Yahoo is going to stop offering its "Geocities"-Service, in which every user could create a website on their space with an amazing 15MB of space, or something. However, now this ends and all these pages will die on the 29th of October.

This is, all things considered, not that tragic, but it's really the end of an era. The era of incredibly stupid gifs.



Some of you might not even remember these dark age of the internet. Are there still webrings around? Man, those were annoying. But I guess the rise of Giant Google killed the need for them. So in essence, we traded privacy for an easier ability to find porn and other things. Well, thats progress, in a way.



So do you have an old Geocities-webpage? The dark, embarassing, early times of your internetlife, maybe? Because now is the moment to show them! So we can laugh at with you! Was it about the cheats to Diablo that you found and/or collected? A fanpage about your favorite, now long-forgotten band? Or maybe, but that's ridiculous, maybe it's about videogames you made! Ho ho ho!



Shit.

Okay, gang, so this is ... was my page, located at That incredibly long URL that I still know from memory. Geez, it's been a while since I've set foot here! So it's probably full of spelling mistakes, bad grammar, horrible puns and all the other annoying traits of the old "Error". Sheesh, remember that guy? Make a camera thread and that idiot will ALWAYS post there. (In another hilarious episode I created a thread about ulillillia, defending him. That one didn't end well, and in hindsight, I can't for the life of me figure out how I could ever have considered that a good idea)

So the slogan that I've cut here is "The page with no design awards at all", which even for my standards is incredibly unfunny. It's true though, and there is a reason for that, the page uses frames. Which... are bad, I guess? I'm not a webdesigner. But back then, i thought they were INCREDIBLE, so I used them, of course! I guess thats how you learnt how to create webpages in school. Which is, in another way, pretty embarassing.

... Wait, whats that?!



Thats the visitor counter. Yes, thats right. My webpage has been visited an astonishing zero times. So now that you look through this, you actually witness things never ever seen before by anyone!

Okay, so actually, that visitor-counter is broken for years, and I never bothered to fix it. It was actually a neat thing Yahoo allowed you to add in with "one click" (which then took me an afternoon to figure out). Since Geocities didn't support PHP, this was - to my knowledge - the only way to add a visitorcounter (save for using another service using another server, but thats cheating).

So on the left, we see a "menu", which is a sneaky little word for what should be called "Embarassing factoids". Thankfully, even back then I was surprisingly aware of my privacy and didn't register that website on a service that shortened the URL to something memorable - a friend of mine did, using both his and mine name. To this day, I still receive Spammails from them - speaking of which, anyone looking for cheap Viagra? Because apparently, I'm a lucky guy who could order now lots and lots of those for an incredibly cheap price. So drop me a message if you want some.

So there is "NEWS", which is just the page you just saw. It says in rough translation:



Yeah, thats how you lure your visitors in, huh? Tell them "Go get lost in this trainwreck of a page, HAVE FUN LOOKING FOR THAT ONE THING I WANT PEOPLE TO LOOK AT".

Okay, to be fair, it's not like that. Originally, the News-page actually hosted, you know, NEWS. ... Well, not news as in "Obama is president!" but rather news as in "New Tutorial online!".
For most of you, it's unthinkable, but back then, I was actually doing GAME DESIGN!* And I made tutorials and minigames and effects and screenshots, and I put them up there. For you guys to look at. Then, I would create a thread in Showcase (nowadays "Projects"). And then, people would reply "I CAN'T SEE IT", since you could not hotlink Geocities. So I would then tell them to please copy&paste the URL into the adress bar and they would be like "Man, your page sucks" and I would be like, ":("
I would contribute things like tutorials and code - mainly an AI-code that used a surprisingly ineffective pathfinding algorhithm, as well as some Point-and-Click-Adventure code that to my knowledge was downloaded and used even recently, but I don't think anyone ever used it past the initial trial phase.
Theres also an inventory code still up there - back then, inventory wasn't trivial! Turrican might remember conversations about this.

So what kind of Tutorials were there? Ah, lets just click the "TUTORIALS"-link!

... only to find out it doesn't exist, sadly! I'm sure I had something up there, a tutorial explaining vectors and then using that knowledge for particle effects, but apparently - I'm mistaken. Or I took it down earlier because I was too embarassed of that.
Who knows.

On to the "PROJECTS"-Page. Aaah, what might be behind this?



First of all, there is a link to 3dgamestudio dot de. Because nothing screams "I'M A GAME DEVELOPER" like saying "I USE GAME STUDIO". It's like I were to put up a cooking site, and on the recipe-page, I'd say "MICROWAVE LASAGNA - buy and put in microwave. Serves one".
I knoooooow, obviously, that Gamestudio allows real design, but the name sure doesn't sound like it. Which is why I put "A6-Engine" on there. Man, am I clever. There is also the beloved old "I am not responsible for external webpages", which, as I'm sure some readers will remember, was a curse - and somewhat still is - along germen webpages.

