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by dmpayton 901 days ago
This triggered a memory from my early days of learning to code...

When I was in middle school and high school – late '90s and early '00s – I got heavily into forums and message boards. Customizing them was a major part of how I taught myself to code, and me and some friends spent a lot of time building RPG features into them. Shops, battle systems, and lots of other RPG and community features. Every action required a full page reload, as XMLHttpRequest wasn't a widely known thing yet. (I didn't hear of it until maybe '04 or '05, but it looks like it first appeared in '99?)

There were no CC-licensed game asset collections, but there was a site, rpg-icons.com, that had a assets from many games, mostly RPGs. Breath of Fire, Harvest Moon, Final Fantasy, and so many more. I would spend hours looking through that site, searching for the perfect sprite to use for this or that item. It was a lot of fun to use assets from our favorite games to do our own creative thing. Maybe not super legal, per se, but still super fun.

I haven't done game stuff in almost 20 years, but almost my entire career has been web stuff. I'm glad resources like this – CC-licensed game assets – exist for today's kids learning to code.

1 comments

> XMLHttpRequest wasn't a widely known thing yet. (I didn't hear of it until maybe '04 or '05, but it looks like it first appeared in '99?)

My memory says that it was first implemented in IE 5.5, which was released in 2000. Wikipedia says [0] that it first appeared in IE 5.0 but with a different syntax.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XMLHttpRequest#History