Is this really the man that started it all?

[Geronimo]

Wow this was a great read eggman.
Thanks for this mod and for giving us an insight into the history of PR.

[Vista]

The sage of six paths just enlightened us.

Thanks for the post eggman

[AfterDune]

Nice trip to memory lane .

[Oskar]

Am awestruck by your story eggman. Thanks for telling it

[Rhino]

Nice write-up eggman but not all entirely accurate according to my account.

By the time we changed it to just /pr/ we were in decent shape with our build, test and deploy processes. Although it was never frequent enough for me, we had done half a dozen public releases and dozens of test releases at a time when most other mods had not yet released anything. I was entrenched as the mod lead, having earned the trust of the team - well.. most of them except for Rhino - the mod was fun to play, more people were playing PR than all other BF2 mods combined, and the community was growing - we were on a roll.

I was behind you being lead back then from what I recall? You did an amazing job back in those days.

Around December of 2007 I encountered a "catastrophic event" in my personal life. While we had just completed development on v0.7, fulfilling most of what had become my "vision" for Project Reality, and my enthusiasm for working on the project was at an all time high, I had to focus my priorities on my personal life. This was extremely abrupt and disruptive to the PR team - it created the longest gap in between major releases in the history of the mod up to that point - I have a "family first" ethos in life and that was where my priorities needed to be for the foreseeable future.

Thankfully another hero stepped up and took over: R-DEV UK_Force. He did a tremendous job of creating time from his busy real world life of serving his country in the military to make time to take over leadership of the mod. My personal life situation normalized and I got back involved later. That created some friction, including me being a bit of a **** to UK_Force about a couple of things (which I deeply regretted and later apologized for, UK_Force is a 110% stand-up guy). It became clear that the team had found it's new leader and direction. My re-joining was becoming as disruptive as my leaving abruptly. I chose to step aside and put some limited energy into the PR 2 stand-alone game project. However, it was clear that I didn't have the time to devote to this in the same way I did when I joined prmm years earlier. While the PR2 project never went anywhere, the dream lived on in what became Squad.

It wasn't just UK_Force who stepped into the void after months waiting to hear anything thing from you after you vanished, Fuzzhead and I also became lead devs along with UK_Force, with UK_Force managing the community, Fuzzhead managing gameplay and myself managing content development. During this time after a bit of a "dark age" during the point you vanished, PR had quite a boom with v0.8+ having loads of new content and also PR finally winning MOTY in 2008: Competition - 2008 Mod of the Year Awards - Mod DB

With the MOTY2008 awards, we also got the "Torque Game Engine Advanced (TGEA)" which triggered the idea of PR2, and also around this time your return eggman. I looked into the TGEA engine but it turned out to be a worse engine than refractor 2 (bf2) engine even.

You were not just "a bit of a ****" to UK_Force, you were also to me and convinced UK_Force that I should have never been promoted to lead dev (after I was voted in by the entire team for that matter, not just UKF), even thou I had already more than proved myself, and got him to demote me, which lead to me quitting PR for a short time as the offer of being demoted to a "Quality Control" role, well under lead, was a total slap in the face and instead I came back as a normal dev to avoid all that BS and instead to focus on my own work, something I hadn't been able to do much of when being lead. This is something UK_Force later totally regretted and PMed me telling me he so and blames you, eggman, as well as a few other people for what happened and he wanted to totally rejig the team with me becoming the new "release manager".

This, however, didn't totally happen (since it was next to impossible to do) and instead, PR:ARMA2 was formed and [R-DEV]Ancientman took the reigns of PR:BF2, something that ended up being in the best interest of PR since AM had the skills and vision to really take PR:BF2 forward in a way no one else could. So somewhat all for the best, although AM would have probably still become a lead dev even without this "disruption"

I'm still waiting for your appoly to me eggman, although it's nice to hear you at least apologised to UKF and you do recognise that your return was disruptive, to say the least.



You were a huge part of what has made PR what it is today and I really did enjoy working with you at the time, but I'm still a bit butthurt for what happened.