So theres "Mini-Games" and a secret "Real Project". What might it be???? Some people around here KNOW
Will do that one later on. For now, let's check the Minigames.

We're greeted with a friendly remainder that "WE NEED TO HAVE DIRECTX 8 INSTALLED" or else! (the games won't work). Also, there is the disclaimer oh-so-prominent on the internet. I still use the english version of this, since it's simple and to the point. Is it something that would actually be heard in court? Who knows. So, "If it blows up your machine, it's your fault", it is.

And then, there were games. Three games, to be exact, "Ball Madness", in which you had to draw lines in order to get a Ball to the goal, kind of like Kirbys Canvas Curse (only not as fun), which is described as something for "people who liked Lemmings". Sheesh, EVERYONE liked Lemmings! Too bad those two games are nothing alike at all! This devious plan for lots of downloads backfired, though, since, well, this is a geocities page and as such won't allow more than two downloads in an hour. Lots of disappointments were had in the Showcase-forum back then - mainly by me as people shrugged and moved on to the next shooter since my game won't load. Aww man!



The next one was called "Asteroid Race", and we can see a superblurry picture up there. Why so blurry? I was afraid that my limit of 15 MB was almost up (and at that point, it was!), so I had to compress this. A lot.
The game also had three updates and bugfixes, which means it had an incredible lifespan for my standards. It was fun, and still is, actually! Had lots of modes, a nice and easy concept, and even a two player mode. Music is missing, sadly, but its really not that bad, and the explosions look nice. So better try it today, since this will be gone in October.

The other one is Block Run, which I thought was incredibly innovative, but apparently, even Nintendo did something similar back in, I don't know, 1823 with Warios Woods. Time-travelling thieves!
It's still very different, but its not all that fun. It's just missing a clear goal.


And ... this is it for now. I might continue this look through the ages later. Why?

[img]http://img34.imageshack.us/img34/501/17070832.jpg[/img]
(Pic doesn't show up? LINK)

FOOTNOTES

* I still do.

EDIT: Stop dropping me messages for cheap Viagra, goddamn.

http://web.archive.org/web/20000409151732/http://www.firoball.de/

oldest snapshot I found... I have all those old pages still somewhere on my pc, though...

I love this web-archives here is an old, but not-so-bad example from my little team in 2000: http://web.archive.org/web/20000929110007/www.software51.de/german/index.html

This was my first site which started around 1997 as a links page and grew into a very popular site in its day

http://web.archive.org/web/19980130015531/http://www.vbexplorer.com/

http://web.archive.org/web/1998013001553...vbexplorer.com/

and an old 3DGS review I did on another site I had

http://web.archive.org/web/20030622035110/www.cavebrain.com/cavebrain/3d_game_studio_3dgs_review.asp

few others but looks like they didn't merit being stored on archive.org as the pages are all not found.

Yes, humble beginnings:

http://z8.invisionfree.com/jedi_outcast/index.php?act=idx

BEFORE I wanted to develop games...this is the only mod of mine that started a forum and site, but the site has been unavailable for quite some time and I can't find it, nor remember the name. The mod got to version 1.1 and was halted after that. The Jedi Outcast Full Game Enhancement Mod. Good times, good times.

Mmmm seems my geocities and freewebs websites were deleted a long time ago. Can't find 'em anymore.

Remember those??
http://web.archive.org/web/20051127011233/www.coniserver.net/ubbthreads/ubbthreads.php
http://web.archive.org/web/20040805215340/http://conitecserver.com/ubbthreads/ubbthreads.php

they should have waited until 2012

Since my page is only online for a few more days, I better hurry and do the promised second part:



I'm sure you've all been waiting for this, too.

Back then, this so-called "Real project" was an RPG with lots of similarities to Pokémon. You encountered, fought and caught wild "Monsters", and then used these to fight against the monsters of other "Trainers". It's really similar to Pokemon, but it's in 3D!! Also, the monsters look different.

During the course of this project, several people worked on this, which I'm afraid I cannot list all at this time (I might if I had the backups at hand, but unfortunately, I don't right now). Thanks to them, though! Apart from the "usual suspects" who help me with all my projects (you know who you are :)), I definately have to mention Stefan and our modeller, who called himself "positive_electron" back then (which was a long time ago, I don't know his current nickname, and I also don't know if he was ever active here). Then, there was a guy named KeNiBu. And ... I'm sure I forgot lots of people, for which I apologize.

Have fun with the shots of this unfortunately failed project. Some here have played it!

Part One (the less impressive part)
Part Two (the more impressive part)

Some notes I remember while looking through this.

