Pantera – a silent feline
Spacey’s story about Thanatos (Panthera) told few months after project’s death
Well, it all started with me and nneonneo we were hanging around in the XaosWoW (A private server) IRC channel and we were just kind of half-seriously discussing the possibility of bringing StormCraft up-to-date, it was nothing serious at first. And then we started researching a bit on the source still not completely serious, I talked it around with shouji, he sent me some SRP libraries and wished me luck.
At the time it still wasn’t too serious. nneonneo started looking at the possibility of fixing the server-client communications. Things didn’t seem to progress so fast, and it looked like it we wouldn’t be able to do anything with it in the end. But a few weeks later, nneonneo posted his progress on BH. He had managed to fix a large part of the server-side communications, and you could now at least login to the realm list server and create a character. From there, we gained a big public attention very fast, of course, however I felt that it was not a very good kind of attention, and I was right. We were shortly thereafter contacted by AlexM who told nneonneo that it was disrespectful to continue the development of StormCraft, at the time I contacted a man named Wesko who, at the time, created a similar project so I told him me and nneonneo were interested in merging, on the condition that we would go underground. He accepted, so we simply stopped posting all progress of the project, hoping that people would forget it. In time they did. At the time nneonneo was the only active developer but later we managed to get ahold of many very experienced developers, whose name I will not reveal for their privacy, however the development hit a little roadblock, well a rather major one, after awhile we weren’t able to login to the world successfully without causing the client to crash. It took a long time for us to figure out the reason and it almost seemed like we had hit a dead end, but then one of our best developers found the solution (I won’t go in to details about this) and so development continued. Since it was so old we of course had a lot of cleaning up to do, but it was rather easy and development was going very rapid now. We cleaned everything up and made it work very smooth, and then we started working on features. The project was officially called Thanatos at the time, everything was going great we constantly recruited new developers interested in helping out, but we always managed to keep a low-profile. Until day, we announced the project publicly, because we were short on developers. This proved to be quite a mistake so we eventually discarded our statement as a hoax. A lot of people had a hard time believing this, but we had a lot of political influences at the time, so we managed to make sure that the public belief was that Thanatos was a hoax. Development moved on as usual, until we had an internal quarrel and Wesko (Yes, he wasn’t exactly the best leader) decided to split up a big portion of the team and thus we were renamed to Pantera, and this also caused a lot of members to be kicked out. The project regrouped but a lot of members were growing more and more displeased with the project, and we also discovered a lot of previously unknown weaknesses with the core, so a big rewrite was started. But because the member that was working on this left, due to circumstances that I would not like to disclose, the project started dying out gradually until somewhere around the beginning of this year when it was officially announced dead by the leader.
So that was the story of so-called hoax, one never knows what’s happening under the public scene, right?