ToEE 10 Year Anniversary Thread: 9/16/2003 - 9/16/2013

lol 0rion, bless his heart.

That's pretty high praise Sitra, thank you.

I'll spare you all the phony modesty, but suffice it to say, I honestly never thought of myself as anything but another contributor here - albeit one who was determined to right the ship. I was probably most inspired by zhuge back in the early days, whose leadership and capability I think saved Co8 from its first crisis. That was simply the end of the initial rush of interest after ToEE's release, where there's a very natural and predictable die-off of members and contributions. And it was pretty much a simple desire to see the 'legacy,' if you will, of him and all the other contributors maintained that lead me to try to see this all through to what we have today - though of course I never figured it would take this long . I didn't like the idea of all the effort and the history of this place going to waste or falling into disarray, with our lasting contribution to the game world being a rather jumbled up mess of random mods that broke the game overall as much as they fixed it improved it individually. And here we are now ... I hope we achieved that and that the public thinks nice things when they think of Co8 - all of us.

One interesting thing to note about members and generations is that I think there was actually a generation before zhuge's, the very first, that put out versions 1 and 2 of the modpack in late 2003. (zhuge started with v3 I think.) That crew was made up of guys like Chris Woods, Nomad Wanderer, and even Sol/Exitium. You can still read about their exploits on the Negative Energy Plane board, where all the founding threads went to after the server crash or whatever catastrophe it was that happened here back near the beginning.

 

Hehe the beginnings of my toolset and my very first meaningful post on the boards here, over 9 years ago (I lurked Co8 since its very inception but only registered and started active modding about a year later): http://co8.org/forum/showthread.php?t=1062

It's interesting to see that my efforts here started with a simple and rather haphazard interest in the mobile object file format and, since I was unable to break it immediately, in working around the inability to create new MOBs by scripting. This has later resulted in many modding utilities and research projects down the road, including the Spawner Mod (a very early pure script-based creature spawner), ToEE Mod Studio (does anyone still remember that one? it's the historical precursor to ToEEWB that was not very successful), ToEE World Builder, ToEE Editing Utilities, and, of course, ToEE Front-End and its successor, ToEE Front-End X. It was a big pleasure coding them all for the modders to use and seeing them put to good use!

- Agetian

 

Yeah I think the first crew restored the brothel, fixed NPC overlooting, made Iuon stones, did stuff like that. In those days the mod was called 'fan fixes' (lol). We still have those mods on the server; they weigh like 120 KB each.

And yes, the modding forum was private in the beginning (though I was not active here at the time - only read about it in old threads) until Livonya of all people womaned up and got that straightened out.

~

And since we're giving credit where credit's due in this thread, let's mention or re-mention a few others ...

Agetian indeed, who took on the less glamorous job of behind-the-scenes work in cracking file formats and code and building tools for the rest of us to use. This has been huge all along, and I always wish you got more credit for it Ag, but such is the way these things go. Suffice it to say, modders and players alike appreciate it greatly, even if we don't always say so as loudly. :hug: (And yes, it's kind of cute or quaint now to think back to ToEE Mod Studio ... humble beginnings.)

Sitra similarly has done a lot of low-key work that actually has resounding effects on the game. Reactive Temple pretty much singlehandedly made the Temple something other than a hack and slash dungeon crawl. The intelligent monster/enemy model is really profoundly different than the 'put .mob here and wait for PC' method that Troika originally used. This is simply huge in its implications for the game. Oh and personally I have 'borrowed' (read stolen ) more code of yours than I care to admit, though in all seriousness this just means your efforts have extended beyond the immediate effects of your own mods. And no one knows the torments you had to endure from this finicky game to actually get that stuff to work.

Lastly let's not forget the rank and file people here who keep this place a community. I'm not going to try to list all names, but the sirchets and GuardianAngels of the world hold a special place in the annals of ToEE/Co8 for keeping the lights on. Thanks to you all - you know who you are.

 

Yes, I'm very happy to see that absolutely everybody who has contributed significantly to the modpack has left a lasting imprint on it that shows till this very day! It's really heartwarming to see the 10-year collective effort because even more so than individual mods that make up the modpack, it is the people that contributed to it that bring back a lot of good memories! *I'm suddenly feeling nostalgic, to be honest... *

- Agetian