History by Bugaboo #1
The Pre-Alpha Story
Sometime around March, 1997, I began work on a role playing game. The game, at first, had no name and no real purpose, other than giving me something to do. As the game progressed and began to build its own base of players, its purpose became clearer. During the developement of the Odyssey Pre-Alpha, many people had approached me and said, "Visual Basic? You can't make a good game in Visual Basic!". It was my goal now to prove that wrong to the world. Although the graphics in Odyssey Pre-Alpha were not extremely flattering, it never-the-less attracted a decent croud. Many hundreds of people played the Odyssey Pre-Alpha, and some still remain devoted fans today, over a year later. Late in 1997 Odyssey pre-alpha was closed down. It was closed for many reasons. The pre-alpha server was very unstable, having sometimes to be reset every half hour, which became a major burden on me and everyone else on the Odyssey team. Secondly, the source code had become corrupted on my hard drive, and was eventually lost. And, finally, we felt it was time to move on -- time for the Odyssey Alpha.
What is Odyssey Classic?
The Odyssey Online Classic is a re-make of the original Odyssey Pre-Alpha. Although it contains none of the original code, it is very similar in appearance and function. The Classic version has most all of the features that the last pre-alpha version had, and some completely new features may be added in the future. Among other improvements, the classic version should run more quickly on most computers than the pre-alpha version did, and should have a much more stable server. The Odyssey Online Classic also contains some never before seen graphics, that were intended for use in pre-alpha but never made it in.
The Classic Story
The Odyssey Online Classic was very successful at first, boasting as many or more players than the original pre-alpha. However, as with anything, problems eventually came about. Hacks were developed for the game, and it became impossible to tell who was cheating and who was playing fair. This led to several highly unpopular server resets. Several times the game server was even "held hostage" by players who had gotten their hands on the password of a god. I have handed development of The Odyssey Online Classic over to Wolfgang, who has worked hard to try to fix all of these problems, so that I may get back to work on Alpha. I hope to see Odyssey Classic recover to what it used to be.
The Next Step - The Odyssey Classic Alpha
Re-releasing the pre-alpha version was not a replacement for Alpha. The Odyssey Classic Alpha version will still be released some day -- we're just giving you something to do until then! For more information on Alpha, check out http://odyssey.kriegeronline.com/alpha/
History by Bugaboo #2 - December 26, 2000
A brief history of previous versions of the Odyssey:
Way back in March of 1997 I started working on the original version of the Odyssey -- Odyssey Pre-Alpha. Of course, at that point I really didn't know what I was getting into -- the game didn't even have a name. It was just me, fooling around in Visual Basic, seeing what I could come up with. I ended up surprising myself with what I could make with Visual Basic -- most programmers said that Visual Basic was not a 'real' programming language and not much could be done with it. It eventually became my goal to prove that a fun online game could be made with Visual Basic -- and out of that goal Odyssey Pre-Alpha was born. Pre-alpha was a pretty simple hack-n-slash online RPG -- there wasn't much to do besides kill things. But somehow, despite its simplicity, it was quite addictive and fun! It even became quite popular -- with 2000 user accounts existing by the end of its life.
Pre-alpha had a bunch of problems however. For one, the server software was extremely unreliable, and so the game was often down. Secondly, the Odyssey Pre-Alpha was my first real big programming project I had ever taken on, and so most of my energy went into learning new concepts, and less of it into creating good code. By the end of pre-alpha the code was such a mess, and I had learned so much about programming, that I felt I needed to start over.
Next came Odyssey Alpha. There were actually several different versions of Alpha, none of which were ever released. The first version was made in Visual Basic using DirectX. It boasted a nice new set of graphics, and large scrolling maps. However, during the time I was writing this version of alpha, I was also busy learning C++. When I was just about finished with it, I decided I was sick of Visual Basic and ready to try writing a game in C++ -- so I scrapped all the code and started over once more.
However, people were quite restless at this time and wanted something to play. So, before starting the next alpha, I decided to quickly re-make the pre-alpha Odyssey to give players something to do. I started once again from scratch, and in third weeks of non-stop programming I was able to get a game back up -- I called it Odyssey Classic. Although this version was meant just to be a temporary distraction while I built alpha, it turned out to be a lot more. I ended up putting a lot more time than I had planned into adding more and more features to classic. Finally, I handed the game over to Wolfgang so that I could get back to alpha.
The C++ version of Alpha was written beautifully. I thought out carefully every feature before I even began programming. That version too I built almost to completion. However, despite all the cool new features I had added, I had left out a very important feature -- the ability to edit game data while the game is running. In the beginning I had chosen to leave this feature out because of advantages this created, but by the end I regretted this decision -- an online game needs to be continually evolving, and this design didn't allow for that.
And that's where I stopped for a long time. I was at college, and didn't have the same time I used to have -- and so I stopped.
However, being away for Odyssey for so long has revived that old craving I used to have for it. I want to get back involved, no matter how little time I have. And so I have started work on the final Odyssey -- a hybrid between Classic and Alpha. I am building this from the C++ Alpha code, enhancing it to include an online editing system.
This brief history was mostly from my view as a programmer, and I didn't mention anybody else in it. However, there were many other people involved in Odyssey in many ways. It takes a lot of people to get something like this going, and to keep it going! I hope I get the same kind of support now that I did from all you guys back then
