archive.virtualwolf.org

Table of contents

What is all this rubbish?

This is a collection of most of my old websites from over the years. They're all almost exactly as they were originally, other than some minor tweaks to get the links working properly in this format. The later PHP-based sites required a little more modification since they were mostly originally written under PHP 3, and the databases that backed some of these sites are long-gone so there's a number of pages that just don't work or are blank. I've been able to recover almost all the Marathon maps and so the majority of the download links for them work. Sadly, the lone Myth II map I created appears to have been lost to the æther.

There's a number of simple images instead of the full site from 2001–2011 because I was writing everything in PHP by that point and didn't keep separate source files for each site — I still have the Photoshop designs for them, but would just save the images out and use the same base PHP that was already on the webserver. The links marked with a dagger (†) are PNG exports of the original Photoshop design. Several of the sites from this period that I've recovered were done so by way of The Wayback Machine and manually fixing up the HTML. They were primarily displaying just my LiveJournal anyway, which has since been migrated to Wordpress.

2011 is when I started putting everything into Subversion (now moved to Git) and so I have a proper record of everything from then on. In mid-2012 I rewrote the site using the Perl web framework Mojolicious, it was rewritten again over the course of 2016 using the Javascript framework Sails.js, and again in 2019 with pure Express.js in TypeScript, but the functionality and look has remained pretty well identical since that first rewrite in 2012. The only obvious changes in look were to the default theme, all of which still exist. The links marked with a tick (☑️) are links to the current live virtualwolf.org domain and will set the site theme to that particular style.

Everything prefixed with a construction emoji (🚧) are ones I had mostly completed the designs for but never ended up uploading. Be warned, there's a lot of non-functional links! As with the sites I actually did upload, there's a number of exports of the mockups from Photoshop which are marked with a dagger (†).

Sites

What, even more rubbish?

Yes, and older!

I was in Year 7 in high school when a friend introduced me to the Warhammer 40,000 universe, and I immediately fell in love with the whole setting... the sheer scope and richness and general grimdark-ness captured my imagination like very little else has. Right around this time I also read the Dune novels for the first time as well, and adored the setting and richness of its world too, so naturally I totally ripped both of these off and wrote my own little fictional universes! There's clearly Descent influence mixed in as well, as witnessed by the Imperial Deep Space Mining Corporation document under The Galactic Empire.

I still have all the original files with their original modified dates, so I've prefixed each file converted file here with that date. Documents marked with a ruler emoji (📏) are ClarisWorks 3 drawing documents (or in two cases, Aldus SuperPaint) that were painstakingly exported in several stages into a format readable on modern computers. They're all untouched other than some minor tweaks where the fonts were different and so ended up overlapping parts of drawings, so there's multiple spelling errors here. 😛 Everything else was written in Microsoft Word 5.1 and 6 which was able to directly export to RTF, opened in TextEdit on a current Mac, and saved out again as a PDF. See my blog post if you're interested in the nitty-gritty details of the format conversions.

None of this continues past early 1997, which is the year that I started prolifically building websites instead!

The Saadiumm Empire

The Galactic Empire

Imperium