Hall of Failures
< back to xkeeper.net · 2008 Edition >
A (mostly) comprehensive, detailed list of projects of mine I consider failures.
Contents:
- ROM Hacking Archive - October 2004
- LameBoard - Late 2004
- Losers List - Late 2004-Early 2005
- Lameboard 2 - Early 2005
- Graal Server - Early 2005
- ROM Hacking Archive II - May 2005
- Lameboard 0 - Mid-2005
- Marin's Awakening - Mid-2005
- Acmlm's Board - November 2005
- Tina - Early to Mid-2006
- Justus League - Mid-2006
- Misc. Crap - Late 2005 - Early 2007
- AcmlmWiki - Late 2006
- Subcon - November 2006
- MiniSM - December 2006
- Acmlm.org - New Years 2007
- Board2 - Febuary 2007
- xRPG - Late 2007
- Closing
ROM Hacking Archive
October 2004
[top]
One of my first (public) projects, the ROM Hacking Archive was basically supposed to be something like romhacking.net is now. Donut, the original version of RHDN, was basically translation-oriented, and didn't feature much in the way of more general ROM hacking aside from a few hosted hacks.
Coded in only a few days, it showed. It was active for a short period of time, looked fairly promising, but just didn't really make it. In short, it didn't last long at all and quickly faded into obscurity.
Unsuprisingly, it had its own forum, which served to be the base of "learning Acmlmboards" later, although it didn't last long or get very active.
Only a few hacks were ever uploaded, and after a few other sites took the idea (most notably, solid t-bone of TEK Hacks), it died.
LameBoard
Late 2004
[top]
Having your own forum was the trendy thing to do, and I felt like using something other than Acmlmboard software; namely, coding my own. Unfortunately, my skills in coding hadn't improved at all, and it was mostly a mess. It only got as far as replying and creating threads, but used very inefficient MySQL queries, as I wasn't experienced enough with it yet.
LameBoard was to be another of my eventually-released projects, the other being LameNews, which the RHA was based on. Both projects died together when the computer they were being created on, the TrashCan 300, was destroyed (or so I thought, but regardless, they died).
LosersList
Late 2004 - Early 2005
[top]
Everybody has their personal hate-list. LL was a sort of "High score" list for people I really hated. Mostly as a way to vent and such, but regardless, just another way to get a lot of crap aimed at me.
I was an attention whore, and to this day, still am, to a point. (I am writing this, after all)
Regardless, it was another one of those things that kind of sat around, never got updated, and mostly turned into a large joke. Giving people 1000 points out of boredom kind of reflected that.
LameBoard 2
Early 2005
[top]
What happens when something you're working on stops existing? Simple! Make it again!
This strategy doesn't work at all, and unsuprisingly resulted in LameBoard 2, my next attempt. LameBoard 2 never got past the "basic design" stage, much less actually getting coded. This, as well as the xkeeper.shacknet.nu homepage, died for the umpteenth time.
Graal Server
Early 2005
[top]
Somebody from Pockethouse was designing a Graal server, and I offered to help. I had some experience previously (I was a pretty active player years before, and made some dumb NPCs), so I was pretty quickly added. Regardless, after all the planning and other work we had done on it, the server never went anywhere and quickly died. It didn't help that Graal was a dying game and that we were using old, outdated GServer/client software.
ROM Hacking Archive II
May 2005
[top]
Noticing a trend? "Let's remake everything, but better." Another site that basically went nowhere (except for the theme and layout/planning)...
The only thing of note about this project was that it was part of the base for acmlm.org, discussed later.
LameBoard 0
Mid-2005
[top]
I never learn.
Marin's Awakening
Mid-2005
[top]
What would happen if Marin was the main character of Link's Awakening, and Link never showed up?
Probably not this. It was an attempt to create such a ROM hack, but my skills in sprite editing were(/are) horrible, and went nowhere. Very little of it was ever done, resulting in nothing but a few sporadic screenshots and very little else.
It was estimated by a friend that it would be finished by November of the next year. The only thing that was finished by then was the forgetting of this altogether. Even now, all traces of this project are completely gone, aside from memory.
Acmlm's Board
November 2005
[top]
Tired of fucking up my own things, I move on to other things!
This one started off with a real bang, reverting the codebase back to 1.92 (after they had been using 1.B), nuking most of the staff, alienating half the users, and generally a very bad start. Too many random bans, too "try to keep the old staff so they don't feel alienated" staff members, too much of all of these problems.
It was doomed to failure, unfortunately. As with most "I'm hosted by a friend" problems, relations turned sour and everything fell apart. The details of this probably didn't happen as most people like to recite them (it's more fun to point fingers at me, but I believe both of us were at fault). Regardless, it broke apart early in 2007, a little over a year after the start. This resulted in ||board, a forum comprised mostly of people I had banned or alienated, and board2, most of the original members of this particular forum.
