally supposed to be online for about two months just to test the client technology and get our own server done, up and running. There was a slight delay...
At the moment things are going at a rate where we can start designing real content instead of the placeholder pseudo content out there right now. Originally it just had one map. Then we scratched that and made a city with one map to go out on (Tulimshar and the thing just south of it). This was done to make it a bit more attractive for testers so we'd get more bug reports. Then it started to grow to test the client further and we had a slight oopsie: we had a player community who held the game dear.
We did not realize this in time and the game had already gone pretty much FUBAR in the three or so years passed. In the past two or so years we've actually slowly and painstaikingly patched it up to a state where we can actually add content to it in a sensible way, but it is still in the need of a complete overhaul from my point of view for many reasons. This is why I've now decided to pull from eA development and actually get the first content release of TMW out there for you to enjoy.
As this is probably going to cause confusion and panic: as long as there are people playing the current server, we will not shut it down. Relax, have fun, enjoy. There is no doomsday.
That is a true story, although I should probably update my field of study a bit since my majors and minors slightly changed.
I came over since I was looking through free-to-play MMO games to fill in my boredom due to the excess time I had back then. It could have been a random lucky Google hit or then it was http://www.onrpg.com/ which led me here originally. It must have been 0.0.6, it was mostly written in C with Allegro and it had SoM graphics as placeholders. Also the map editor was really horrible and did only 640x480 full screen back then. It has no relation to the nicety of tiled we have these days.
I registered at the forums, I played it for about two minutes, discarded it and went on. About two months from that I actually came across to read the web page, discovered it was open source and felt it gave me a better chance to go complain about things. I noticed they had an IRC channel and I came in bashing and trolling. After about half an hour I got the position I still hold.
And yes, it will get done. We're doing things the right way this time. Of course once we get the gameworld done and alongside that the gameplay bit by bit in each content release, then we will have to keep on developing the story and content further and further as long as there are players out there. If we don't keep on taking it further, people will lose interest and we will have to shut it down since no one is interested in it anymore. Any of these concerns are still probably a decade or so ahead of us at this pace, and I'm being optimistic with this assesment.
Our current server, the hunk of junk circa 2004 eAthena, was originally supposed to be online for about two months just to test the client technology and get our own server done, up and running. There was a slight delay...
At the moment things are going at a rate where we can start designing real content instead of the placeholder pseudo content out there right now. Originally it just had one map. Then we scratched that and made a city with one map to go out on (Tulimshar and the thing just south of it). This was done to make it a bit more attractive for testers so we'd get more bug reports. Then it started to grow to test the client further and we had a slight oopsie: we had a player community who held the game dear.
We did not realize this in time and the game had already gone pretty much FUBAR in the three or so years passed. In the past two or so years we've actually slowly and painstaikingly patched it up to a state where we can actually add content to it in a sensible way, but it is still in the need of a complete overhaul from my point of view for many reasons. This is why I've now decided to pull from eA development and actually get the first content release of TMW out there for you to enjoy.
As this is probably going to cause confusion and panic: as long as there are people playing the current server, we will not shut it down. Relax, have fun, enjoy. There is no doomsday.
This message used to be meaningful.
Re: Five years and still going
YetRotonen wrote:There is no doomsday.
I still remember my early contributions for TMW. God! That was hopeless XD
Re: Five years and still going
Five years, and four of these years I am here. ;-)
Regards.
Regards.
Re: Five years and still going
me too. and I'm still hopelessi wrote: I still remember my early contributions for TMW. God! That was hopeless XD
.Rotonen: I remember your car crash.
Re: Five years and still going
BTW, Platinum, the hosting server on new years eve is 12 years old. ;)
Regards.
Regards.
Re: Five years and still going
Rotonen: I remember when you went to army! :P
Re: Five years and still going
I still have some visible scars from the car crash.
Even though I got out of service for health reasons during peacetime, they found me a wartime use and hence I have to go to these silly rehearsals every now and then.
Getting platinum.edu.pl level quality of service for our hosting for free was probably the only thing which allowed our community to get to this point.
Even though I got out of service for health reasons during peacetime, they found me a wartime use and hence I have to go to these silly rehearsals every now and then.
Getting platinum.edu.pl level quality of service for our hosting for free was probably the only thing which allowed our community to get to this point.
This message used to be meaningful.