Tuesday, January 10, 2012

Alter Aeon 17th Anniversary

As of this weekend, it's been 17 years since I started on Alter Aeon. It all began with:

#include "stdio.h"

void main() {
}

When I started, I remembered so little C that I had to go look up what a structure was and how to use it. The game server code has since then landed me two good jobs and served as my final project for my engineering degree.

We're up to over three hundred thousand lines of source code now, with another twenty or thirty thousand lines of help files, faqs, rules, and other information. It's sometimes helpful to step back and see how far things have come.

This weekend, in celebration, we'll be having one of the rare scripted RP events that I occasionally do. These events are time consuming, with a lot of prep work and hassle trying to manage and keep everything working well, but they are hugely popular with the players. This time we have a storyline with a fairly plausible "end of the world as we know it" theme, and with any luck it'll be as successful as our 15th anniversary was a couple years ago.

Thanks to all the players who have contributed and help make Alter Aeon great over the years. See you all there!

-dentin

2 comments:

Richard Woolcock said...

It all started with "void main"? Bad dentin!

Dennis Towne said...

KaVir,

Yeah, that's the shocking part. That's how little I knew of C at the time. I'm not joking about having to look up what a structure was so I could group variables together.

On the other hand, it's a testament to what brute force and being hard headed can do, if you just stick with it.