Deef's Net

This was easily the most enjoyable (and most time-consuming) thing I’d done to date. I began playing the VGA Planets Play-By-E-Mail game in 1995, and decided to host a couple of games myself in the summer of 1996 because I was a little bored of summer vacation and had just finished working for a Bulletin Board System (BBS). Had I known that I would become the largest free host of VGA Planets in the world, I doubt I ever would have done it.

I originally hosted games through a few Pegasus Mail filters. At about the same time, I started learning the Visual Basic language, and thought about the possibilities if I combined the two (I like learning programming languages by applying them right away). So I did.

The result was a surprisingly (to me) popular hosting service that at its peak ran a hundred games simultaneously with nearly a thousand active players (VGA Planets is an 11-player game). Other sites claimed to have similar numbers, but not all of their games were actually running at any given time.

Unfortunately, NAVGAP’s popularity far exceeded what I expected, and I had to spend a considerable amount of time upgrading the code without causing downtimes. That was a challenge that eventually became unmanageable while I was also trying to study for an Ivy League undergraduate degree. So, I kept Dartmouth College, and stopped working on NAVGAP.

Fortunately, I didn’t have to shut down NAVGAP. Neil Grigg, who was working with me as a one-man Help Desk, was willing to take it over, though in reduced form (I had T3 access to the Internet at the time; he had a dial-up modem in Australia). NAVGAP was originally written to work on a dial-up connection, so it didn’t involve much adaptation to work on his computer.

NAVGAP became NAVGAPlite for 18 months until Neil got sick of my telling him he should change the name back to NAVGAP (there may have been other reasons). I haven’t been keeping up much with the VGA Planets world, so I’m not sure how it ranks among other hosts nowadays, but it still seems to be a respectable host.

(For those who have visited his site and are wondering, NAVGAP did not originally stand for “Neil’s Australian VGA Planets”, but rather “North Atlantic VGA Planets”, which was accurate for all of about three weeks, when a player from Japan joined.)

I miss running the service, although it’s very nice to not have the burden of trying to keep buggy code online and live 24/7. I officially transferred ownership of the navgap.com domain to Neil in July, 2001 when it came up for renewal. We still keep in contact over E-Mail, however, and if I have a moment of boredom (a.k.a. insanity) over the next few years, I may offer to help out again.

If I should do so, I think the program will look a lot different — four more years of programming experience and a couple of Computer Science courses have given me a lot of insight into things I could/should have done differently. Contrasting the NAVGAP code to the current Reflection code will undoubtedly show that! :-)

If you’d like, you can take a look at the current NAVGAP.