R2/History

From RockServ

It's not often that history gets to speak for itself. Here I have included links to pages that have been preserved by archive.org. Luckily, most of the old sites, forums, scores and miscellany are there, but it looks like some player created sites may be gone for ever, such as WarGod's. If you have these websites saved, please contact Spanky. See Main Page for tips on How To Add Other Peoples' Stuff.

1 www.tcbi.com
2 www.deltapolis.com
3 www.zilla.net
4 www.dillfrog.com
5 www.dillfrog.com/games/r1/

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www.tcbi.com

(bbs.tcbi logo)

The original Rock scripts brought a dual-pentium (300mhz? unsure) IIS server to a crawl. Here is the first public announcement for Rock, made by Plat on 10/07/1997:

From: Plat Subject: ADVERTISEMENT: (custom) Rock - Multi-User Web Based Mud This is the only article in this thread View: Original Format%%% Newsgroups: rec.games.mud.announce Date: 1997/10/07

Hi there. "Rock"'s been around for several months now, but I don't believe I ever got around to actually "announcing" its arrival.

To keep things simple and honest, Rock is a web-based mud, boasting a more-or-less textual interface, and not requiring any additional plug-ins, java, or javascript. Sure, it's not as big as other telnet Muds or commercial Muds, but it's still growing along with its player base. The realm is turn-based, so players don't end up playing all day, thus allowing people with less free time to compete with the others.

If you haven't checked it out yet, or would like more info, come check us out at:

http://www.deltapolis.com/rock/

Regards,

Plat (Programmer/Creator, Rock).

Though Plat got assistance from a variety of sources (including donated hosting, and misc. NPCs and stuff), much of the content was created by Plat and Cracker (now known as Venomlord), who brought unflinching goofiness and scaredom to the realm.

Venomlord's homepage can be viewed at: http://members.lsol.net/cracker/

Jan 28, 1999 All evidence is not lost! This orphaned page is a last remnant of the existence of Rock on tcbi.com's servers. The song labeled, "Set You Up" with the filename of rock.ra was written about Rock. (its not there :( )

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www.deltapolis.com

Krafter wrote up a history about Godz in 1998, found here

The GodZ project, more or less, started on 5-25-1996 at 9:20pm. I was at home recovering from reconstructive surgery on my left ankle and was terribly board. For several months before this a few friends and I had been talking about online games and what made some good and some bad. We talked about what we felt would make the ultimate online game and this was the date when I started cataloging what we thought should be in the game.

In the beginning we were actually talking about a space exploration/exploitation game. Most of us had spent plenty of time playing games like Railroad tycoons, Civilization, Spaceward Ho and an Online game called Tradewars. When tradewars came out for MajorBBS we spent considerable time playing it. Soon we became dissatisfied by the MajorBBS version of tradewars and we started planning what we felt would be a better version. At first it was going to be a MajorBBS addon, but eventually we decided to make it run on the Internet via TCP/IP.

I spent some time coding up the socket libraries and fighting through Microsoft's foundation class libraries. I started constructing a generic server that would be able to host our game within itself. We called this server Godzilla.

In Spring of 97 I moved to Milwaukee, WI. While there, and with the assistance of Chris Frantz I recoded everything for Linux. I was working on the database support and trying to work out some portability issues over the summer. I spent some time experimenting with Java but that seemed just to slow.

Sometime during the summer Tyler put Rock online. I didn't find out about it until Jason Brunette pointed out to me the loading that the NT server was experiencing. We investigated and found Rock to be a interesting creation that was growing in popularity. We offered our services to Tyler to help support Rock, and he came on board with Delta, bringing Rock with him.

After a few months the loading was just to extreme so we moved Rock to our Unix server in the hopes that would help some. It did ease the loading, but more and more people were playing all the time. Tyler was looking for some answers to help out with his various problems. Unfortunately we could only help so much because of the complexity of what he had already created.

I saw the changes that he was trying to make, socket libraries, multithreading, background server. I realized there was a close parallel between where Rock was going and where Godzilla was going. That is when I made the suggestion, start over using the concepts that we had put into the Godzilla project.

We all agreed this was the best direction to go. We decided to run the two in in parallel until Godzilla was complete and then we would shut down Rock and offer up the next generation.

This turned out to be impossible as the administrative tasks and general instability of Rock became all encompassing of Tyler's time. We made the decision to shutdown Rock, and focus everything on doing Godzilla.

So that's about it. So where does the GodZ come from. It was an internal abbreviation for Godzilla. We all think that Godzilla is the coolest thing out there and so we felt that it made a great name for the project.

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