Any good guides for GINA?

[Mblake81]

Originally Posted by dekova [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

Essentially I'm trying to show you that I wasn't just making stuff up to argue with you.

Originally Posted by dekova [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

I'm fine with people using Gina. Not that much different from the log parser I used back in the day. The UI is much prettier though.

What did the UI look like on your second computer monitor?

[Mblake81]

I screwed up the original post, too many tabs open and edited the wrong post.

Originally Posted by dekova [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

And... I'm pretty sure that I mentioned using two computers before he did. Happy to be proven wrong on this though.

Originally Posted by Mblake81 [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

You weren't tabbing in and out of the game and with single core cpu the game took up your processing power. Some guys might've had a second computer to run a voice chat program but it wasn't the norm. My roommate eventually did get a second computer when he upgraded so he had two to run eq. No one in my guild used voice. Ring of Valor would take over /auc /shout and /ooc to do raids on Lady Vox..

That was me. Although it was about voice chat in this same thread. It was after that when people brought up second computers. It was a way out to explain things.

Still interested in which kind of comp it was. Recall any specs/brand?

[kylok]

Originally Posted by Mblake81 [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

Which server did you play on and what kind of computer was the second one that you used to display the information?

How did you use this and how did it help you to manage your mezzes? I ask because playing the game was keeping a mental track of them. The game itself didn't provide the information for the player, if that was the intention then it would have been displayed by the developers. The game didn't have this information displayed so it was up to the player to remember.

The type of computer he used is hardly relevant, anything running windows would do. Logically, if you were a clever person with resources back in 1999 sharing the directory over a windows network would be the easiest thing to do... it was the first thing that came to my mind when I thought about how this could be done.

You're making a pretty hefty assumption about the intention of the developers. Have you considered that they may have wanted to include this information in the UI but chose not to due to technological limitations such as too much stress on the the players hardware? Maybe this was a design goal that took a while to get around to. Perhaps it was introduced from player feedback - perhaps even players using programs they wrote themselves to display this information on a networked computer.

We will likely never know, but there are a lot of possibilities.

[Mblake81]

Originally Posted by kylok [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

The type of computer he used is hardly relevant, anything running windows would do. Logically, if you were a clever person with resources back in 1999 sharing the directory over a windows network would be the easiest thing to do... it was the first thing that came to my mind when I thought about how this could be done.

You're making a pretty hefty assumption about the intention of the developers. Have you considered that they have wanted to include this information in the UI but chose not to due to technological limitations such as too much stress on the the players hardware? Maybe this was a design goal that took a while to get around to. Perhaps it was introduced from player feedback - perhaps even players using programs they wrote themselves to display this information on a networked computer.

We will likely never know, but there are a lot of possibilities.

I fully expect we will now see people claim that it was all done over a network, since that option has been put in well after the initial claims have been put forth.

It was hardly irrelevant. All of this would have been stated to begin with, knowing computer people will give the details.

Note: Stating that GINA has a nicer UI was suspicious and would point that his version of an early GINA like program had a worse UI to look it (you couldn't run it windowed to have a UI). Running a second computer what did it look like and why would it need to look nice. Asking for hardware specs to further complicate it, a computer guy with the work history he has mild bragged about just recently should be easy to recall.

[Vexenu]

From what I understand it seems that dekova would run EQ on PC1, where the game was installed, then read the logs being generated via the use of a shared drive and display the data generated from them separately on PC2. So even if this was technically possible back then, it was limited (by virture of EQ being locked to fullscreen) to those who had two computers side by side, utilizing a shared drive. Such a program would also be unable to overlay a UI element onto the play screen, which is really the main issue here.

So even if such a program existed it had several practical barriers to adoption that GINA does not:

1) Required an entire additional computer and monitor (not common or cheap in 1999)
2) Required the technical savvy to set up a shared drive
3) Of only marginal usefulness since the information could not be displayed on the actual game screen, but only on the monitor of the second PC

So even if dekova did have something like that working, it really wouldn't even be comparable to what GINA is like today, the main advantage of which is the fact that it essentially augments the existing UI with features and information that are otherwise unavailable to the player.

So basically dekova's homebrewed GINA-like program had similar barriers of entry to boxing. And boxing was heavily discussed back in the day and is well-documented and remembered. But we still have no evidence for the existence, much less widespread use of GINA-like programs.

[kylok]

Originally Posted by Vexenu [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

From what I understand it seems that dekova would run EQ on PC1, where the game was installed, then read the logs being generated via the use of a shared drive and display the data generated from them separately on PC2. So even if this was technically possible back then, it was limited (by virture of EQ being locked to fullscreen) to those who had two computers side by side, utilizing a shared drive. Such a program would also be unable to overlay a UI element onto the play screen, which is really the main issue here.

So even if such a program existed it had several practical barriers to adoption that GINA does not:

1) Required an entire additional computer and monitor (not common or cheap in 1999)
2) Required the technical savvy to set up a shared drive
3) Of only marginal usefulness since the information could not be displayed on the actual game screen, but only on the monitor of the second PC

So even if dekova did have something like that working, it really wouldn't even be comparable to what GINA is like today, the main advantage of which is the fact that it essentially augments the existing UI with features and information that are otherwise unavailable to the player.

So basically dekova's homebrewed GINA-like program had similar barriers of entry to boxing. And boxing was heavily discussed back in the day and is well-documented and remembered. But we still have no evidence for the existence, much less widespread use of GINA-like programs.

1) I had more than one person playing EQ in my house, and had 2 computers with 2 monitors
2) It's really, really easy to share a folder on Windows - even back in 99
3) Whenever the other computer in my house were not being used I always used it to look up relevant information. If I had access to a log parser back then I definitely would have used it for that as well.

[Mblake81]

Originally Posted by kylok [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

1) I had one than one person playing EQ in my house, and had 2 computers with 2 monitors
2) It's really, really easy to share a folder on Windows - even back in 99
3) Whenever the other computer in my house were not being used I always used it to look up relevant information. If I had access to a log parser back then I definitely would have used it for that as well.

1. Did you have them side by side with a log parser that displayed a UI giving real time additional information, that despite if the original developers would have liked to put it the fact is that it wasn't?

2. Share a folder, sure. But would it do what is being described?

3. Sure, I used a roommates computer to look up wiki maps that I had not printed out yet. There are no arguments about that. If you had access to a log parser you for sure would have used it? why didn't you have one?

[Izmael]

Back then, the amount of software available for EQ (or even gaming generally), was orders of magnitude lower than what is available today.

People who played EQ relatively seriously - raiding guild members etc, usually were aware of the available software and people often knew who used what. I don't remember ever hearing of GINA at all back then, before I quit in 2002.

[kylok]

They were indeed side by side. I didn't have a log parser because I was a child in 1999, I didn't even know there was a log command.

[Vexenu]

The main point stands: why is there ZERO DOCUMENTATION of anything like GINA existing back in the day? No one mentions it in forum posts. No one is able to produce a screenshot of it. If it existed at all, it was entirely a ghost. This is basically impossible, because anything that had even remotely common use would have been discussed - there is simply no way it could have spread between players otherwise!

We are told that because log parsing existed in classic we should be ok with real-time log readers that create new UI elements overlaid on the game client. How disingenuous must you be to equate these two things?