Ah... Iron Dragon
A few years ago, golly it must be 6 years, I helped write a computer game called Iron Dragon. My friend Martin reminded me with this post.
Martin wrote the game client, the music and sound effects, and was pretty much in-charge. His brother did the art. What the hell did I do? I wrote the game tools, the setup script, the web site, and the game server.
The tools were very simple. The main tool allowed you to drag images and other assets into a resource file manager. We created a file that had a nmrf extension. nmrf stood for Nick-Martin Resource File.
I wrote the server in staright C and it compiled under BSD. I did most of the development under Windows and made sure the code was portable. For years I managed the server too until I started to become unresponsive and I passed the torch.
I also wrote the server. Believe it or not, I wrote it in C as well. Pages are served up via CGI. It’s all dynamic and you can configure the web site to do a lot of simple things like post new articles, upload new verssions of the software, etc. The beta testers even got to submit bugs via a simple bug tracking system I developed. Finally, I implemented the ELO rating system for game rankings. This is the system used by most Chess ranking systems. You can check out the latest rankings, here. The HTML is a bit dated and doesn’t look nice in Firefox. I suppose I didn’t follow the standards well even though the page claims to he HTML 4.0 Strict.
It’s amazing all of the grunt work that went into getting the game to be a commercial entity. All in all, I can trace all of my hard-core knowledge of network and web programming to that project. Whenever I pull shit out of my hat, it’s probably based on something I learned while writing all of that stuff.
Now playing: Dave Slusher @ Evil Genius Chronicles - Apr 13, 2005 - "Psychic Used Cars"