Project motivation

Nostalgia

This project in particular started off when I found out Toor had finally released the CipSoft files from that Tibia breach back on 2007.

I happened to be playing Zanera, the game world which was hosted on the breached server.

So yeah- I immmediately set up a virtual machine in Azure, and started attempting to run the files released. I got it working in a couple of hours and from there the nostalgia kicked in, transporting me back to 2007. Has been on and off since then.

Background

I've been around in the OpenTibia universe pretty much since it started.

I remember logging into one of the few servers available at the time, when there was only a simple, single floor map, and no combat or items at all.

Back then, there was a super fun, spam-all-you-can battle system and fixed spells with no exhaustion at all. Later, runes came around and it was so much fun just spamming, dying, respawning and repeating, along some 50+ players doing the same. It was like a full blown, permanent test server from back at the time.

I remember the names of the most popular distributions around that time: Survival, YurOTS, Zion(?) (first multi-floor attempt). DarkOT (closed source) was also around.

Career

Anyhow, back then I did not know how to program and, I remember my only motivation to learn to code (in C++ at the time) was to compile and make changes to my characters at the time. It was so painful to even try to compile and work my way through compilation errors.

At some point, I stopped playing Tibia completely and focused only on OpenTibia. I was very green as a programmer, but I made some contributions under the alias “BurnMc” to the original repo (back then the code was hosted at SourceForge, and we were using TurtleSVN).

I remember when SimOne released their first map editor and tools, and how it all seemed so far fetched from my abilities: To me, how it all was being designed, how these people envisioned the service, implemented and refactored it in front of my eyes was super interesting and probably the single most helpful thing I experienced in my self-learning phase.

Back then and there, I decided I was pursuing a career in computer science and tech. As is usual, some years after graduating I was absorbed into the workforce and forgot all about OpenTibia and how much I enjoyed this.

A few years later, in 2016, I was fortunate enough to land a job at Microsoft. I’ve been here for more than 4 years now.

Motivation

Reflecting on my past, everything about me having anything to do with programming started off because of OpenTibia.

And this is really what drives me at the moment- to give back to this community and maybe be that example to some naive kid as I once was, which lead me down this path.

Hopefully, this helps other newbies pick up on a project that lets them discover their strengths in coding, sets them down a good path, let's them learn what it takes to jump into this industry and why not- a top tech company.