History of a mod

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Bytekeeper

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Jul 15, 2001
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While all (or at least some I hope) are waiting for the new DA2 for UT2k4 release, let's take a history tour of Defence Alliance. I think it's interesting to see, what happened all those years. Especially the team members (including retired) and long time fans might be interested in it - but I hope some "new" people are interested too.
Since I cannot really remember all stories and all people involved in this, I'd like everybody who was part of the team to add their knowledge in this thread.

And to keep it as clean as possible:
Do not post comments in this thread
(OT posts will be deleted)

DA exists as an unreal mod since early 2001. I hope aBsOlUt is willing to write a bit about the prehistory and start of DA.

I actually started modding unreal in the year 2000. Mid 2000 I learned unrealscript to start modding unreal with no real goal in my mind. I joined a mod named "Frontline Assault" - a WW2 modification for Unreal Tournament.
The mod consisted of 4 people including me, with 2 active, 1 partly active and one - well one might call him retired - members.
I think we released a first alpha in late 2000/ early 2001. It was quite famous althought I cannot find any review on the web nowadays (even waybackmachine fails me). As with most mods we lacked proper PR and when our mapper/modeller left it was over.
And so I searched for another mod to join and found .. err some medieval mod I cannot remember ;)
But they were pretty much dead when I joined and together with a member of that team I tried to start a RPG mod for UT. As you might suspect we didn't make it...
Finally - july/august 2001 I asked DA to join them - I had already watched the mod for a month to check if it's active or not. The active team wasn't huge, but at least 5 people I guess. IIRC I joined when IR1.5 was just given to the team members.
It was still in it's beginnings for that there were only a few weapons, not player skins and only minimal class support.

To be continued...

DA site 2002:
http://web.archive.org/web/20021019124439/www.planetunreal.com/da/homepage.asp
 
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2COOL4-U

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Perhaps I can add some things as well? :)

There are some interesting articles which still can be read about the early DA versions:

My very first interview as a DA team member. I don't remember when I actually joined the team, but it was in a very early phase. No code had been written. There was a coder who came from the half life scene, but he never started as far as I know.

I joined as a mapper, although I couldn't map at all. When I joined the team I could substract and add brushes and that was about it. Some of the screenshots in this first interview feature my maps. The fort in the desert and the one in the jungle are made by me: http://www.planetunreal.com/features/da/ . I am not too proud of my achievements as a mapper.

By the time I had some maps done, we found our first coder DaveA, who coded the very first lines for our project. The code actually worked, and I believe parts of his code still are to be found in DA 1.7. Unfortunately, DaveA had to quit. I was already experimenting with UnrealScript and I showed aBsOlUt my first creation(a really buggy mutator). I still remember his reply: "So you can code now?". From that moment on, I was the lead coder. As you may have noticed, we were really professional back then!