Wanderings of a RuinExplorer

There are literally thousands of games in the domain of freeware, however I think of most interest are games that were originally released as commercial titles that have been given by the copyright owner to the freeware community. Commercial software understandably has a higher polish and quality associated with it (at least on average, open source is making leaps and bounds). Some game developers (the most respected by many) have taken it upon themselves to give back to the community that supports them. They release software titles as freeware once the main profitable lifespan of the product has run. ID Software was a forerunner and made a huge statement when they released Doom as freeware (only 4 years after its commercial release!). Doom had been one of the most popular first person shooters of all time and ID felt that it had made its money and it was time to release not only the game, but the source. This allowed for a huge community development of mods, levels, and for many u...

The problem with waiting to do something until you know you can do it perfectly is pretty obvious, you never start. I mean without the practice and evolution caused by repeatedly making a mistake, correcting it, learning how to avoid it, gaining insight on what works and what doesn’t, how do you get any better let alone perfect? Thus I start. Years after I tagged http://ruinexplorer.blogspot.com/ and then continuously checking up on an empty blog so that my site squatting wasn’t lost, I finally make a friggin post. I have several online resources, many with only sparse if any content. All are grossly outdated. I have been toying recently with this idea of finally consolidating resources so that I have a somewhat coherent online presence as I did a long time ago, back when a few hundred kilobytes of web presence was something to be proud of. Now we have MySpace, FaceBook, MSN Spaces, Yahoo Spaces, and the new entry into world domination we fondly call Google… There are ...