The Shattered Star

Greetings SSX'ers,

It's been a few years since I last stopped by to say hello. For those who have been around long enough to remember, I used to play games about 10 years ago. Since then I've moved down to Orlando, FL and have been working for a radio station for the past four years. I'm not playing games these days... but wanted to reconnect with old friends so I could find out what has been happening in your lives (game or non-game related). So if you're old enough to remember me, drop me a line. I'm thrilled to see that something I contributed to years ago is still running (in one form or another.)

Ray
Original call sign, SSC-Waterstar

Dude, how have things been? Haven't seen you in agggesss At least the last time I remember you dropping by I was still in Uni. I finished up at Uni, and moved onto doing my PhD, which I'm still in the middle of. It's meant that I haven't been doing as much multi-player gaming as I would've liked (as my work schedule is rather irregular). I've been spending my free time messing around with PHP instead though.

BTW, for those who don't know, waterstar was one of the first Site Admins, when the SSC was around.

Wow.. Nice to see ya Ray! Talk about people comin out of the wood work.

Greetings!

Daaaaaaaaaang,
and here I thought a fam reunions only come round once a year
Good to see ya

Heya Water

hmm don't know if we ever chatted but you're DEFINITELY a name i remember well

lets see.... i was 13 when i started playing FS1. i am now 22, been married and divorced, i have a two year old son, and i really don't do much gaming any more. if i ever get a good gaming computer built, i will be back playing FFXI again but in the meantime i lurk on the Arch and Guild Servers of The Reincarnation under the nick Jahnikar

Whoa bud tis been a long time.

Good to see your doing well and still doing what you love.

I'm currently in my final year of college and have a 4 month old son named Ethan who is getting big awfully quick.

Hey, it's one of the five Stars.

Hey Ray, nice to see you're still at the radio dealio indeed, it's been a long time, and I'm glad you're doing well

Time for the "it's been awhile" post. Just dropping a line to a community I used to be involved in years ago.

Just ordered a copy of Civ 5. Looking forward to losing sleep for "one more turn" just like I did with the first Civilization back in the 90s in glorious VGA with my SoundBlaster sound card.

Hey! Great to see you again water

How've things been going? Always nice to see an old face!

Going well. I've got two kids now, a six year old step-daughter and a two year old boy. Still living it up in Orlando, FL. Found some old files from the early days that I'll try to post here... starting with the old FRED Team Flash Intro (http://rayhill.org/ssc/fredteam.swf)

Put up most of the files from the old site... they don't work properly since I haven't uploaded the old perl code which built the site. But here is a couple of links:

http://rayhill.org/ssc/
http://rayhill.org/ssc/asheron/
http://rayhill.org/ssc/bz/
http://rayhill.org/ssc/diablo/
http://rayhill.org/ssc/dk2/
http://rayhill.org/ssc/earth2025/
http://rayhill.org/ssc/fps/
http://rayhill.org/ssc/freespace/
http://rayhill.org/ssc/freespace2/
http://rayhill.org/ssc/homeworld/
http://rayhill.org/ssc/jk/
http://rayhill.org/ssc/smac/

Intro for SSC Radio:
http://rayhill.org/ssc/ssc.wav

People might not know it but we had a phone call with the Descent Freespace team right before the launch of Freespace 2 (we ended up in the games credits if I recall correctly) but never got around to recording an official interview. We also got the go ahead to line up an interview at Firaxis. They weren't sure if we could get time from Brian Reynolds or Sid Meiers. That also got killed off when I had to leave. Here is the one show I was able to locate on the old computer.

http://rayhill.org/ssc/show%207-7-99.wav

awesome, but tbh way before my time

Ohhh, this is amazing! Great to be able to see all the old sites back up again - I have not seen these in so long!

Is there any chance you'd be willing to package up the old code/images/whatever you have and share it with me? It would be really awesome to restore those sites as much as possible, and host them on our domain - so people can look back on the SSC as it was - a period of history we lost most assets of due to the move. I'd love to put those sites up for general browsing, and even recode the PERL parts in PHP so that they work again (as much as is possible) - naturally all copyright and credit to original creators would be left completely as is

It's fantastic just to see them again, but it'd be even better to get them back together under the Shattered Star domain. No worries if you'd rather not though - just a thought!

I think I have a good portion of the assets but not all of them. I'm probably missing some of the images (which may or may not be in the internet archive [http://archive.org])

I wouldn't bother trying to rewrite the perl code... it probably wouldn't be all that hard to create flat html files from the perl source code since it no longer needs to be dynamic.

Here are my copies of the original logo files:
http://rayhill.org/ssc/Logo.eps
http://rayhill.org/ssc/Logo.gif

The font used for the letters was Bank Gothic (at least I'm pretty sure). Not sure why it's missing from the eps.

Cheers

True, probably a fair point. Maybe flat files would do the job just as well

Any chance you could zip up what you've got, HTML, images and all and PM or Email me the link? I'm grabbing what I can from the links, but wary I might miss something

You are awesome for putting this stuff up again!

EDIT: Unfortunately it seems that I can't download the SSC radio show for some reason. The download keeps terminating after around 1MB, and MS had the same issue when I asked him to try too

Sorry the audio didn't work. I've uploaded it to dropbox.

Here's the link: https://www.dropbox.com/s/qxl8ero4es9ep ... 7-7-99.wav

I haven't had a chance to zip up the old files yet.

waterstar wrote:Sorry the audio didn't work. I've uploaded it to dropbox.

Here's the link: https://www.dropbox.com/s/qxl8ero4es9ep ... 7-7-99.wav

I haven't had a chance to zip up the old files yet.

You, sir, are a king - Dropbox link worked perfectly, and it's a really interesting listen for someone who wasn't around for the first broadcast

I'll get that up on our servers, hopefully alongside the other stuff, as soon as I get a chance! Really pleased that we've the chance to preserve all this!

Anubis wrote:Really pleased that we've the chance to preserve all this!

Seconded. Always thought it a shame how it's really just the SSX days we have archived and preserved but missing so many years of our SSC history before it. Tis really nice to see some of this

Bob (aka Lonestar) and I were the original two guys to get the group going. Lonestar had the genesis for the name and original ideals of the group and I was more of the technical community builder. We had a lot of fun and some help from some great people. Stork from New Zealand, Killjoy, Firestar, and many others come to mind. I used to keep pretty detailed logs of chats we had back then but some of that data is lost as the drives I kept them on are pretty much toast. I believe they are in the garage and I don't have much of a way to access them with their old interface and all modern computers being SATA and the like.

I like rehashing the past as much as the next guy... but I'm just curious, is the group still active in any game or has it become more of a relic and a museum? Seems like the advent of games having built in community tools that web based gaming groups are not as active as they used to be. But to be fair and honest I haven't played games actively in the past 10 years or so. Just a few short stints with games like World of Warcraft.

Waterstar

We're still active in a couple of games (EvE Online our most prominent currently, as can be seen on their killboard), though we've quietened down over the last few years broadly it's true in terms of groups - though we're still here as a community

That said, there are a few of us still eyeing games for chances to do things together. Star Citizen, for example, I know a few of us are planning on playing together. So we're definitely not a relic just yet! Having said that though, as the current admin of this place I do like having archives of the past and ways people can see where we've come from. Suppose in some ways that could be looked upon as a museum, though that's not the entire intent!