Posts with tag: city of heroes
- Code archaeology: Reading City of Heroes' .bin files •
07 Mar 2020
For the past month, I’ve been digging into the data files for a nearly twenty year old MMO. It’s a fascinating journey through not just the juicy details I’m looking for, but also how the original City of Heroes devs thought about structuring the very data for their game and the systems design behind the character data and abilities. "But why?" you might ask. Why? Because it was fun! But it was also frustrating at times. The data structures are directly tied to how City of Heroes represents data in memory, to the point that it has pointer offsets encoded... Read more ... - Building a retro gaming PC from 2008 •
14 Jul 2019
One of my hobbies is collecting retro gaming hardware. I have a modest collection of several different consoles and games: Super Nintendo, Sega Genesis, PlayStation 1/2, Nintendo 64, PlayStation Portable, and Game Boy Advance. Sometimes I just like to kick back with a game from the older generations and appreciate a bunch of different consoles and games I didn’t get the chance to play the first time around. I mostly gamed on PC through the late 90s and into the 2000s, so it never really occurred to me to revisit older PC hardware. However, my wife is big into City... Read more ... - City of Heroes and the private server kerfuffle, or why intellectual property is stupid and broken •
21 Apr 2019
I’m a patron and reader of Massively Overpowered (a news site about MMORPGs), so when news broke about a private City of Heroes server that had been running in secret for years, I just had to get my popcorn and dive into this. It intersects neatly into a couple of things I’m personally interested in: the history of video games (and its industry) and drama, both of which were unfolding before me in real time. I won’t lie, I’m a bit of a drama queen myself so I had to dive down this rabbit hole and see how far it... Read more ...