- The Name of the Game - Alter Aeon
The name 'Alter Aeon' was chosen some time in early 1995 with the help of the guys from the yellow house in Fairbanks, Alaska. We bandied names around for a couple of days, then had a meeting and hashed it out for a good ten or so minutes. The result of that discussion was 'Alter Aeon', which Dentin finally chose in spite of all the other suggestions. His reasoning at the time was,"It starts with an A so it will be at the top of the mud lists, and it doesn't sound stupid. We can change it later if we need to."
The other guys were unimpressed, but agreed that it could be changed later if needed.
- The Lost Spear of the Ancients
This item by built by Dentin based on a real object from his childhood:
"The local polygamists got a whole bunch of used hardpan mining bits from somewhere. They're about six feet long and have a blade on one end and a drill seat on the other, with about a one inch thick hexagonal shaft. Anyway, they came to my dad to turn a few of them into crowbars for fencepost jobs. So, we cut the drill seats off the end, heated them up with a big propane blowtorch, and hammered the non-bladed end into a point. It was some of the toughest steel I've ever seen, easily 4130 grade or better. I never did see one of them get bent, and they drove trucks over them all the time"
- A thick glass lasing tube
Yet another item built by Dentin based on his childhood:
"My father was a manufacturing engineer who ran various kinds of metal and fabrication shops when I was growing up. When I was about 8, he got a deal with some surplus place to buy an industrial carbon dioxide laser cutter. It was about 30 feet long, consisted of multiple great big boxes, and was broken. He never did decide to make it functional.
A couple of the gas lasing tubes were broken. I remember thinking that they would make neat weapons, except that they were very fragile. Hence, the beefed up version in the game." - The mob "The happy clam" was the first ever mob built on AA.
Dentin loaded several thousand of them in the 5 room area (the entire mud was five rooms at this point) and let them wander for half an hour or so to test the list handling and movement routines.
- The first playable area was Vikings, built by Loki.
Loki and Wyvren were the first two gods to really build areas. They both built before the game had network capabilities, and before objects were available. Vikings was playable only slightly before the second playable area, Wyvren's catacombs. Chaos, Dentin's first area, was started before all others, but became usable much later.
[Building note - Wyvren's catacombs start at vnum 100 (!) and Loki's Vikings at vnum 400. Vnums 0-99 were reserved for common area, and vnums 200-399 were for other builders who didn't actually start building until much later.]
The Viking area was moved to the southern shore of the Island of Archais in 2008. Wyvren's catacombs remain beneath the Temple of Dentin in Ralnoth. Dentin's Chaos area remains west of Old Thalos.
- The domain name 'xirr.com' is named after AS/400 hardware.
XIRR stands for 'eXtended Interrupt Request Register', a special register used to handle the large number of external I/O devices that can be plugged into an AS/400.
- Where 'Alter Aeon' got its name
When Dentin and the alaska gods were thinking about a name for AA, nobody had anything really catchy or good. Finally Dentin said, 'we should pick something temporary that starts with an A so it shows up at the top of mud lists'. Dragonsinger said something about 'aeon flux', and Dentin said 'we would have to alter it, we cant just use aeon flux'. With that 'Alter Aeon' was born as a temporary name until we could figure out something better.
- Early grouping experiments
The largest (mortal) group ever was run by a student at Utah State University, in the 1996 timeframe. After getting permission from Dentin to run an experiment with multis, he wrote a tintin script to create level 0 characters with a single command and created about a hundred of them. He then formed a giant group, and killed the green dragon at level 0 using magic missile.
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Alter Aeon Trivia
This page will hopefully contain miscellaneous trivia about Alter Aeon and how it
was built. If you have something to contribute, please send it to soda(at)xirr.com.