Back in the early 2000s I had a pin board on which I had pinned GTA Vice City car configs. Literally configs with numeric values for the grip levels, speed, weight etc. for the cars in game. I had no idea what any of it meant at the time but I just assumed if I looked at it long enough then at some point surely I would understand what was going on assuming it was some kind of programming language.
Unfortunately that never happened. What did happen though was I started creating simple texturing mods for GTA Vice City and then later on San Andreas. Some of which actually ended up being fairly popular on the GTA modding sites at the time. That led me to starting a small Webs.com (back then it was freewebs.com) site to host my mods and that rabbit hole took me down the path of starting to play around with html / css in dreamweaver (anyone remember that?).
Moving on a few years and im hooked on counter strike source and now creating skins / maps on a community called fpsbanana. There was an incredible amount of talent on that site and you could spend hours just browsing creations or checking tutorials / taking part in the forums.
A few years down the line and a tech demo for Crysis was released on youtube and I was blown away. I started a new website (maxedgaming) which focused on creating tutorials for using the cryengine level editor and creating mods / maps and eventually ended up with around 1000 members in the forums with a ton of creations and a massive talent pool in the community from 2D pixel artists all the way to 3DMax magicians. At some point we were building java mods for minecraft that integrated our community server into the phpBB forum and so much more things I can’t even remember.
Unfortunately life just got in the way and I just couldn’t keep on top of the website and it just slowly faded out. That was over 16 years ago and looking back I think that whole time was the peak of creativity & sharing in your hobbies in niche communities on the internet. It all kind of tapered off into facebook groups or discord later on. I hate both for killing so much content by just hiding it in the void behind a login wall.
So after a very long arc in my career as a web developer I somehow landed on threejs at the start of 2025 as a new years resolution and was instantly hooked on building little things with it. The community scattered throughout the discord / threejs forums & bsky even brought back some of the nostalgia of the good old forum days.
From my day to day job I absolutely love anything that does realtime communication so the multiplayer side of things just kept itching and I couldn't let it go. It took me quite a while to get something up and running that resembled even half of something that could be reused but I think I'm slowly making progress on it.
Not sure where I'm going with this but I guess maybe I'm just hoping to relight some of the nostalgia I had for the community I shared my passion with over a decade ago and just share in doing something fun along the way. I specifically went the forum route because I don't want this hidden behind another tech giant and just have everything lost in the void.
Hopefully I can get it to a point where you can show off some of your creations with it! Looking forward to seeing them