[sunshine2241991]

congratulation' eggman for dream job at ED
you deserved it .
in my opinion this game should get 100\100 in every rating .
this mod/game is exist for like 12+ years and is still active and still have realases .
this is amazing .

when i say PR is Life . it true .

i 26 and i play PR for 12 years .
its like a brother that i never had .
i hope this mod or the community will never die

[Heavy Death]

He is the Bono of PR. Even the story, it fits Bono.

[Filamu]

It's actually sad to see that the break lead to that many problems. I hope you guys can get over it in time.
The mod is great, and have bonded thousands of people over the years and I hope all of you are proud of the work you have done all these years.

[Yrkidding]

He showed me some rcon commands that allowed him to spawn anything into the game world by typing into the console. So he could spawn a vehicle, just by typing a "spawn vehicle foo" command into the console. More interestingly, he could spawn a static asset - such as what would become the FOBs in the future - into the game world.

...could use Python code to interface to the rcon console and manipulate the game world....

So this was how that other old Sandbox mod worked! Neat to learn about, had a lot of fun in that and met someone playing that Sandbox mod who also played PR and got me to try it, never looked back.

Definitely interesting to hear about the stories of PR's old development, thanks for the stories guys.

Also, egg, if I recall correctly you were on the first Team Canada at the PR World Cup too, no?

[DesmoLocke]

Excellent post Eggman! Thanks!

[PLODDITHANLEY]

A nice read thanks for taking the time to write it up.

[DogACTUAL]

-snip-

Pretty much the best response i could have received.

History | Project Reality

Not detailed enough camo, read it before.

@rico: Thank you for your detailed response!

[FlyingR]

Thanks Eggman for the excellent read! Very interesting information!

Eggman, one question man, what would you change or add to today's PR (1.4.9)?

[eggman]

Eggman, one question man, what would you change or add to today's PR (1.4.9)?

Campaign mode.

A collection of maps in a "metaphoric" representation of a battle area would be fought over. The results from one map would carry over to the next map. Commanders would have options for each map, those would be affected by the results from the previous map.

Ultimately there would be a victory condition for the complete campaign, but that could go on for a very long time (several hours, possibly a day or two).

I would accompany this with some form of persistence so that if you had to drop from the campaign (because real life would not let you have a 27 hour gaming session) you would be able to check back in, or rejoin. This would be exposed on a website. If you chose to rejoin the campaign, you would rejoin the same team and your history for that campaign would be preserved.

This can all be done by hacking the BF2 persistence layer into a proprietary back end service.

egg

[mries]

Very nice read!

MakeThisADevBlogPost!

[mectus11]

Campaign mode.

A collection of maps in a "metaphoric" representation of a battle area would be fought over. The results from one map would carry over to the next map. Commanders would have options for each map, those would be affected by the results from the previous map.

Ultimately there would be a victory condition for the complete campaign, but that could go on for a very long time (several hours, possibly a day or two).

I would accompany this with some form of persistence so that if you had to drop from the campaign (because real life would not let you have a 27 hour gaming session) you would be able to check back in, or rejoin. This would be exposed on a website. If you chose to rejoin the campaign, you would rejoin the same team and your history for that campaign would be preserved.

This can all be done by hacking the BF2 persistence layer into a proprietary back end service.

egg

A mode similar to what Planetside was/is? It would be interesting to do and could be done in a way that isn't overly complicated.

Setting up a "Campaign" server, have each round be a "battle" and the victor of that battle is the team with the most tickets then it automatically updates on a map where all the PR maps take place.

Problem would be dividing the teams, giving factions away to a team and getting the balance right. Then you'd have the issue of having "proper" commanders and a dedicated playerbase to this mode which I don't see happening.

It'd be fun if this was given the time by the dev team.

or people could join the official project reality tournament which is not too far off from that.

[Jaymz]

Great post, Eggman. Really happy things worked out for you!

[X1 Spriggan]

eggman, you are my spirit animal

[FFG]

Its worked for so many years too, what can we do to get you old DEVs back on the team? We need you. Desperately.

I heard that the SQUAD devs have been paying off the PR devs to sabotage the game so that people will go play SQUAD. XD