[karajorma]

As part of my (long put off, but finally have time for) plan to improve things on HLP I'm planning to come up with some ideas on how to get people to learn about us and what we do here. But that's for another thread. I figured a walk down memory lane first might be fun. So, how did you find HLP? What made you register? Did you post immediately, or did you lurk for a while first? 


For me, I found the VBB by googling around after buying and playing Freespace 2 (it was actually the first game I bought for my first ever PC). I quickly got into FREDding but I wasn't particularly interested in modding, so when I became aware of HLP it was as that place we sent the modders to for more information on that while we talked about FRED. Eventually, I wandered over to check out what was going on over here and basically never left.

[jadeddragoon]

Well, I was a big fan of Descent back in the day. Not Freespace... Descent. And Decent II. My first experiences with mapping and modding where in those games. Years passed... I played the Freespace series and liked it too... but it was Descent I and II that I kept going back to play into the '00s. Then I learned about the rebuilt Decent engines such as DXX-Rebirth. Upgraded textures and effects? Yes please! More time passed... I finally got around to wanting to play Freespace I and II again... and I thought to myself... maybe there's an updated engine for that too...

Turns out there was. I joined the forums in the late '00s. Didn't post much.  Left... came back a few years later... discovered Blueplanet and loved it... made two posts and then left again. Only just now returned yet again... and this time actually being active.

::shrug:: And that's the story.

[Trivial Psychic]

A friend of mine used to play FS on his computer... first FS1 then FS2.  Later I got the 1st chapter demo of FS2 (called FS2: Colossus) with my Logitech flight stick, then bought FS1+ST, then copied my friend's FS2 CDs for a full copy (rather than a neutered copy I found on P2P).  That same friend then told me about HLP once I'd played some more.  I finally joined in the summer of 2003, which was in the days leading up to the first implementation of HTL.

[mjn.mixael]

Hmm, I don't entirely remember what it was originally. I know I was pretty young. I had a computer in my bedroom which was a pretty big deal. I remember my sister got me Freespace 1 for Christmas one year and when I launched it for the first time.. that FS1 Intro cutscene has a bad word in it and I vividly remember freaking out and powering off my speakers really fast so mom wouldn't hear lol. I loooooooooved Freespace 1. I played it a lot. But eventually I moved on as kids do. It wasn't until many years later that I happened to be browsing a Babbages game store that a PC game box caught the corner of my eye. It said "FreeSpace 2". My eyes went wide. WHAT?! There's a TWO? OMG OMG OMG. Instant purchase. This must have been around 2003/4 maybe. I played the **** out of it.

It was probably around that time or a little later I found HLP via some internet search. I was probably looking up if there was Freespace 3. I remember desperately trying to install various mods. This was really before the MediaVPs and things were released randomly in threads and you had to kind of piece together stuff that would work together. Dark modding days for sure. I also remember being really interested in making my own campaign and made this whole dumb "trailer video" that was like 5 minutes long. It was all Freespace 2 ANIs/cutscenes spliced together with text and music. Honestly, that might have been my first video creation ever. It was either that or Lego Movie Studios. I stuck around for a while, it was under a different username.

I eventually moved on and it wasn't until I was on a nostalgia trip after I got married (my wife worked nights at the time, so I had most evenings to myself to game or whatever) that I decided randomly to look up HLP and see how far things had come. I had gained some knowledge and skills by that point. I lost both the password and email to my old account and thus this new account was created and I decided to make an ambitious "first" post. I think I've had a tab permanently open to HLP ever since.

[Fusion]

Grandfather owned FS1 and 2 as well as all 3 Descents and Mercenary. I was playing the games at age 2 and 3. Eventually get back into Freespace and find out the MediaVPs exist. Eventually joined the forums here and have been on and off as time's gone by.

