"TERDreader!? Why would you call it that?" 

2001 was a WEIRD year, a year of even bigger change. I still had the idea of being a programmer in my sights, yet was in school for networking. I still continued to hone my older programs to keep my logic skills sharp mostly. I mean, I always thought it would be cool to have one of my old QB programs recognized by some retro group or something, but it hasn't happened :). That's my explanation of why QB Stuff keeps showing up from the past edits. This history section generally was originally created to document what I had written overall, which in Jan 2003 was almost ALL QB stuff.

Now, on to 2001!

There were a couple more websites...the first I maintained roughly from November of 2000 through spring 2001 that doubled as the BWR website and my personal site. It was, ironically, the only one I've had that garnered rather heavy traffic...I had a larger social circle at the time, between college, the HS friends that were still around (I had graduated less than a year before, of course.) It was simply called "Timmy Online!"

 

Right off the bat, I released Livin' In Buddha 2.0. I had been working on it between October 2000 and January 2001. The reason it took so long was the fact that I was meticulously digging through all the old LIB code and updating/correcting it. I fixed every little weird quirk that I could find in the game. I took out the cheat code(s), and added an ATM to the mini-mart, effectively copying the "Ye Olde Bank" idea from L.O.R.D.. That way, a player wouldn't lose all their money if they were killed, granted they had stowed some away. I also added the "Hotkey" theory, thus you no longer had to hit enter after a letter, it just automatically accepted the input. Also, most importantly, I updated the user interface for the game's data management system. Now, all you had to do was enter your first and last name, and the first time you ran it, you also had to enter your gender. It was that simple. No more making up or remembering file names. The only thing it made different in game play was that you used your first name in the game instead of one you made up. Here's a pictorial view of the differences between 1.3 and 2.0:

I continued through the rest of '01 without much thought to programming, as I was preparing for my wedding, working 35-40 hours a week, and attending school in Indianapolis. Once I got married, I was able to once again find some time to get in front of the keyboard and play with a little design.

I began work on a version of Livin' In Buddha that I was going to call "Livin' In Buddha: Final Edition". It's version at full release would have been 3.0. I designed a scripting system, that , for lack of a better term and the sloppy way the first version was written, I deemed TeRDreader. It reads a .TRD script file, which I personally designed myself. 

Here's an example of it's purpose:

The entire game of LIB: FE was finished, when I had a nightmarish hard drive failure, and none of my backups worked. The game was finished, right down to the new goodies: Converse w/Abel in Abel's Arsenal, the Animated Chevette Races, and the new fighting routines that were rather Pokemon like in their design (complete with lifebars!) The good thing is, a compiled Beta version exists, and will be posted on this site for download in the near future. For now, enjoy the following clips out of the game.

One last thing for 2001: I did do a full-fledged BWR website once again after TOL...and it survived the longest of the freyellow.com freebie sites. It had a full description software section for each of my QB Games where they could be downloaded and a few other goodies. This was redone as the first "Backwood Realm" website in August 2002, just before backwood-realm.com went live for the first time. It wasn't an oft-updated site, but I did manage to preserve the html in the archive from freeyellow at one point or another. This also started the tradition of the BWR logo first and foremost on the site. I got the idea of "The Backwood Realm" from my own quote at the top of this page. Page obviously had a heavy developer/programmer's slant much like older sites. There was a news section, but no journal, etc section (this was still before the term "blog" came to be.)