Comment by nebezb

15 hours ago

Wow! This is no small feat... am I reading the contribution graph[0] correctly, you've done all this yourself?

This endeavour sounds a whole lot like a server emulator for Infantry Online that was started by an incredibly talented developed 16 years ago ("aaerox"). I found the original svn commit on Sourceforge [1]. It's since moved to GitHub but has been active for 16 years and it has much of the same functionality you've already built, but done by more than a dozen developers over a decade-and-a-half.

Kudos to you. You've gotta explain how you've managed to do so much all by yourself.

[0] https://github.com/moongate-community/moongatev2/graphs/cont... [1] https://sourceforge.net/p/infserver/code/1/

So: I took most of the infrastructure from the my first attempt at moongate (https://github.com/moongate-community/moongate, which failed miserably along with https://github.com/tgiachi/Prima). From there, I had a good starting point to quickly build the foundations. I had already done the Lua scripting part in another project (https://github.com/tgiachi/Lilly.Engine). Codex helped me with all the testing, implementing functionality and creating tests, so at least I have a good sparring pattern. For the data import part (which I called FileLoaders), I took the logic from ModernUO. For the items part, I created a script (scripts/dfn_*.sh) to import items from POL! Thanks for the compliments! The way I am, if I fixate on something, it becomes an obsession!

  • while i understand the motivation to have codex like, do this problem for you, that's fine. what is the ethos of corresponding with people on Hacker News through the chatbot too? like i get that this particular comment i am replying to, you authored, but ChatGPT authored your post, and your documentation, and some of your other comments.

    the big picture question is, if you can mess around with the bot to do anything, why spend it on this game? why not make your own original game instead?

    • the Hacker News post itself was written by me.

      I do use ChatGPT sometimes as a tool while working on the project (similar to using documentation, Stack Overflow, or an IDE assistant), but the post and the project direction are my own. So what?

I forgot to mention, the entire web part in React was done by Codex. I hate developing frontends!

  • Did you have to massage/guide the UI quite a bit? I've had terrible luck with codex, claude, and gemini at doing frontend. It's always so close but so far at the same time

    • I just have them stub out something I can open in a more specialized tool. Sometimes I can use the results as an example.