- The black borders around the screen highlight a "cutscene" or are shown during a dialog, but they don't appear during all cutscenes or dialogs. I don't know what exactly triggered them, but I do remember being exceptionally proud of their nice fade-in-effect.
- The dialogsystem was extremely easy to work with, and very powerful. It also had lots of options like shaking text, automatic centering and what-have-you. I wanted to use TrueType-Fonts at first, but they slowed down the game so much (due to a bug that I'm not sure was ever fixed (I believe it wasn't a Gamestudiobug)) that we went with Bitmap-Fonts. The font used here has been used in many, many other projects since and was made by the amazing Turrican.
For my new project, I made a new dialogsystem, since the old one used execute, and was generally not the best one. The new one "kind-of" encrypts the text, is faster, but uses a standalone editor.
- "BESIEGT" is shown when a monster dies in battle (nobody ever "dies" in these games, they're always just "knocked out"), but in this game, it's "BESIE". Obviously, the text is cut short way too early, but I never bothered to fix that. Huh.
- The "Realtime-facial-animation-code" in this project was made to look like the faces in Wind Waker. It's not too bad, actually, but it doesn't really nail it like Wind Waker did. The code in my current project is closer
- Not shown: If you pressed the spacebar, a menu popped up. It was a neat effect with gears - but thats about the only nice-looking thing in the shots, the "time" and "action"-panels look extremely bland.
- However, the dialog-panels, as well as the "dinodex" and other menu-ish-screens looks nice: Turrican did those, thanks!
- Speaking of other peoples work: Positive_electron did the models, Stefan the levels (but also craeted some models, panels, graphics and what-have-you). I, however, only made horrible programmers art.
- The guy in the pink shirt was supposed to be an annoying character who always told you weird, long and elaborated stories. It was an in-joke to show off the dialog-system. The idea, I believe, was ripped off from Paper Mario 2, where Luigi does the same
- The battle-screens differ a lot. This is mainly due to the fact that there were two battlesystems in place: A turnbased one that worked just like Pokemon, and a realime-based Battle system in whcih you control the monsters movement. Nowadays, I'd try to create a realtimesystem in whcih you indirectly control your monster.
- The battlesystems may look confusing, and they were, but they worked. They weren't balanced great yet, but every attack did its job and could be used.
The code in place for this, however, is a giant mess.
- Even the turnbased battle system had realtime elements: By hitting the left mouse button at the right time, the attack would become stronger (or weaker, depending on if you're attacking or blocking). This shamelessly stolen from Paper Mario, again.
- The grass are actually particles. It was a lot faster this way, but they also had sorting errors and obviously wouldn't eract to lghting.
- The inventory was hastily coded from old pieces of code. It worked, but could easily be taken advantage of by other people - the whole thing was stored in plain text.
The black-and-white-effect was used in several places, and personally, I do think it looks nice!
- Catching the Monsters was possible using "Crystals", for whatever reason. Different Crystals had different effects (i.e. effective at night, effective for water-type-monsters, etc.). Some of those catching-effects looked nice -- but the zoom in was done using camera.arc, so the view-entities are placed incorrectly. Never bothered to fix that.
- The first pic from 11/23/04 is a favorite of mine - the camera position for these kind of animations (i.e. knock out, monster sent out, etc) was chosen randomly, and they do look nice!
- There were two playable areas: The grass-level seen in the first few shots, and a cave-level.
There was also a random-cave-generator in place to provide the player with ENDLESS FUN!! Although I think the random caves were only fun for a short while...
- The "ó" and similar characters were placeholders for symbols (like the male-female-signs).
- The shot from 11/05/04 shows the character looking at the sign. This was done by manipulating the bones, which at that time was a brand-new feature of Acknex.
- The first shot from 11/06/04 is also a favorite of mine, I really like how there's lots and lots of stuff on the screen.
- The trainer battles could be customized a lot, and I remember having a field day with this. Basically all trainers cheat or do something unexpected during the fight. One trainer, in particular, forced the player to balance on a ball of all things, so you always had to balance by moving the mouse while doing battle with him. Good times.

All in all... It was a nice little project, but the scale of it was way too huge, so it's not a large surprise that it was enver finished.
I have never shown the shots before apart from posting them on the website (and, given the pathetic amount of views, this is pretty much "never shown them before"!), so this is a BRAND NEW EXCLUSIVE!
Have fun with that.

Anyone here who still has shots from very old projects they'd like to show?

Wow, this looks like some solid coding.

However the project does not sound like a "nice little project".
There seem to be a lot of features.

I htink my A3 shots are pretty well known by now. And 4LW has enough stuff on the homepgae. The project was a giant big mess. I think I had a spaghetti phobia for several months afterwards