[Androgeos Exeunt]

I came across HLP in a roundabout way similar to jadedragoon. In my case, I came from PlanetDescent, back when it was still hosted on GameSpy's Planet Network, in the mid-2000s. At the time, I had already known about FS2 (thanks to watching the FS2 trailer on Descent 3 CD 2 way too many times) and played the FS2 demo by then, but I owned Descent 3, and subsequently spent more time playing the latter.

While looking through PlanetDescent one day, I came across a series of Descent 3 music videos made by Rake originally for his "Fusillade" project, which was cancelled. These videos led me to his website, as well as the other videos he made, including Flail SCP and Flail Babylon:

Both videos showed links at the end - Flail SCP to scp.indiegames.us, and Flail Babylon to their microsite on HLP. The Ares and shockwaves in Flail SCP left quite a good impression on me, so I went to scp.indiegames.us, which also linked to HLP. That's how I found this place, way back in 2005-2006.

It took a while before I became a forum member here because I saw no immediate need to do so. FSO 3.6.9 crashing while running JAD due to graphics driver issues was what compelled me to join, and even though I've since become more engaged in other online communities, I still consider HLP to be my "home base" of sorts on the internet.

[Mongoose]

Oh wow...it's probably been the better part of 18 years, and a lot of the details are definitely fuzzy. I was really into Descent in the late 90s, and PlanetDescent was the very first forum I joined around 2001. The neighbor who introduced me to Descent had a copy of FS1 lying around, and I remember being very confused by the title ("Is this another Descent sequel I don't know about?"). Much like Androgeos, I also distinctly remember watching the FS2 trailer on my Descent 3 CDs, probably because I couldn't even run D3 on the family computer at the time, so all I could do was watch the videos. I don't know if I bought FS1 before or after seeing the trailer, though. In any case I played the hell out of FS1, and then the FS2 demo, since it was just about impossible to buy FS2 back then until Interplay put out the 20th anniversary release. I'm fairly certain that it had to have been someone in the Descent community who linked here, or else I found my way here via one of the overlapping community sites like Descent Network. I know I lurked for a good long while before finally registering, probably a year or more, since that's how I did things back as a painfully-shy teenager. I remember getting super-excited reading all about Inferno ("OMG someone made FS3!!!"), but setting up FSO was almost impenetrable to newcomers back then so I think I just stuck with whatever I could grab from the VW Archives for a while. My very first posts here were asking for help with getting Renegade Resurgence to work, and a few other campaigns of a similar vintage.

(Protip: Don't look back at the beginning of your own tracker. I hit some incredible cringe before too long. )

[Novachen]

HLP was very late actually in terms of other freespace communities i visited.

As i was very active in Multiplayer back in the day i found myself in a mutliplayer squadron which had its own site and forum board. So i got some freespace news through that (and later other games like EVE and Starlancer that were actively played)

Have to admit, back in the day my source for new missions and campaigns was only VolitionWatch (RIP). After that went down or was set to archive mode, i had to look for other sources for new campaigns.
Even my focus was actually more into multiplayer coop campaigns back then, as we played through (nearly?) all of them from VW.

But what i have to say? I am not even sure if ever a new coop campaign was released on HLP, but i found some complete new single player experiences instead. Back then some in the squadron (myself included) converted some of them into Coop versions. But as the campaigns got more complex due to SCP together it got more difficult to even organize a four players coop run it died slowly.

This is actually my second account here. I was registered ~15 years ago already. But well... things did not worked out very well already then as a young girl on the brink to be a game developer.
Well, 15 years later nothing really changes, as visionaries are always stubborn heads, regardless of their age. So still hard times for me here 

But now through working life I have significantly more experience to assert myself in this treadmill dominated by men.

[0rph3u5]

I come across HLP back in 05(?) when searching for Babylon 5 mods for the games I owned - tl;dr B5 DVDs were hitting the market and I re-discoved my love for the show's designs, narrative and characters. After downloading TBP and discovering FS_Open through it, I got into FREDing.

