Diehard Forums

hppav · Last edited by hppav on Wed Nov 26, 2008 1:16 am; edited 1 time in total

The Evolution of First Person 3D Gaming: History of Trespasser: Jurassic Park.

by hppav

Part One: The Lost World
After Jurassic Park hit theaters in 1993 the public eagerly awaited a sequel. Michael Crichton penned the novel The Lost World, a book which is influenced largely by Sir Author Conan Doyle's book of the same name. It was his only sequel novel. The book became the basis of a new movie called "The Lost World: Jurassic Park."

As hype started to rise for the new Jurassic Park movie, a team formed at DreamWorks Interactive with a goal to make the most advanced 3D First Person Shooter game ever made. It would recreate the world as realistically as possible and include real-time physics, an unheard of concept in those days. They pitched the idea to the executives who gave them the green light. They could only afford the license for the Jurassic Park name and the locations but not the music or sound effects. They also cast Minnie Driver as Anne and Richard Attenborough as John Hammond.

As development progressed the team let slip features they were working on before they were perfected. Things they said were that the game would render the entire island and be nonlinear, that one could pick flowers, that one could pick up a rock and break a window, and even that trees would sway out of the way of the mighty T-Rex. All these looked fine in the previews for the game but not in the game itself. Due to a combination of time constraints, bad management, and the overall buggy state of the engine, most features were scrapped leaving the core game. The game launched in October of 1998

Part Two: Trespasser Released
Critics and most of the gaming world had high expectations for Trespasser as they popped the game into their computers but many found that the system requirements were too steep. Those that could get the game running found it to be a buggy mess. Trespasser, one might say, was the Crysis of 1998 (with FarCry being the Crysis of 2004). However the critics were much harsher on Trespasser than they were with Crysis, overlooking all of its advancements.

The folks at Valve, however, saw what the game had introduced with its physics engine and sought to implement a similar system in the sequel to Half-Life, a game which came out one month after Trespasser. Also a small community of Jurassic Park fans loved the game despite its faults and decided they wanted to make the game live up to its full potential.

Part Three: The Trespasser Hacking Societies
The Trespasser Hacking Society (THS) quickly started hacking Trespasser's main file system. They identified what some of the files were. However they were disbanded after a while. Some original members continued on to found the Trespasser Hacking Society II (THS II). This group made several utilities that hacked the swp and grf files. This group also ended up disbanding. Charles K. Hughes and Andres James decided to continue on without them.

Part Four: Trespasser Secrets
Charles K. Hughes (aka TSOrd) started a site called Trespasser Secrets which included it's own (hosted elsewhere) message board. He started work on a level editor he called TLE, the Trespasser Level Editor, and rebuilding a level known only as the Geothermal Plant Level. TSOrd also managed to hack the TPA files and created the TLAe, the Trespasser Level Audio Editor. However no one could get the tool to work. In September of 2001, TSOrd announced his plans to move to Texas and never returned. Andres, however, was hard at work with his OpenGL Trespasser Level Viewer called TresView. After a while the members of Trespasser Secrets began to worry about TSOrd. Many feared that the site would go down.

Part Five: The Diehard Forums and Trespasser: Pine Valley
This led into the biggest phase of the Trespasser modding community. Madppiper, who was running a server which had a forum he used to discuss programming, let the members of the Trespasser Secrets site use a section of his forums for discussing Trespasser. One member, Martijn Buijs, aka Remdul, set up a site on the Diehard server known as Trespasser: Pine Valley. The goal of the site was to document as much information and screenshots possible of the cut level known as "PV" through the file names. The valley shape of the level and the amount of pines made it obvious that the name of the level was "Pine Valley."

I, hppav, had been watching TSOrd's Trespasser site and lost my patience with waiting for an update to Trespasser Secrets. I searched for "Trespasser Geothermal Plant Level" and found the Diehard Forums through Yahoo. Through there I found Remdul's site through a banner he had placed in his signature. I viewed all the content on the site and drew a rough layout of the plant based on the screenshots and videos. I emailed Remdul about this and he invited me to the forums. This was December of 2001.

Andres continued to study Trespassers file structure and kept adding features to TresView. Eventually, by community recommendation and poll, he changed the name to TresEd. He originally did not want to do that because he didn't want to compete with TSOrd if he returned and started working on the TLE again. Members began to refer to themselves as the Trespasser Community in early 2002. Madppiper, realizing the increasing need of an up-to-the-date Trespasser site to keep track of the community's progress, launched TresCom on April 28, 2008.

Part Six: The rise and fall of TresCom
The site had a bumpy start. The overworked Diehard server kept crashing and became unreliable. In order to compensate, madppiper had the site hosted by GameSpy. The forums, however, were still on the Diehard server. In November of 2002, while I was surfing the Diehard Forums, madppiper and the TresCom team, later known as the Ops, upgraded the forums to a newer version with a newer color scheme at the cost of all the posts (which were stored in the older Diehard forums archived on the server) and forced users to reregister. Since I was already there I was the fourth registered and snagged the first post, which was a comment on how I liked the new forums. A couple people were upset about the change and how they were now equal to the noobs because of the lost post count.

