I keep deleting Karolyn's post because that story was written with a lot of anger. Saying the reason MyVMK opened is because of OpenVMK is silly, too. If OpenVMK didn't exist but I still got contacted by the same people, which I think would have been more likely if anything, it would have happened sooner.
Back in early 2013 I was working on another game called CokeStudios. It closed around six months before VMK did. CokeStudios was similar to VMK but ... for Coca-Cola. I mean that's a vast oversimplification, VMK has so much more going for it... Anyway I was contacted out of the blue by someone called Ashley-Pink who saw that I was working on CokeStudios. I don't even think she knew what it was but the connection was strange, CokeStudios was (*originally* but im not going into that right now) developed by the same company that developed VMK for Disney, using the same technology.
Anyway, her message interested me so I decided to follow her up on it. She says she had the client files for it, or that her friend did i can't remember what she said. Anyway the person who had the client files turned out to be KarolynD. After a lot of convincing (she was stubborn) she gave the client files to me. Now, they weren't... useable... at all... Let me explain a little bit...
The files were the files that were loaded by your browser when you opened the original VMK. What it did was it would store them so it doesn't have to load them again when you visit VMK again, so the game would open faster, this is known as caching. Thing is, the files all had meaningless names like mp3958792, and no dictionary was included for the original names, so I was just given a jumbled mess of what was originally half of VMK. Keep in mind, VMK had around 20 files alone for it to work, and then every single clothing item and furniture item had its own file too, and there were many different versions of the files and a lot of duplicates and everything all scrambled in there so we're talking tens of thousands of files...
Before I continue, let me explain the difference between the client and the server. The simplified way of putting it is, the client is what runs on your computer... this is what you see in your browser... The server is what lets all of the different clients talk to eachother and handles logic such as purchases and things like that (it also decides what you get when you open a crate, for example). The server is also the only component with any kind of memory. You can't use the client without the server.
So after I received those files, I went to work on figuring out the bare minimum of them so I could get something to work, this was all a passing curiosity for me at this point, and OpenVMK still hadn't even come into the equation. I get it working to the point where the client loads, and what do you know, I'm able to do some trickery to figure out what the client wants to hear to do different things such as open the map, try to load a room, etc... of course I didn't have all of the room files named and set up, or anything... But I pulled out a couple of the rooms from the jumble and got them to work. I posted a couple of videos of that to YouTube.
== START OF OPENVMK PARTS AND DRAMA ==
A bit of time passes, I talk to Ashley about possibly reaching out to Nick from OpenVMK about me helping with it because of problems I hear about from it. But nothing comes from it and I'm still working on my other game so I just leave it be for a while, thinking I'll try again at some point in the future. Now at this point I get contacted by the worlds most rotten cucumber, no I won't clarify on that one, a lot of you know who I'm talking about. He wants me to help Nick with OpenVMK and mentioned some of the same problems as before. At that point I was considering contacting him directly myself, so I don't really consider this person to have any relevance in the history of the game besides maybe speeding it up by a few days. Now he'll probably be running exploit scanners on us again but shrug.
Anyway, me and Nick end up talking and decide to work on the original client rather than his remake as his remake was going fairly poorly and taking a long time. I end up writing all of the code, and I mainly point that out to say
nothing from MyVMK came from OpenVMK beyond things I made myself, I was the only one working on the actual game. From the beginning there was some tension, for instance, I have a lot of difficulties with getting things done and usually get them done in bursts, but noone else really understands that (it's due to fairly severe ADHD which was undiagnosed at the time).
Let's get to the dirty parts. I suggest we should open a forum, because I think it's something really important as we don't have anything for people to do anything on yet. A community without somewhere to talk is just a bunch of people with no way to reach eachother... So I go to bed and he makes an arrangement with two people without telling me, essentially asking them to run the forum for us and giving them control over it. This was what ultimately killed OpenVMK in my opinion, but of course it took months for it to actually happen.
One of the people was eventually fired, I can't remember why but I think he was really nasty with me. The other person was Grace, some of you might remember her. She was one of the worst people I have ever met if I'm being completely honest here. I don't want to go into details but she was really manipulative and kept trying to trap me and get blackmail on me. She used personal things against me to try and get me to do what she wanted.
Anyway, there's a lot of tension between me and her because
I literally had no idea Nick had signed the forums away to her, and noone wanted to tell me that so I was looking like a complete jerk when I wanted to make changes and run it in a certain way. Time goes on, tension gets worse, she shows her bad side... things get bad... but I keep working on things and eventually it's ready to launch. The entire staff team was very strange at that point and had a nasty atmosphere.
