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KG Erwin -> The Short History of the DV Project (5/15/2007 7:03:13 AM)
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This all started as a project from the Depot crew, but, as it went on and on, one enterprising gamer, Alby, decided to take the bull by the horns and do it himself. In the meantime, over here, many of us took interest in this, and started listing the faults we found.
Then, out of the blue, I got an e-mail from one Michael Wood. He mentioned the problems with the OOBs, and stated that he was thinking of returning to SPWaW and offering a patch to the game. This is what became 8.4 and then 8.403, the current "official" standard. I was dumbstruck, seriously. I was a relative newcomer to the gaming world, and one of the heavyweights is writing me.
To me, this was a moment of serendipity. I was tinkering with the Marine OOB, which I knew needed some improvements ( yes, I was one of the 8.3 team), and mentioned the work that Alby, Flashfyre and Goblin were doing. So, contacts were made, private discussions ensued, and Mike came up with the key to the whole project: The Enhanced OOB Editor.
This tool was a gift from heaven, as we finally had a way to normalize unit prices and ammo loadouts, which had been a bugaboo for the "official" Matrix teams.
So, all this, in a fashion, was a happy accident. Michael was very forthcoming in explaining how the code actually worked, and the whole team , of which I was a very small part, worked together to present what is, to my mind, the definitive version of SPWaW.
After it was realized what was needed, the hardest part was (and is) an actual line-by-line audit of the entire database. You folks have no idea what a monumental task that is. The inevitable errors crept in. This is why a further patch will be issued.
In any case, this project was the meeting of several independent ideas occurring simultaneously, and we should all be grateful that they came together. In today's gaming world, this spirit of cooperation is all too rare.
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