Monday, September 30, 2013

Internet Archive: David Kruse's Home Page

From: http://web.archive.org/web/19980216065533/http://www-kbs.ai.uiuc.edu/d-kruse/

Yes, thats right. You have now entered into....
(Dum Dum Dum DUM!!!!)

David Kruse's Home Page

ANNOUNCEMENT!!!

On Saturday, February 15, 1997, David Kruse got Engaged to Sara Escoubas!

Thats right, folks! I am officially engaged, and plan on being married before 1998! Imagine that! Kinda weird, isn't it!

Its good to see that you made it. How long has it been. Remember the time we <fill in quaint little reminiscent story #1>. Hows your <fill in spouse, child, friend, parent, or pet here> doing. Thats <Choose one 1) Great 2) Too bad> Well, your looking <Choose one: 1) Good 2) Thin 3) Pregnant 4) Dead > Well, hey. I gotta run, but if your ever in town, stop by.

WARNING: Standard Personal Information Paragraph Detected!!!

I know that everyone has one of these, and most of you don't really care about who I am and stuff, but I feel that I need to put it in...

Actually it's an excuse to put my resume up on my home page...

My name is David Kruse and I am a Junior at the University of Illinois. I am studying Computer Science and I plan to graduate in the Fall of 1997. I'm not sure whats going to happen then, but if you would like to offer me something, please just mail me. Before you do that, though, you might want to take a look at my resume. I have a pretty cool job. I am working with the Knowledge Based Systems Group of the Artificial Intelligence Division on a project for the Navy. You can read all about it here. We are located in the Beckman Institute. For a summary of the applications I have written with them, check out the KBS Simulation Applications page.

Some of my other hobbies include music (I play the bass and the guitar) and hanging around with Sara, my oh-so-great fiancee , and getting out to visit my family whenever I can. I also maintain the Chickhead Page , which I am very proud of. Other than that, I just try to be happy.

DirectX Programming

The latest in Windows Game Programming... Well... Kind of.... I have some free software you can download to try it out, along with a couple of links to various DirectX resources.

And, of course, like everybody else, I have some links that I find useful, so I stick 'em right here where I can get to them.
Web Surfing Tools

Some Links for my Personal Use, feel free to try them

Here are the classes that I'm taking this semester:

CS 318 (Click here to go to my 318 page for C++ Makefile, etc.)
CS 373
CS 384
Hist 282
Psych 396

And some Buy/Sell stuff I check out occasionally

Onsale Auction

Well, thats about all for now. Thanks for stopping bye.

Page Designed and Maintained by David Kruse
Please mail me any problems...
You are visitor number

to this page since July 12, 1996

THe Panumbra Team

From: http://web.archive.org/web/19980204020851/http://www.shareplay.com/team.htm

Web Board

The Panumbra Team

This page is about us, who imagined Panumbra and brought it to life. We all love to play computer games!

Anne Brenner

Anne is our designated adult. After all, someone has to be responsible... Anne does our books, helps with administrative stuff, and most importantly, gives us paychecks twice a month.

Ben Brenner

Ben is our playtester. He also helps out around the office, and brings us a carload of soft drinks every month or so.

Márta Gabnai

Lead software designer, and the wife of Jonathan. Márta has been working full time on Panumbra since January 1997. Marta is the main software designer of the game server, where most of the stuff happens. Marta is from Hungary, where she met Jonathan. At that time, she was a computer consultant as well and had no idea that she will be designing games at some point...

Dave Kruse

Dave is our incredible server programmer. Dave is with us since May, 1997, and wrote most of the server code, which is not easy, anyone who tried programming multi-threaded can tell you. Dave can not only program C++, but has an excellent knowledge about all possible software which you can use for development in the world. He even managed to make sense out of MS SQL server. Dave has been our LAN administrator as well as the author of Chickhead, the mighty egg. Chickhead has made a carreer as a test character in the game by far. Dave is getting married on December 6th, 1997, congratulations! Beware Quake players: you do not want to run into Dave in a dark alley on a CTF level... Check out Dave’s home page at the University of Illinois.

Eric Lin

Eric is our all-around technology man. Eric coded the entire messaging architecture, the client architecture and parts of the server architecture. Eric designed and coded the game client, as well, and knows Orbix very well (which is not easy, believe me). Basically, Eric knows everything! Eric has been with Manton Communications right from the beginning. He was a student at the University of Illinois at that time, and became full-time in May, 1997. He ran his own MUD before he joined us. And he can kick anyone’s butt in Quake!

Jonathan Manton

President of Manton Communications Corp. Jonathan loved playing computer games since he was a kid. Back in 1995, while working as a computer systems consultant in Hungary, Jonathan wrote the first prototype of a Dungeon game, which is now Panumbra. Soon after in May 1996, he founded Manton Communications to make his dream possible. And his dream was nothing else but making good quality games on the Internet, which lots of people can play for free. A lot of water has flown down the rivers since. Jonathan designed and wrote the core architecture underneath the game, found investors to finance the development, and manages the controlled chaos which is Manton Communications. Jonathan stated that his goal is to make an excellent game which he himself would like to play!

