| My journey to programming all began with RuneScape private servers in mid school. It was my perfect creative outlet because I always wanted to get into programming, I loved MMOs, and it just so happened that RuneScape had a legit full-on underground private server reverse-engineering community.
What better way to program than learning how to create your favorite MMO from complete scratch? (With all the documents provided & the active help of fellow others). The RSPS scene was really big, active, and very competitive. What was so fun about this is that the private server communities always encouraged users to share data resources, programmijg tutorials/snippets, and reverse engineering documentation of the game so that way it helps everyone that's trying to program their own server. Everyone wanted that "Java Developer" icon next to their forum name, and to do that was to contribute back. There's only one community standing left and it's an absolute gold mine of programming & game-development information [1] It's a very niche community, but back then anyone could spin up a server and quickly have 50+ players actively playing within a week, and because of that, i've learned the concepts of client to server network designs, mysql databases, asynchronous communications, non or threaded model designs, and the whole Java basics spectrum. Another good venture is the MineCraft server development communities such as Bukkit,Technic, Sponge, and Spigot-MC [2]. They've got some interesting frameworks as well for the Mobile-Portable edition that's pretty interesting to look at. Last I can think of is Garry's Mod. GMod solely revolves around Lua. [3] Roblox is Lua as well and they pay a good chunk of money to developers if you can create a trending server. But you've got to have some sort of real interest to get into these, otherwise it feels like a waste of time imo. I was young and havent graduated yet so I had all the time to mess with these source-codes & actually host them, but now, I just don't see the point unless i'm going to attempt making money from it. It's a rewarding and fun experience though. I wish I knew more underground communities espcially akin to RSPS, it was the best learning experience and it is not often you find something genuine like that. 1. rune-server.org 2. spigot-mc.org bukkit.org 3. gmod.facepunch.com roblox.com |
I thought what a crazy idea, who would pay for that? And a few months later he bought himself a new Alienware laptop with his RS server income.