after doom i simply had to play all the 'good' shooters out there. so that
it comes to no surprise, that i played heretic, doom 2, hexen, duke nuk'em 3d,
quake & mission packs, quake 2 & mission packs, sin & wages of
sin, half-life & opposing force & blue shift, heretic 2, hexen 2,
quake 3 arena & team arena, unreal, unreal tournament, wheel of time, ds9
- the fallen, elite force, alice, gunman chronicles and no one lives
forever...
so basically i play games with id or epic engine. i am really looking
forward to doom3, halo, unreal 2, duke nuk'em forever and return to cw. the
expansion pack for elite force is as good as bought... today (2005) i have
played something like 80 games of that genre, but also (2009) racing games
like need for speed or toca race driver, and lately rpgs like kotor or two
worlds... ok, i love games, but is that all? not quite!
as a fan i can't just sit back and watch the world go by. i really wanted
to do something fun that might also be of interest to all the other dedicated
gamers.
quake site
i started off with setting up a quake server, that had its own admin friendly
mod (head hunters, death match, ctf...). what made the server different where
the custom maps i ran in the map loops. though by today's standards only a
small group of gamers played there, we had much fun and and things used to be
a lot more personal. back then auto-downloads (of maps, skins etc.) were not
implemented, so folks needed to get the maps prior to joining the server.
obviously the server required a dedicated site for downloads, map infos,
and lots of other stuff related to quake. this was my very first attempt at
html and a great learning experience. i still remember the times when i used
to play with other folks 8 hours straight or would chat in quake's 40
characters max. console for hours on end. those where the good days of gaming,
where cheating had yet to be invented. in the first few months of quake, i was
still playing with the keyboard. something you youngsters out there will find
pretty hard to believe, i am sure.
parallel to the site, i started to code my own stats and ranking tool that
was a collection of amiga arexx scripts, that generated html output.
after much fun with quake, quakeworld started to be played more and more...
and the competitive edge crept into gaming... read: it was less and less fun
to play for the heck of it, since too many clan fanatics were taking winning
too seriously... and then cheating started.
quake 2 site
as is my way with things, i quit playing quake/qw entirely. luckily quake 2
was only about 6 months away, so i started to build up a site dedicated to
quake 2. once the game was out i was one of the first folks in europe, that
had a server running with great pings. again i set up level loops with custom
maps - to break the monotony of the standard maps. since the server and the
site were right there from the start they became fairly popular. so that at
just about any time in the day folks where playing death match games. the mod
i used was lithium ii, it featured admin control, runes and an off-hand hook.
since i am no fan of ctf or tf these mods where never put up... and then came
rocket arena 2... that mod really took off!
around this time i had started to build a map for quake that never quite
got finished, but since the level editors worldcraft and qoole very quickly
supported quake 2, i ported to map to quake 2. the result: cyber arena. the
second map i built was shake 2 and that took me literally months to do.
of course... a new game needs new stats. since the quake version of my
stats tool was too slow and required to much intervention by the user, i
started to re-code the whole thing in ansi c and called it aeqs. this time
everything was automatic.
then again the time came where i had had it with all the so called
professional clan players. i quit quake ii and shut down the servers.
unreal site
to pass the time and to support a totally different game, i started the unreal
site. it really was fun to do a completely new site. with it i wanted to
spread the awareness for unreal multiplayer. but since the net code was simply
unplayable right up to the last few official patches, it never really took
off. anyway the single player game was great. i coded another version of aeqs
for unreal called aeus, that featured time calculations and other nice new
infos in stats.
half-life... nope, no site
the story behind half-life is a bit weird. i loved the single player
experience and i also played quite a lot of multiplayer death match on the
net, but i never got around to build a web site. this is all the more
peculiar, for i did build several maps for this game: canyon tower, cathedral
and cube using qoole and quark. much to my surprise the canyon tower map seems
to be very popular with the half-life folks, even today.
æstats site
after several generations of parsers, i occurred to me that it simply is not
efficient to do a complete re-write of the code for every game. so i developed
a concept that would let me support just about any shooter (up to now) out
there on the "fly". this has been working just fine, even though æstats is
more than 2.5 years old today (june 1st 2001). and still i am coding at
it.
quake 3 arena site
finally quake 3 arena arrived. i had a little site going, dedicated to this
game, nothing much but it was fun doing it anyway. later i did the german
quake 3 arena site (www.quake3arena.de) for the folks i was working for, gxp
(known for their lan parties in germany).
quake 3 arena is still (june 1st 2001) my favorite game. though by now i have
shifted from death match to instagib. since id's latest engine supports curved
surfaces (patches), it was again a challenge to build maps. so far i did arena
(quake-ish), sculpture (1on1), arcs (massive use of curves) and a q3dm17 remake
for instagib. i have a ctf map almost done, have started a counter-strike-ish
map and map with egyptian design. wonder if i will ever get around to finishing
those.
2005: the ctf map was done, and several other q3a maps have been built,
the cs-ish map never made it into anything playable.
æstats++ site
there is no tool, that can't be improved. i have been planning a total
re-write of æstats for ages, and have set up a dedicated site to show the
features of this tool. alas i have not gotten very far in coding yet. but when
i do get things done, it will be a very powerful stats tool indeed :).
2005: the site has been re-designed, and i have started to recode æstats++ in
d, possibly by the end of this year a release will be available.
2009: alas programming simply takes up much to much time and energy, so
æstats++ never got coded. well i wrote a configuration file controlled
pre-parser in d for the q3a engine games, but that was it, alas.
nostalgia site
i used to run a site that collected screen shots for all sorts of games.
mostly interesting stuff i had found on the net. interesting in so far, as you
could compare final release games with early development shots and see how
things progressed. i am planning to start that site again with up to date
screens (done).
2009: though fun, the work put into the site never really was worth the work,
so the site just quietly hangs in there.
a bit of design here and there
i designed most of the sites myself, so that i do have some basic 'pixel
skills' and an eye for design. but there are folks out there who simply can do
better. the unreal site navigation e.g. was done by m7 in shockwave and the
previous (not the present) re-design of the æon's site was done by flash. i am very grateful to
these very talented folks.
finally to pass my time i did some collages for quite a few games / movies.
over these years i have amassed several wallpapers on this site.
more recent work
up to now, 2009, many things have happened: i wrote quite a few faqs, built
more maps, created some more wallpapers, and even started a new sub-site
called aeon's rpgs, that features interactive maps for the games two worlds
and gothic 3.