Chris Strong

Chris is our awesome artist. Check out the monster gallery, and you will see what I mean. Chris has been with us since summer 1997, and works part-time. He is a student at the University of Illinois. Everyone here is truly amazed by what he does and how he works, he is simply great!

Brian Waak

Our Game Master, or data designer. Brian has been playing role-playing games since he was grown enough to be able to. Brian has been a game master for Dungeons & Dragons campaigns, and his favorite game is Magic: The Gathering, the card game. Brian has developed his own world, Taera, years ago. The world is huge, with a details of magic, history, vast maps, skills, monsters, races etc. Panumbra’s Taera is based on this world. Brian is not only an RPG expert and game master, but he has definite writing talents, check it out on our Story page.

Special thanks to the following people:

	Tamás Kálmán, for co-founding the company, working with us last summer, and continuing to provide excellent advice
	Andrew Brenner, to help us and Ben, and reviewing our business plan
	Venkat (Ganesan Venkatasubramanian), for helping us with our database access routines, and all the rest! (Hopefully we will see Venkat as a permanent member of the team soon!)
	Robin Krieglstein, to make the first client and contribute with great ideas
	Jason Hartman, to bear with us in the beginnings and write our first server
	David Camitta, to help us with the first ad software
	Brian Martin, for working with us this summer
	And of course, all of our investors - we wouldn't be anywhere without you

Forgive me, if we forgot someone...

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The Technology of Panumbra

From: http://web.archive.org/web/19980204020839/http://www.shareplay.com/technology.htm

Web Board

Warning: this page is for techies! Basic programming and software design knowledge is required!

The Panumbra engine is a client/server system, where the vast majority of the processing happens on the server. The client is a small Java applet, which simply displays and transmits information. Everything is validated on the server, people cannot hack the client to cheat.

We built our own underlying software infrastructure, what we call the architecture. The architecture involves things like TCP/IP messaging between client and server, user logins, error handling, dynamic process creation etc. The Panumbra server is just one application running on the top of the architecture. (Currently the only one.)

Panumbra was built to be a massively multiplayer game. We used two key technologies to achieve that: object oriented
analysis/design/implementation from Rational Rose; and the distributed object standard CORBA, implemented by Orbix.

Our design philosophy is object-oriented. We use Rational Rose from Rational Software to create use cases, object diagrams and detailed design of objects, attributes and operations. We generate C++ and Java code from the Rational Rose model, and use that as a starting point for programming.

CORBA enables us to distribute our objects on many servers. We structured our server so that we can simply add more servers if we run up against their limits. We designed our server so that there are no bottlenecks to real-time play. We used   Orbix from  IONA Technologies, which is the object request broker software implementing the CORBA standard.

The game server relies heavily on the database. The database contains all information about the game itself, including maps, skills, races, templates, characters, monsters, items etc.   Our game designer simply creates data in the database - there are no scripts. All that data is stored in our Microsoft SQL Server database. The data editors are programmed in Visual Basic.
The Panumbra server is programmed using Microsoft Visual C++, the client uses Symantec Visual Cafe.   The server is distributed across a pool of Windows NT servers.

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Known Bugs of Panumbra

From: http://web.archive.org/web/19980204020828/http://www.shareplay.com/buglist.htm

Web Board

Here you find some of the most commonly reported or most annoying bugs and problems we are currently working on. There are a lot more less annoying bugs not listed here.

You may want to find if your current problem is due to some of the events happened recently.

You may also check the "Bugs, problems and how to...'s" and the "Development news" conferences on our Webboard.

Posted	Problem	Action
1/31/98	Poison affects you even if the poisonous bite fails, causing poison snakes to be a lot more dangerous than they should be	Under investigation
1/30/98	"Invisible monster" attacks you but you cannot see it and/or attack it	Under investigation
1/30/98	Part of the screen is cut off in 640x480 resolution	Under investigation; problem can be corrected by resizing the window or changing the resolution
1/30/98	Client gives system error message on quit	Under investigation; does not seem to cause any damage though
1/30/98	Client lags	Under investigation; clearing the browser cache helps
1/30/98	Server instability due to characters getting locked up	We ran several sessions on the server to reproduce the error. We found and fixed three lock-up errors, but it still happens. We will repeat the sessions until the problem is eliminated.
1/29/98	Defensive spells can be cast unlimited times, allowing gaining experience fast	Fixed. Now you can cast it only once
1/29/98	Unused experience levels can be used to accumulate extra experience	Fixed.
1/29/98	Experience is awarded even if 0 damage is done	Fixed
1/29/98	Experience gaining is not balanced well	We made some fixes to the experience calculation; however this area is expected to undergo several adjustments in the future. We can only see the problems as we go and get feedback from players.
1/23/98	Parties fighting groups of monsters sometimes get locked up, causing the server to slow down and to be restarted	Still happens, hopefully we can find and fix it during the lock-up hunting sessions
1/23/98	The server is lagged due to huge performance hits on the data server when people log in and out, create or change characters	We now run the data server on a separate machine so data intensive operations do not affect players in the game
1/23/98	Skill assignment is non-intuitive for new players	We added automatic skill assignment. It should eliminate the original hassle but skill buttons still can be changed if necessary.
1/23/98	Text messaging to "All" can be inconvenient and cannot be turned off	Now you can turn it off

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Marta Gabnai's LinkedIn Page: The Shareplay Years

From: http://www.linkedin.com/pub/marta-gabnai/31/745/165

Game Developer

SharePlay, Inc.

