AA has always been a love/hate relationship for me. I think we all love the classic days and funnily enough, those are all different time periods. We came in at different times, knowing different people, enjoying different servers and different crews on different versions. But we all share the same fondness for a specific period. The way it used to be.
It's almost heartbreaking, the poor timing I've seen in this game. I came into this game around when 2.6 was released, maybe a bit before. This was a weird time. All the anti-cheat sites were still popular but MD5 checks didn't exist and you could do crazy easy cheats and only get caught if the server admins were lucky enough to get a screenshot. I met Crusade just as he was starting to take off on modding and hacking, bringing back a lot of the old school coding to life that was pioneered by PAS clan and Rifle over at the Hazard AA Tracker. I had learned about modding and loved to run my own server and looking to make it better, I found out about custom maps and that's when I met BlueBlaster. Both him and me were scraping together the remnants of the custom maps once created by enthusiastic people at aa-maps.net. We were too late to work with them but instead just browsed through the forum which was more of a graveyard. This is just a tidbit of my personal history with AA and the great people I've met through it. I say the timing is heartbreaking because, knowing what I know and seeing the timeline unfold, I was always too late. Finding out about cool shit after someone else was done with it. I've come across so many super talented people over the years I've been involved with AA. It's impossible because it's gone but I often wonder what would have happened had the timing been right and a lot of us gotten together to create something amazing. Brilliant website coders and designers, creative UScript, LUA and C++ coders, 3d modelers, countless talented mappers, tons of eager people willing to learn. It's been such a waste. Looking back, a lot of these characters quickly burned out. I'm sure they all had various reasons but I can't help but think that given what we know and have today, if that same enthusiasm and knowledge they had 10 years ago, if that was around today... wow.
I don't know what it is about this game but it's just heartbreaking and frustrating. I miss the way things used to be. I am disappointed in the waste of potential due to timing.
What do you miss? What do you wish was different?
i Could see my AIMod being something people would be interested in if/when i get it functional but i am very busy lately and haven't been doing much modding or anything besides sleeping and working for that matter lol, but if there was anyone else that knows UnrealScript that wanted to help i can release the code i have so far.
I am not an original player my BattleTracker account
http://battletracker.com/index.php?page=AAOPlayerStats&pid=853312 is the only AA2 account ive ever had so i dont know how things used to be but i do like the game and would like to see more people playing but i dont really see that happening. adding things to the game could attract more attention to the game maybe people would come back and new players would come in, New gamemodes could be added new maps could be added, if enough skilled people wanted to they could port the game to UDK and release it for free on steam. the main issue with any of that is the lack of people who have the skills,people who want to learn the skills, or people that have time to learn the skills to do any of this then of course actually doing it. another thing that could help is people actually suggesting things on the forums that they would like to see in the game or in mods. i dont really see anything useful in the suggestions Vanoke has some maps hes been working on and thats about it. if i ever saw suggestions for mods to the game i would atleast attempt to make them lol all i ever really see is complaining about hospital and other random crap.
* Start Suggesting things that could make the game better in the forums.
* Be willing to go into mod servers and help test the Mods.
* Learn to Mod learn to make maps learn to model new weapon/characters.
* Advertise the game anywhere you can.
I am more then willing to help people get started modding if anyone ever wanted to, the more people there are modding the more people there are to spitball ideas and learn with.