And being 16/17 at the time, living in a rural area that was feeling increasingly claustrophobic in many ways, I was super enthusastic to show off what I back than considered "skill" and exercise a "creative side" I, back then, felt like I couldn't show elsewhere (in part also because I was not willing to admit that most of my ideas were bad) ... and eventually looking for advice when I felt I was stuck on matters of FREDing. So I got into posting almost as soon as I arrived, and enthusastically joined the TBP team after only being around and posting for nearly a year I think.

And now its 15+ years of failing laterally and foward later

[spart_n]

20th Anniversary giveaway, I was looking for cockpit HUDs.

[Strygon]

Played the demo that came with my joystick. Discovered that FS2 does not in fact end at Feint Parry Riposte, found SCP, tried out mods I somehow didn't actually find on HLP, then found WoD, crawled onto this site, lurked for several years, learnd2mod and now here I am.

[Nyctaeus]

Old polish community - The freespace.pl. I was lurking around HLP years before closure of fs.pl, but language barrier was too strong for me get in. When fs.pl finally died after hacker attack, I migrated and eventually settled down... And somehow after 12 years, I'm still around.

[BrotherBryon]

Early 2000's some time with an internet search if I remember correctly, lurked for several years I think before ever actually creating an account and posting something. Still lurk several times a month at least all these years later.

[deathspeed]

Since my first post was on the same day I registered, on a topic Official: What would you like to see in FS3? way back in 2004, I’m going to go out on a limb and guess that I was searching Yahoo for info about FreeSpace 3 and came across the thread.  I then lurked, and eventually sort of forgot about HLP.

But I vividly remember re-discovering HLP almost nine years later, reading about Diaspora on Kokatu.  I still don’t FRED or mod, but I have remained more active in the forums, and “show unread posts since your last visit” is one of my browser homepage tabs.

[Colonol Dekker]

Hunting for mods after being pretty adept at squadwar flying for the LOA, (f**k you roughnecks).. Came here when it was 3dap 👍. Lurked for a bit before making loa--jk47 profile.

[Ertanax]

I saw there was an active community, realised I wanted to do my part and chip in, and here we are.

[X3N0-Life-Form]

I'm not really sure how I discovered HLP & FSO to be honest. I'm pretty sure I discovered the wiki first, likely looking for new campaigns to play, or info regarding some specific aspect of the game. That's also probably where I first heard of FSO, since there were a lot of mods requiring it. And after playing a few mods and hanging on the wiki, I decided to click on the "forum" link for some reason, and never really left.

[Scourge of Ages]

I played FS1 and 2 a ton, and pretty much left it at that. Until one time back in 2007 I had a thought, "I bet somebody could make a pretty cool Star Wars mod for this game. Hang on, I bet somebody already HAS!" So I googled FS2 Star Wars mod and found Fate of the Galaxy. And I've just been hanging around ever since.

[CP5670]

I came from the VBB as well when that forum shut down. Back then the mission designers and squadwar crowd were on the VBB, while the modelers and render artists were on here. There was also VWBB and many squad-specific forums, I used to post a lot on the SSC one. I had played FS1 and 2 a lot at that point, and was a big Descent fan ever since I played the shareware Descent. Actually, I probably would have never bought FS1 (or FS2) if it wasn't for the Descent in the title.

I think this type of community could never form around any game that came out today. FS2 happened to come out around the time internet forums and persistent multiplayer (clans, tournaments, etc.) were a new thing and becoming popular. It was easy to mod and had its source released, and was basically the last game of its type for a long time, so people stuck with it.

[Colt]

Around mid-November of 2015 I was watching some youtube LPs one night. At some point I saw a suggestion for a Derelict LP. I watched a few clips and decided to buy FS2 on steam that Christmas. Downloaded wklauncher, MVP's, mods such as SGWII and Derelict, and started to lurk on HLP (I think the YT LP had a link to the website) until finally creating an account at the start of 2019.