This brought back a memory I hadn't accessed in quite a while:
In highschool we had a filesharing systems that teachers "used" to upload class materials, homework, notes, etc.
In reality, about 5% of the teachers used it to host their syllabus but didn't bother to upload anything for the remainder of the year. My junior year I spent the better part of a semester building a workaround to allow students to locally install AoE via a cracked version that I torrented and brought in on a CD. We hosted the files deep into our technologically inept math teachers directory and buried ourselves during study hall to try and host complete matches in our allotted 40 minutes.
I wonder if it's still there. Even today I can still imagine the cries of "more wood please!" very distinctly.
I love it, I played a ton of AoE in HS but we played a lot of StarCraft as well. The matches in SC (for us at least) went a lot faster so we would play that instead. They had some kind of child protection software on all the computers (They used macs) so you could only launch a handful of programs logged in as a student. I managed to find a workaround.
You couldn't open System Preferences but Safari (much like Internet Explorer) was deeply integrated into the OS. You could open the settings in Safari and change the default browser to... say... terminal. Then you could open up Word (or any app as you'll soon see), type "http://google.com", hit the space bar, then click on the link Word automatically created. The system would then launch that URL in the default browser which you had changed to Terminal. This instance of Terminal had elevated privileges. You didn't have root but you could now run "open /Volumes/StarCraft/StarCraft.app" (You could launch Terminal directly as a student but it wouldn't let you open things). We played a ton of SC that year in "study hall".
Our study hall teacher questioned us about it but didn't know much about computers, was a bit of a pushover, and accepted the answer of "Well the computers let us run the game so it's not dangerous/disallowed". Good times.
If your study hall was anything like mine, there is a bit of irony in the notion that it was intended to help students that were falling behind, some of whom found themselves there because they were too bored and subsequently devoted their time to elaborate ways to play games in class.
HAHA -- In Highschool in 1992, we convinced the Drafting teacher that if we were to ever draft anything - it would be with CAD and not with a pencil. We convinced the North Tahoe Unified School District of same, and they allowed us to buy an Everex Step "Cube" [0] as a server, and run GeneriCad on six workstations.
My best friend and I were already big BBS users from our homes - and were actually grounded for running up a $926 long distance bill calling up PCLink and BBS in San Jose to play The Pit -- so we were already downloading warez and what not.
We convinced the school that they needed a BBS and a modem in the machine - and created a BBS which if you were to log into it with our logins - it was a warez BBS and playing the Pit etc...
But that effort was what got me on the path to architecture, IT and my career.
I found the "master" computer that all other computers in the computer labs at my high school were reimaged from every week. I installed Warcraft 3 on it, a week later every computer in my 5000+ student high school had Warcraft 3.
In our university they had locked down the windows to not allow us to install anything... A friend had a linux boot disk that would remove the windows admin password. And we had AoE on our the last bench computers! Counter Strike on the second last bench! The admin realized the password was gone, and he reset the system a month later, and the process repeated! Oh so much fun!
I did the same but instead uploaded the original Halo which had network access so anyone, in any class, that were on at the same time could play against each other. Was a bunch of fun, wouldn't surprise me if the miles deep of folders exist on their network still (later, added other games).
We did this as well. The school gave us 4gb flash drives to store our homework on (2009) and we used 7-800MB for a portable version of Halo. The desktops in the school were optimized for CAD software for our engineering classes (STEM school) so Halo ran pretty good.
At one point we had a quarter of the student body playing at once. :)
did something similar with cs1.6 at primary school, someone set up win xp permission badly so I could just install it onto every PCs within root like C:\CS\
Sunk a lot of my childhood into AoK. I come back to it every now and then for a bit of nostalgia.
I remember downloading the demo - a whopping ~60mb. I had to start the download in the morning, went out for a bit and prayed to god that the 56k didn't cut out or my mum didn't use the phone.
I even remember the demo had online capability on MSN. Nine year old me didn't get the point of death match. I tried building as usual in the middle of the map instead of rushing for a corner.
I remember another time me and another player decided to lay down arms and just build. That was fun. I was looking for a SimCity or Caesar III in AoE.
So much fun. I'm glad people feel the same enough to invest so much time in something like this.
Most file transfers at the time would have to start from the beginning if you dropped. This sucked when it took 10+ hours to download a file that size.
