Intro

As the title says. this will mostly be used as a developers diary, documenting my work on Adonthell. But before diving into recent events -- to build up the suspense -- allow me to digress a little bit.

Enter 1997. We had seen The Black Gate in 1992, Serpent Isle and Ambermoon in 1993. Baldurs Gate wasn't due until 1998, Planescape Torment not before 1999. Already a few years without any remarkable CRPG had passed. So what's a CS student who just went through a crash course in C++ at that time to do? Roll his own, of course!

While 1997 wasn't the year of Linux on the Desktop, you'd find people to borrow the latest SuSE from (release September 1996 in my case) and the idea of OSS was generally catching on. Since a CRPG rivaling any of the above isn't written in a day or two (and not in 10 years either) by a single person, the prospect of working with like-minded people across the globe seemed appealing at that time. But before this could happen, there needed to be a plan and some code to show, perhaps. In brief, there was work to do.

Fast forward to 1999. There was a spec, a dialogue system with graphical editor, a web site and a bit of luck running into like minded people that had code and artwork complementing my own. Adonthell was born. In the same year, Sourceforge.net opened its doors, offering exactly the tools that made collaboration on OSS projects simple and efficient. Adonthell joined January 2nd, 2000 and became project no. 1051 on the then young (and friendly) platform.

Since then I've spent a good deal of my spare time (sometimes more, sometimes less) on Adonthell and I still happen to do that on a fairly regular basis. From now on, I'd like to take some of that time to write about stuff I'm up to, interesting bits of code and a few other things that might fit the general theme, in the hope that fellow developers, fans waiting for the upcoming v0.4 release and even the occasional newcomer will find interesting and entertaining tidbits on these pages.