Directsong

From AboveTheGarage

After getting quitted at Amaze I was approached by Jeremy Soule to write an online store for him. Part of his idea was that the music could be embedded into the game in a way that would support expansion packs. The time spent in MMOs is pretty huge and at the time most games had an hour max of music. So his idea was that he could sell expansion packs for MMOs.

Since I'd spent the last four years as a manager (worse, an executive) I was itching to write some code. This was a great opportunity for me to dive in. I was lucky enough to write the entire system from billing to delivery and playback in-game.

The main components were:

• PayPal billing system (PayPal API, ASP and MySql);
• Catalog system (ASP and MySql);
• DRM support (ASP, Microsoft DRM manager, and C++ player)
• Embedded player for Guild Wars (C++ and Microsoft DRM licensing);
• Support utilities (backup, customer service, test modules);
• C++ downloader.

The main thing for me was that I'd never implemented a web site or used programmatic web services before. This was in 2004 and the whole web services thing was kicking off but not very organized IMHO. PayPal's documentation in particular was not accurate. ASP programming was new to me although I understood the concepts and I knew that allowing people to type SQL into their name field was bad! Still it took some time to come up with a style (such as it was) that worked and looked decent.

The entire project took about eight months. The system launched with the free Sorrow's Furnace expansion for Guild Wars. That was one exciting night! People were queued up to get the free music and suddenly the system was live! And it worked! Awesome.

That was really fun and exciting.

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