#171
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Last edited by Mblake81; 10-19-2019 at 05:49 PM..
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#172
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I screwed up the original post, too many tabs open and edited the wrong post.
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Still interested in which kind of comp it was. Recall any specs/brand? | ||||
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#173
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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. | |||
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#174
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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. | |||
Last edited by Mblake81; 10-19-2019 at 06:02 PM..
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#175
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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. | ||
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#176
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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. | |||
Last edited by kylok; 10-19-2019 at 06:15 PM..
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#177
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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? | |||
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#178
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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. | ||
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#179
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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.
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#180
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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? | ||
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