GameIslands.Net

A tractor - The Universal
A tractor is a 3d online game set on a collection of different worlds.. miniature online civilisations populated by real people...worlds with their own economies and battles, aims and rewards, and if you're lucky, giant bongo playing monkeys.

You can play flight sims, have car races, go fishing, see butterflies and sheep and ultrakricket matches, play CTF games and fight each other in robotic-crows.

And then theres island radio stations, arcade machines, chess servers, hornball and team games, jetpacks, boats and a never-ending supply of new, downloadable content.

And its all free. No ads. No subscription fees. No conditions.

What it's all about
The 'game' is a virtual universe of interconnected game-worlds. A world can be a place to play games of various types, share music & images, build cities, have wars or just take it easy and laze about in the sun chattin to your mates.

It is still (and probably will always be) in development - new features are regularly added and we're continually striving to make the game more friendly and easier to play. (Particularly with regard to designing your own world, which is currently a difficult and time-consuming task - ultimately we hope to make Island building as easy and fun as logging on to the game.)

Technology
The game and engine is written in C/C++, using a UDP base connection and dedicated guarantee-ing, file transfer and music-streaming systems, as well as support for email, ftp and other bits like that that i dont really understand :). The 3D engine was written around DirectX 8 and everything else was made up at 3am after a few too many glasses of whiskey.

Island Customisation
Architecture
Each island can have its own customized building models and textures. These can either be made in a 3d modelling package and converted to .atm format, or you will be able to download premade models and textures from the gameislands.net model library.

Vehicles
All vehicles (cars, aircraft & boats) have an assigned model and a range of settings to determine how the vehicle controls.
Environment
All the world's texture and background graphics are customisable on your Island, so its up to you whether you're living on desert island surrounded by palm trees and butterflies, or floating through an asteroid field with the string-worm creatures of Asalbal VI.
Gameplay
Using combinations of the hundreds of settings available, almost limitless game-types can be created. You can control whether players on your island earn rewards through industry, warfare, skill, or, perhaps laziness - or combinations of any.
Economy
Using a combination of settings and by modifying the product lists, production rates & building types available on their world, owners create & control a wide-ranging macro-economy.
Robocrows
The settings (speeds, damage rates, weapon types) & models for robocrows are fully island-configurable - much as they are in subspace.

History...

Some many years ago, there was almost certainly a big load of nothingness.

Over the course of time, an almost inconceivable, and oft debated, series of events occured, ultimately resulting in a collection of semi-intelligent ape-descended creatures and the world we know today.

Around 20 years ago I (one of these monkey-like creatures now known to some as Mit) was given a "Vic-20", thanks to a bizarre annual gift-exchanging ritual. For some reason, I gained enormous pleasure wasting time on this glorified calculator, in vain attempts to get small graphical characters to move seemingly randomnly around the screen. As time moved on, I was found to be continuing this 'programming' behaviour, writing small games for the Commodore 64, and Amiga, and eventually even finding that I was able to perform these strange tasks for other people who, oddly, seemed willing to actually give out money in return. (!!)

After spending a little while writing games for the Playstation and PS2, I decided to go back (for a while) to writing things for the fun of it, and started on a game which, mainly to annoy people, I called 'A Tractor'. If there were aims at the start, (and many would argue there wasn't and there has never been), it was to combine the concepts of the virtual worlds described in books by William Gibson, Neil Stephenson etc, with the accesibility and playability of a game like 'Subspace'. (A favourite at the time, which has inspired much of the progress of Islands, and which is still very much worth a play if you're into "Proper", "old-style" gaming. :]). It was also the idea to create a world where others could join in the enjoyment I get from making, as well as playing games.

The Development Team
Since December 2000, A Tractor, Islands or whatever its called, has progressed through many forms, and at different rates of progress as circumstances allowed. (No-one has been paid for workin on it, so far, so almost all but the first few months of the development has been happening extremely part-time, on free evenings and weekends.) Over the course of the years, a number of other people have joined the game and helped keep it moving forward.

A great deal of programming in the game has been done by 'Device', who has also provided a permanently hosted home for the game on his home PC, and has become a good friend in real life too.
The game's lead modeller is Fooli (a friend of mine since college who has also gone to lengths beyond the call of duty to let me continue writing the game, from lending me money to giving me a place to live) and a whole load of the real pretty texturing and other graphical stuff you see around (from the space station screens to jesus) is the work of the game's main texturer, hedgehog, who also hosts stuff, built and maintains the staff website, provides bug-reports and feature-requests galore.. and well.. lots of things. He probably should get out more ;). The original collection of models used in the game (houses, tractor, gas station) were made by Dan, (a friend and colleague from my time working on the Playstation). Special mentions also to 'Kim' (for programming and for generally being the ultimate resource of knowledge for new players for at least a year) and 'Zaroba', the host of a number of the best islands and webmaster of the most comprehensive reference website.

The nature of the game and its open-ended configurability means its impossible to list all the people who've contributed models, hosted islands, and submitted ideas over the years, but I'd particularly like to thank the following people for their efforts.

'Karyn' - helped enormously in the design, testing and hosting of the game over the years.
'Muridae' - Who hosted the first 24 hour island.
'wT' - who has provided a load of well-optimised models.
'Mattizme' - who wrote the base for the 'Invaders' arcade subgame.
'BradSk88' - the most active modeller for the .03 islands.
'Andy' - who's kindly spent a load of his time building an Island-compatable bot system

And thanks also to..
Smilinjoe, Whirl, harmfuldata, qwertyAlien, Lugie, BigSlam, Bubba, BlackDevil, Calren, Legogirl, Yevgeniy, Huss, KnoxJoey, iwarp, Jeff, Evil Overlord, CHL, Cory, Tom, chanb, Magicfinger, Destroyer Dave, #1Stunner, Yamantalai, BoB, TheMightyMoses, Pooky, MetusRex, Joe, Kitchen, Syraq, Paulus, Qorered, WhiteDevil, OmegA, euio, Dowie, Wild, FusionDragon, Egg, UndeadDude, viper2004, RyanKiller, Ardshael, Ram, Hyat, Tempest, Sceaphierde, Jordie, ..

..for suggestions, ideas, beta-testing, models etc etc (My apologies to anyone i've missed from this list, but over almost 3 years more people have helped on this game than my shrunken brain can remember all in one go :|.)
And finally, a special thank you to Steve, Lorna and (most importantly :]) Clare for remaining friends even tho i spend so much time in this silly other world.

Mit 2004