However once the dust settled things were back on track... at least until the Diehard server gave up the ghost. Madppiper had to transfer the forums onto the GameSpy account. They did manage to get the server back up for a little while afterwards but it didn't last too long. Rebel began work on a new level, known as Rebel's level. Only a few screenshots were released of it until news was silenced. Suddenly the Ops appeared with news of the first TresCom Ops level: TC-Level. It was a modified Demo level that made proper use of all the tools available at that time, including TPAAdd which was used to reimport sounds into Trespasser whose string values were unknown.

The Ops also started work on a level known as TC-Isle. The test level for this level was released and was the first level to feature rain. Rain was made using an idea that I worked on once during the Diehard phase, which was using a plane with the bool AlwaysFace = True string and an animated texture. Remdul was interested in my work and continued it at his own pace. The problem was that it was a resource hog. The Ops then released TC-Isle's beta in November of 2004 then their activity started to drop off. Andres also started working for a game company and stopped updating TresEd.

Big Red appeared in December of 2004 to notify Rebel and everyone that he had found the Draw Distance variable in the hex code for the EXE. This later evolved into the ATX patch which enabled cheats, created new ones, and added ActionTypes that enabled users to add new features to the engine. Draconisaurus, who also started at TresCom in December 2004, stared work on Jurassic Park Dark Secrets, a Trespasser mod that would showcase all of Isla Sorna's movie locations.

For the next four years not much really happened. Some levels were made, some websites died, some websites were created. Trespasser: Pine Valley died with the Diehard server and was temporarily resurrected by myself at Weebly until the host that hosted the screenshots page decided to delete that account. TresCom managed to contact and interview a few team members from Trespasser. Active membership started to decline in late 2007.

Suddenly a new project, known as the Trespasser Movie Project, appeared, the first real project in 4 years, and was immediately followed by a surge of new members, many of which did not want to abide by the rules. This was known by forum members as the Noob Wars, a term I coined sarcastically that became the official label of such incidents. After that ended a new member unintentionally ignited Noob Wars II, which eventually also included TresFan101 until that member started to become more productive. Noob Wars II caused Draconisaurus to officially resign from TresCom and state that JPDS 1 would be the only JPDS level for Trespasser.

Part Seven: The New Diehard and the TresCom rebirth
In an attempt to keep the community together through making new content, I created a sister site for TresCom known as Diehard. Borrowing the original Diehard's color scheme and setting up a new forum designed exclusively for discussing Trespasser modding, the site is designed to spark creative interest in Trespasser and modding it as well as other engines and possibly developing a new engine. The TresCom Ops realized that things needed to change at TresCom and let Slugger and Mickey redesign the website and update it more often. Only time will tell what will happen next.
_________________
The first post of the post-Diehard forums belongs to me! It's mine! GAH!
And it's mine because I happened to be surfing the Diehard forums when they made the switch.

Wolf · Posted: Tue Nov 25, 2008 4:13 pm Post subject:

Objection dude... my project had nothing to do with the increase in n00bs... the names of members bought to the forum by it are blue and as you can see most of them never/hardly posted, it is however true that I inadvertantly sparked of NW1 by arguing with slugger
_________________
Trespassers will be mauled by dinosaurs, survivors will be mauled again

Link · Forum Newb Joined: 17 Nov 2008 Posts: 10

Whoa, JPfan's in the history of TresCom? I vote take it out, a spammer does not deserve to be included in such a fine description of the history of the Trespasser Community.
Yeah, I don't think the members on SW's team was the problem.

Wolf · Posted: Tue Nov 25, 2008 5:24 pm Post subject: Re: fsdfsdsdssdsdsdsdsdsdsdsd

hppav · Posted: Wed Nov 26, 2008 1:20 am Post subject:

Edited.

Sorry Wolf, all I remember of n00b wars 1 was you saying that you're friends would join then a bunch of people did and started harassing everyone. Then I was flamed for laying out some basic things which were at one time common courtesy at TresCom. Someone cried out "Freedom of Speech" which got the Ops in there to stop that person from going crazy about things which are just common sense. That thread ended up locked and the n00b wars phased out.

Then JPFan95 showed up and spammed up the boards. Then got yelled at and still did it, then got yelled at. Then he called Mickey an ass and got banned for a week. During this period of time Draconisaurus stopped watching TresCom and told RexHunter, who shared his opinion, to post his opinion on JPFan's posts, which almost resulted in him getting banned because it always was just flaming. Then Draco announced he was leaving, and it was all because of JPFan95.

Never before in the history of TresCom has one person done so much to tear this community apart, but while doing it he did not violate any rules of the board. That's why I could never find a reason to ban him.

Draco, though, said the last straw came with TresFan101, who he thought was JPFan95 in disguise but enough evidence was found contrary to this. Or it was TresFan. Either way, it was someone with that format of a name.
_________________
The first post of the post-Diehard forums belongs to me! It's mine! GAH!
And it's mine because I happened to be surfing the Diehard forums when they made the switch.

Link · Forum Newb Joined: 17 Nov 2008 Posts: 10

Wolf · Posted: Wed Nov 26, 2008 3:17 pm Post subject:

hppav · Posted: Wed Nov 26, 2008 11:23 pm Post subject:

Yeah, but they are from the same state and only 2 years difference in age. They also use the same ISP but have different IP addresses. It led to some suspicions between me and Slugger about whether the two were one in the same.

And Rex stated that he was just saying what was his and Draco's opinion on the matter.
_________________
The first post of the post-Diehard forums belongs to me! It's mine! GAH!
And it's mine because I happened to be surfing the Diehard forums when they made the switch.