January 2003 – May 2004 (1 year 5 months)

Space Merchant - Internet Game Development; Designed and developed Space Merchant, a large-scale multiplayer Internet game. The game was developed in ASP, VBScript, and HTML, accessing Microsoft SQL Server. Roles played on the project:
Developer, rewrote majority of ASP code, revamped HTML interface, and made significant extensions. Implemented major performance enhancements, and dealt with database concurrency issues in a highly contested environment.
Online community support: created online manual, led community, supported user base.

Vice President, Manager

Manton Communications Corp

January 1997 – May 2001 (4 years 5 months)

Small business operating an Internet multiplayer gaming service and developing large-scale online games. Roles at the company:

Vice president. Participated in business planning and was responsible for company finances and accounting.

Software development director. Supervised a team of 5 developers and 2 testers. Supervised development of 2 large-scale multi-player games using VBScript/ASP, C++/Java, CORBA and SQL server.

Software designer. Used Rational Rose to design an object oriented client/server large-scale game.

Web master. Developed company website, online manuals, and managed web community.

Consultant. Implemented a software process improvement project for the Internet development team of a credit card processing company.

Panumbra Recent News & Changes

From: http://web.archive.org/web/19980204020820/http://www.shareplay.com/recent.htm

Web Board

This page should contain the latest events concerning the server or any bugs affecting players. You may also check the Webboard for more up-to-date information, under the "Development News" conference.

2/1 Sunday

The web site will be down on Sunday between 8:00 am and 11:00 due to routine maintenance on the web host of our ISP. Our servers will be up; but you can only access them if you access the server directly (bookmark the page which loads the client), not through the web site. The webboard server is accessible if you type http://webboard.shareplay.com, but not through the web site.

1/31 Saturday

The server crashed sometime early in the day and has been restarted at 3:45 in the afternoon. We also restarted later in the afternoon twice. These errors are due to the lock-up problems which seem to persist. Sorry for the inconvenience.

1/30 Friday

We repeated the exercise to try to crash the server this afternoon between 1:00 and 4:00 pm CST. We found and fixed one more lock-up error. There is also a new error found, but the lock-ups, at least the most common ones, seem to have been cleared. If more lock-ups happen on the weekend, we may have to repeat the server killing sessions next week during working hours. We apologize for the inconvenience this may have caused.

1/29 Thursday

The server went down at around 10:00 pm, and got back only when we restarted it the next day. We apologize for this; but normally we do not have support outside of normal working hours.

Thursday afternoon the development team was trying to crash the server in order to reproduce and fix the bugs which cause character lock-ups. We successfully found two bugs, but during the afternoon the server was slow due to debugging and restarted several times. Characters played during that time were not saved.

1/28 Wednesday

We released fixes and changes to the bugs and problems in gaining experience levels. The bug which allowed some characters to have an unfair advantage has been fixed, and the characters that used those bugs have been edited to reduce their levels.

1/27 Tuesday

We released a new version of the database which contained all currently available world areas, including Mines Level 4, 5 and 6, with high level monsters. There were also changes to Mines Level 2 in order to establish a more gradual increase in difficulty towards deeper levels of the mines.

We also released a new version of the server which contained fixes to the memory leak errors that cause the server to crash after a while. The fixes increased server stability, and performance as well. However, the number of character lock-up errors increased due to the server running faster than before.

1/24 Saturday

The server was down between about 10:00 am and 4:30 pm CST. Sorry for the inconvenience.

1/23/1998, Friday

Yesterday our ISP (Internet Service Provider) went down at about 6:30 pm CST, and we were cut off from the Internet until at least midnight. Both the demo servers and the Webboard server were unavailable, and we could not get out of the office to even edit the web page. The connection has been restored sometime early this morning. We are now looking into signing up another ISP as well in case one of them goes down.

The same day, 1/22/98, we migrated a wrong version of the database during maintenance. That caused new characters starting in a part of the world which we normally use for testing, and contains really nasty monsters. The problem has been corrected and all characters created in the wrong place were moved to the normal starting spot, the fountain of youth at the Mine Entrance. We apologize for the mistake.

Today we released a new client version which assigns your skills automatically when you enter. You only have to do skill assignment if you want to change the default, or if you have more than eight skills. This change should eliminate a big problem for newbies.

We also changed how much experience you earn. You will get gradually less experience for fighting monsters lower levels than you, but that only starts to kick in if the monster is at least 10 levels below you. On the other side, you get significant experience bonuses for hitting monsters which are above your experience level.

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