It should be noted that this was the last time any real work was done on the codebase.
Tina
Early- to Mid-2006
[top]
Inspired by NesVideoAgent, Tina was a IRC robot originally named "tunabot" (after myself on an IRC network). It reported posts from the board to the IRC channel, assisted with board upkeeping, and generally helped take care of things.
After a while, it was no longer updated or worked on, and support for various features have broken. There are plans to create a new version, but very little work has been done towards that goal.
Justus League
Mid-2006
[top]
The baby sister to my current residence of choice, JL was meant to be a small, invite-only community of me, a few selected others, and generally nobody else. The idea was to have a community seperate from everybody else to escape what was rapidly turning into an idiot fest on the main Acmlm's Board, since nobody could really stand going there. It died a quick death after a short time once we managed to pull things together.
Misc. Crap
Late 2005-Early 2007
[top]
Lots of things, like Lotto-X (a stupid lottery system made to pass time), RPGImage (recreation of Acmlm's RPG image, mostly made to test), and a few other things never took off. They're filed here, noted but not detailed.
Most of them were lost in the fallout of Febuary 2007.
AcmlmWiki
Late 2006
[top]
After a certain someone bugged me enough, this became the next thing added. Based of MediaWiki, this happened to have a lot of very biased, useless articles. It was fairly active, but ultimately died when everything else did. Nobody cared to maintain it any more, so it fell into chaos and disruption, with a few ragtag members trying to take matters into their own hands.
Interesting trivia: This is one of the (several) factors that eventually led to the split, although this one was a bit more indirect.
Subcon
Early November, 2006
[top]
Started on a whim, Subcon was designed to just be a sort of personal journal for dreams I had. It started out well enough, geting fairly regular updates all thoughout November and December, slowing down in January and Febuary, then picking up again in March for a short while before dying altogther in May.
It was started as a plain HTML file and became a beast to edit after a while, which lead to laziness in updating it and eventually death of the "project". Sporadic updates are kept elsewhere, in an unrelated place.
Plans exist to create a new one, but no work has ever been done towards that goal.
MiniSM
Late December, 2006
[top]
Minor Stepmania addiciton + suggestions to work on something new = this failed project.
Started late December, screenshots of the first ever parsed file were shown on the twenty-third of December. It progressed at varying speeds for a while, then eventually completely died sometime in early January, 2007.
Despite a lot of people commending the progress and glad to have another parser in the works (as the Bemanistyle one kind of, uh, sucks), the project eventually slowed to a halt and was forgotten about.
Recently, it has been getting work (last major change was on December 16th, 2007), but it is still very much incomplete.
Acmlm dot org
New Years 2007
[top]
||bass had an excellent idea for a new site to rake in more money from the Google ads, namely a Zophar clone. Using code from the old RHA2, it was coded in (and I am completely serious) about two nights.
Despite being somewhat solidly coded (minus a bug here and there with file downloading), it was a Zophar file mirror and nothing else. The archives were so clogged with crap that it would've been easier to just start fresh, manually mirror everything from updated servers, and call it a day. Unfortunately, neither of us were smart enough to actually realize this, so it died a pointless site.
The idea of helping the community (or what was left of it) helped me code this in those two days, and it should be noted that this was the last of any such community-boosted work.
Board2
Febuary 2007
[top]
After the mess that was Acmlm's Board the Third, surely we could learn from our mistakes and try again. Against other people's advice (and my own hopes), I settled with hosting from blackhole89, Athena (RO emulator) developer and general ROM hacker.
After hounding Acmlm for a while (apologies, again), we finally were able to use Acmlm's prerelease board2 software, which was still full of bugs, very incomplete, and all-around rather inadequate. We did a lot of work to get it usable again, although Acmlm eventually left development entirely. A new, more minimalistic staff was instituted, comprising of mainly me, Acmlm, a few admins, and blackhole89 as a moderator.
Unfortunately, blackhole89 disagreed with how I ran things, and after asking Acmlm and E-"I'm here one moment but gone forever the next"-muz, overthrew me and revoked my access to the server, all during his friend's lies to me about him "not wanting to do it". This is another one of those misconceptions about me, unfortunately, but it's more popular to spread rumors against me considering my long track record.
xRPG
Late 2007
[top]
A half-baked idea for an RPG game system coded entirely in PHP. Enough work was done to create a battle system (with most things hard coded), but was eventually dropped. A friend was working on ideas and items to have, but that is no longer happening, since it is dead.
It was discovered soon into this project that PHP was not a viable language for what I was hoping to do, so it was cancelled.
Closing
December 30, 2007
[top]
This page was meant to highlight parts of my history that I choose to show, and occasionally to help dispel lies or rumors about things in the past. It also serves as a handy refrence for things that died.
You are welcome to contact me if you have any comments or questions. I hope this document has been interesting to read.
Xkeeper, December 30, 2007
May 2008 be filled with success.