Brings me back to the days of hopping from download manager to download manager when one added undesired features, or stopped working.
I recall using flashget. Which I liked if I recall because you could have multiple connections download the same url. Which got around per connection qos. And showed you nice tiles of progress. Also supported resume, was great for the old days of slow connections :)
I was using an old version of IE and the download would just fail without option to resume. If there was a way, my 9 year old self never figured it out.
I really hope they make this work with the added files from Age of Empires 2: HD.
What a lot of folks might be unaware of is that the "HD" edition primarily did not do any graphical makeovers; rather they just adapted the game to run on modern screens/OSes, use the steam workshop for mods, and most importantly, they did several expansion packs of absolutely top-notch quality.
They've almost added as many civs as were in the entire original game + all of its expansions: Magyars, Indians, Slavs, Incas, Italians, Berbers, Malians, Ethiopians, Burmese, Khmer, Malays, Vietnamese. Several of these came with completely new architectural styles.
And they did balance patches to the original stuff! It's a dream come true for an old-school AoE2 player like me.
It's on sale on Steam for $4 for those interested in picking it up again. Also a good time to buy gift copies for friends. Interestingly, there's now a pro scene around the game.
Oh, I wonder if they'll ever make a version of Star Wars: Galactic Battlegrounds. That was made using the Age of Empires II engine. I loved that game and regret that it doesn't work on Linux.
I don't game a lot, but I enjoy the occasional AoE II. I first got into it with a CD version of Conquerors on an old iBook G3, and now I run the HD version using Crossover.
I drew a real-world map of Taiwan for AoE II using Peter Olson's map maker [1].
I'd like to recreate the history of the island and make a video, using AoE II HD to stage some battle scenes. For example, Koxinga's pirates burning the Dutch fort in Tainan. I've already written the script of the 5-minute video, which should be YouTube-ready.
The trouble is, making that scene would need multiplayer, which requires Steam. The non-HD version wouldn't look as good.
Would OpenAge be a better platform for trying to make this video? I'm not much of a movie producer, just a programmer geek who'd like to do this as a hobby project. I actually thought of the idea about a year ago, but never followed it up because I've been too busy trying to find a job.
I remember high school (circa 2013) my friends and I would spend ages on teamspeak LAN servers playing our pirated copies of AoE II. We jumped through a lot of hoops to play that game.
Still play this game on Voobly every now and then. Land Nomad map, 4v4. Rating: 16xx
A few stories:
- Still remember the day we went to the store and picked up AoE gold in like ‘98. First game I played was as Byzantines. Still remember the first enemy trebuchet launch with its immense range: “wtf is that and where is it coming from??”
- my brother and I were both into it. It was so addictive but we only had one computer and had to buy the game 3 times b/c we (I?) broke the CDs when we’d fight over it lol
- lots of hiding from my mum playing it at night in living room. Had to be quick to shut the monitor off and hide during dangerous moments.
- Most memorable recorded game was the 3v3 Yucatán between Arch_Koven, L_Clan_Rami, Arch_Vile vs. L_Clan_Bender, L_Clan_Ugnis and Korean (?). Mongol, Celt, Persian vs mongol Spain and ?? An epic that Gilgamesh would be proud of.
- favorite games vs computer were tiny map, 8 player on hard. Scenarios were enthralling too
- worst part, like the PC Gamer review said, was the opening cinematic
0ad is an open source RTS engine and game with it's own units, gameplay and map making that are similar to AoE, but it is not a clone of AoE. https://play0ad.com
AOE2 is much worse than AOE1, which is simpler, but requires more fast reaction on tactics. The gameplay is always fast, interesting to play and watch.
A remake of AOE1 is much more interesting.
In highschool we had a filesharing systems that teachers "used" to upload class materials, homework, notes, etc.
In reality, about 5% of the teachers used it to host their syllabus but didn't bother to upload anything for the remainder of the year. My junior year I spent the better part of a semester building a workaround to allow students to locally install AoE via a cracked version that I torrented and brought in on a CD. We hosted the files deep into our technologically inept math teachers directory and buried ourselves during study hall to try and host complete matches in our allotted 40 minutes.
I wonder if it's still there. Even today I can still imagine the cries of "more wood please!" very distinctly.