Three Year Anniversary, Dentin Perspective

(posted Jan 12, 1998)
The next week marks the three year anniversary of Alter Aeon's existance.

Three years ago, I sat down in front of a proComm screen at work (after work,
mind you :) and started writing mud code.  Two weeks later, we had parsing
and the outline of rooms and the room builder.  One month later, we had rooms
and mobs, and even had the ability to save the things we built to files.  The
only problem was we had no socket code, and only one person could run the mud
at one time.  Usually, the way this was accomplised was to log onto good ol
trusty dec1.uafcs.alaska.edu and run the a.out executable.

Some time around march or april, the first cheezy socket code was installed,
and good hell, did it suck.  But it was good enough to allow more than one
person to build, and building began slowly. We still didnt have objects, but
we did have mobs and rooms, and amazingly enough some method of handling
zoneloading.  The entire viking area was built by Loki in that era.  The fact
that there were no objects at the time is the reason that vikings still do
not have much in terms of equipment.

Around june, we actually had objects.  However, it only took one full year to
get rid of the crash bug with corpses.  Ahh, the bane of the object code.

Next came the transistion from arrays to a full pointer system - dynamically
allocated space is really cool.  Eventually we got entities, which allow the
putting of characters in inventories and has caused no end of headache.

It should be noted that work still continues... and at this point, the socket
code has undergone 8 (yes, count them, eight) _major_ revisions.  And it
still sucks to work on.  Wonder if we'll be up to ten by the four year
anniversary...

Well, im done reminising, or however you spell it.  Hope you enjoy the fruits
of our labors, at least as much as I enjoyed playing Hidden Worlds when it
was still up.  Good luck, and happy gaming!

-dentin