Then it's opening day! Yay right? Well everything had gone completely wrong. I had asked Nick to do a few things in advance which he hadn't done at all, so the game got to launch with the testing catalogue as well as no moderation! The game was running on a cheap server, because I didn't want to spend too much money and wasn't expecting the bombardment of people we got, so that also made it a disaster.
Someone eventually volunteers a server which I'm very apprehensive about, however I was being given my own account on a fairly large server provider so I thought I'd be okay. I'll skip the details here, but I wasn't okay. I wasn't letting anyone have access to my code because I knew something like this could happen with how much tension there was. Turns out that server provider broke a ton of laws in the process of this because the person who volunteered the server just abused their position and dumped it.
Then, and I remember this very well. I went to see a movie, it was called About Time (still one of my favorite movies by the way). I get home. I talk to Nick a little bit, I'm exhausted because my sleep schedule was weird and I had essentially pulled an all nighter to see it. He tells me everything's okay and at this point he was obviously being very fake with me. I fall asleep. I wake up, check my email and I see a ton of hate messages from various sources and people telling me what scum I am for "what I did".
I was really... confused... so I check Skype and see they removed me from all of the chats and things. They had stolen the server through the host I had mentioned before, and kicked me out. Not only that, but they told everyone I put a virus in the game, which... obviously... I didn't... A load of drama unfolds when I come out and say "uhh no, this is what happened". Most of the players are on my side, but some still think I'm scum because of this.
Afterwards, OpenVMK burns itself to the ground from the drama and hatred around it. I start planning MyVMK and it opens a couple of weeks later.
Now... let me get to the part noone really knows about... I had a strange interest in Sulake (the company that developed Habbo, CokeStudios, VMK, etc) at the time. If I had been contacted by Ashley-Pink, and OpenVMK never existed or just never went anywhere in those few initial months, I would have started MyVMK anyway. The reason I think this is because my interest in that company would have led me to it pretty soon regardless of what happened at that point. In fact, I got more complete client files from a few different people after, one set that didn't even have messed up names. I believe MyVMK would have opened
sooner if OpenVMK wasn't a thing, but people act as if OpenVMK was some kind of predecessor to MyVMK rather than a hindrance.
== END OF OPENVMK STUFF ==
So why, despite all of the drama, nonsense, and everything else did I continue to work on VMK in general despite (at the time..................) having no interest in Disney, having never played the original game, having never been to any of the parks, and only having a fairly loose connection to it in the first place? Well... At first... I was bored. Honest truth. I think my curiosity would have led me to opening it as a full game eventually regardless though. To give you an idea, back then, I had trouble understanding what pins were. I thought they were like badges you wore, which wasn't wrong, but then I get told badges are separate! I'm like what that doesn't make any sense lol.
Anyway, after I started to get to know people who truely loved VMK, I started to see something in it. I saw a community that was cut apart in its prime. I saw people who had passion for something who never quite had anything they could relive that passion in ever again. I saw people who wanted their game back. And due to my very oddly specific knowledge, I was one of the few people equipped to do it.
To give you an idea, to create the server, I had to understand the client. But the client created with Macromedia Director/Shockwave. No decompiler existed for it, so all of the code was out of reach. I had to write a decompiler for it to make this happen, and the file format was completely undocumented. Then based on (originally, very poorly) decompiled code I had to recreate the server from scratch. I had knowledge of Director and other things that led to me being able to do this, and I think that's why it hadn't happened sooner... it required a very specific skillset and was just out of reach enough.
But yes, that's why I brought VMK back, and kept persevering with it despite everything. Because of the people involved. I wanted to make them happy and bring something they loved back. It went from being little more than something to kill a bit of boredom to being something I truly loved, and as more time went on I started to like Disney and other things, and I have met so many people through this game who have changed my life.
Now? The original client, the one the original game used, the one I had to heavily modify (including changing bytecode by hand whilst making sure the compressed size of things didn't change) is being phased out and replaced with the new client, which was written completely from scratch in Javascript. Once the old client is completely gone, no code from the original game will remain, only images.
We're also launching something pretty special soon, I believe it will be the next step for MyVMK, but you'll have to wait and see
TL;DR: don't spend too long around disney freaks or they'll convert you.
Oh and keep in mind I left a lot of people and details out here. If I wrote everything I could fill up the library of babel.
