Happy new year DXMP [2021]
Posted: 03 Jan 2021, 05:59
Happy 2021!!!
It has been ages, a lot more than ten years, since most of us inhabited the lobby of DXMP routinely. That time we got to experience together was the time of another internet, another era, and we were all different people than who we are today.
Sometimes I think about how most multiplayer games today are so well structured but also so hard to modify and experience community modifications, and how most communities are so overwhelmingly big. I think Deus Ex and UE1 games from that time gave us this unique window to experience what were basically combinations of AAA studio efforts and small community efforts, with many players participating in building the game.
I recall DXMP being partially a wild west, it was only made safer because of efforts like Nephthys, DXMTL, ANNA and others. We still had wild security flaws sometimes, like server admins being able to execute arbitrary commands on other players' computers, that sort of stuff is unthinkable today. I also remember there was this debug/edit-variables-sort-of window that could pop up in multiplayer matches and would allow the player to cheat on weird situations (like changing the minimal distance to interact with doors and buttons!!!), on the call of a console command.
I remember a lot of the custom tools and mods the community made, provided to download and hosted on their own servers, had me often thinking to myself during my early teenager years "damn, how did this person do this?!"
No other multiplayer game was as interesting to me, partially because of those quirks, and mostly because of the proactive community, producing game-changing content non-stop, and everyone all-around being really reachable (there were no big streamers nor celebrities, and our community was kind of small anyway - comparing with today's games scale -, interacting in forums such as this).
As part of the transformations the internet experienced, going from semi-wild-west to basically the walled gardens we have today, we lost a lot of good posters, texts, blog entries and friends along the way (GameSpy closed, Xfire closed, we lost the most popular master servers, forums closed and self-hosted communities weren't properly achieved, etc).
I'm posting this because an old DXMP friend ([CDF] Laro) of mine recently reached me through Discord so I was once again made to reflect and remember a lot of my time playing DXMP. That DXMP Discord server sure is bringing back memories, lots of familiar nicknames.
I would like to say that playing this game with you all certainly made me part of what I am today. The >say command on the bottom left of the screen was basically where I practised most of my written English at the time, and years after the game I got into computer networks certifications, a computer science degree and a masters too! The first time I ever wrote code was in the precarious UE1 Map Editor for Deus Ex code window, the first command-line tool I seriously used was UCC, and today I'm a professional developer and also a teacher of related subjects.
To whoever is reading this, Cheers!
It has been ages, a lot more than ten years, since most of us inhabited the lobby of DXMP routinely. That time we got to experience together was the time of another internet, another era, and we were all different people than who we are today.
Sometimes I think about how most multiplayer games today are so well structured but also so hard to modify and experience community modifications, and how most communities are so overwhelmingly big. I think Deus Ex and UE1 games from that time gave us this unique window to experience what were basically combinations of AAA studio efforts and small community efforts, with many players participating in building the game.
I recall DXMP being partially a wild west, it was only made safer because of efforts like Nephthys, DXMTL, ANNA and others. We still had wild security flaws sometimes, like server admins being able to execute arbitrary commands on other players' computers, that sort of stuff is unthinkable today. I also remember there was this debug/edit-variables-sort-of window that could pop up in multiplayer matches and would allow the player to cheat on weird situations (like changing the minimal distance to interact with doors and buttons!!!), on the call of a console command.
I remember a lot of the custom tools and mods the community made, provided to download and hosted on their own servers, had me often thinking to myself during my early teenager years "damn, how did this person do this?!"
No other multiplayer game was as interesting to me, partially because of those quirks, and mostly because of the proactive community, producing game-changing content non-stop, and everyone all-around being really reachable (there were no big streamers nor celebrities, and our community was kind of small anyway - comparing with today's games scale -, interacting in forums such as this).
As part of the transformations the internet experienced, going from semi-wild-west to basically the walled gardens we have today, we lost a lot of good posters, texts, blog entries and friends along the way (GameSpy closed, Xfire closed, we lost the most popular master servers, forums closed and self-hosted communities weren't properly achieved, etc).
I'm posting this because an old DXMP friend ([CDF] Laro) of mine recently reached me through Discord so I was once again made to reflect and remember a lot of my time playing DXMP. That DXMP Discord server sure is bringing back memories, lots of familiar nicknames.
I would like to say that playing this game with you all certainly made me part of what I am today. The >say command on the bottom left of the screen was basically where I practised most of my written English at the time, and years after the game I got into computer networks certifications, a computer science degree and a masters too! The first time I ever wrote code was in the precarious UE1 Map Editor for Deus Ex code window, the first command-line tool I seriously used was UCC, and today I'm a professional developer and also a teacher of related subjects.
To whoever is reading this, Cheers!
