About me

This post tries to depict a brief background on:

• Why I started the experiment
• A little bit about me

Yours truly

I am a (proud) husband, and father of a teen. I have been coding for 20+ years and freelancing for 15, in various languages.

In a previous life, I was a (somewhat) hardcore player of Pen & Paper RPGs. Games played included:

• Cyberpunk 2013 and 2020 (still have the original 2013 box),
• Rolemaster, Shadow World and Spacemaster
• Whitewolf's Vampire 1st Edition, Ars Magica, Werewolf
• In Nomine
• D&D in settings from Dark sun to Forgotten Realms and GreyHawk

I have very fond, if nerdy, memories of this part of my life: meeting and playing (both as as Game Master and player) with friends around a table or a carpet, roleplaying and throwing dice…

I also had a go at several tabletop strategy/tactics games: Warhammer, 40k, Battletech.

Video games

Over the years, I built a reasonably lengthy list of played games: from the Wumpus back in the day to far more recent titles such as Cyberpunk 2077.

I would define some of my favourites as:

• Diablo 2 (happy dropper of a Windforce during 1.09) and the fantastic resurrections thanks to Project Diablo 2 and others
• WoW beta phase (Stormwind invasion, etc)
• Mechwarrior 2 (and Mercenaries) and much later BattleRoguetech and MW5, some MWO too
• The CIV series.
• Heroes of Might & Magic series.
• Daggerfall!
• (ashamed) World of Tanks. Tank Stronk.

Some of the titles I played and I think are relevant to the experiment are:

• Eve online
• Homeworld
• Master of Orion (1 & 2)
• I-War
• X-Com
• Star wars: TIE fighter
• Freespace (1 & 2)
• … and of course Elite!

These days though, I have no time for playing - but do keep an eye out when I can spare it.

Why do I think this is relevant? Well, read on…

The Urge versus The Why - One man band tries to make game

I've actually wanted to try and build a game for a very long time. Not an AAA title, which is simply not realistic, but something far more reasonable in scope & size, nice and enjoyed:

• by myself
• hopefully by others

I suspect my "Game Master urge" as the reason for my desire to create worlds, stories and experiences for others to enjoy alongside myself.

The "others' enjoyment" part is not quite there yet, though: I do realise the creation of an online multiplayer game is a major undertaking, one requiring multiple expertises which quite frankly I am not sure I can even start to master, and have a mostly busy schedule (real life and all that). So it goes as fast as it goes.

Learning along the way + and who knows...?

As a fully booked contractor, my projects are not always 100% what I would like to work on. Let's call this "a void to be filled".

Combine this void to "The Urge" and there you go. Nature does not like resistance. :-)

Whichever the outcome shall be, the Ad Lumens experiment will have been a net positive in terms of professional skills.

This thing might actually lead to some constructive outcomes: an actual product, hell even some revenue? But in the meantime, I see it as a strong opportunity to learn new techniques, languages, design patterns, that, whichever way I look at them, are enriching both professionally and personally.

A brief history

The project started a very long time ago, and was interrupted by more important life events: wedding, child, redundancies (3 of them…), moving to a different country, looking for jobs and clients…. Life happened :-)

And that's fine. Priorities first.

But this current "version" has gone massively further than any other before it, which is why I am putting it out there. I confess this also brings me a (deserved?) feeling of accomplishment.
More recent thoughts and events will be covered in the other posts.

Status updates

Will be accessible in the log entries and more or less randomly spaced in time.

Not everything will be documented, mind you. I still think the codebase is somewhat rough at too many edges, and I actually am missing some data! This will result in an almost guaranteed instability in whatever data is displayed in the data explorer

Not being a blogger by trade (and nature even less), I will endeavour to write and communicate clearly and in an engaging manner, but I can hardly make strong promises. Me being me.

Wtf is it with the name

Yes, the name is not 100% correct latin.

• adastra was taken.
• adlucem was taken.

…I gave up after some more name tries and ended up with the current one. If my calculations are not too wrong it means "To the light", if not "Towards the light".