The classic I never knew

[Secrets]

Originally Posted by Lisset [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

Pretty sure gems came after meddling while sitting.

Gems is 2002-era EQ. It was actually the result of a programmer who got fired for coding gems into the game because he got a writeup for playing Minesweeper (which was removed from all SOE PCs after) and needed his makeshift game fix on company time.

Remnants of the GemsGamWnd code on EQMac reference the petition UI; this was actually causing a crash when zoning on the EQMac client with GM status on. If you didn't have the petition files in the client, it'd try and reference them and crash in GemsGameWnd. The original programmer had left some code there to render the GemsGameWnd in the same function as the 'screenshot' they'd take of employees' client screens to make sure they weren't doing something they weren't on their shift.

After he got fired, they decided to just keep it in the client and add it as a regular feature for players because they thought it was amazing that someone would waste their time on something like this.

Other programming oddities from classic include the "Who's your daddy?" line in the EQ Client. This was eventually going to be expanded on to reset a network connection, and the sequence contained three strings:

"\r\nwho's your daddy?"
"\r\ndaddy?"
"\r\nI'm your daddy"

Once they were received in order, the network connection will reset and attempt to reconnect without kicking you to character select. Additionally, these strings are present in 2002-era eqmain.dll which contains leftover strings from the server implementation of this code.