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Chris on Planet Lara...
Well
well well! Its been 7 years for me so far and what a 7
years it has been. I remember playing Tomb Raider I for
the first time at my uncle's house and later starting
work on the first website 'RidgeonNet' which I
hosted on my freeserve webspace and had only one page on
Lara! Since then we've grown beyond all belief and its
hard for me to backtrack to see how we've got to the
status we are at today.
Planet Lara's progression
Today, I'm running my web design and development
business 'Ridgeon Network' and all this has literally
stemmed off Planet Lara all those years ago. It has been
an absolute pleasure working with Core Design and Eidos
those many years ago to be able to bring all this
content to the fan base of millions. I appreciate the
thing that have stemmed from Planet Lara because pretty
much everything has! and what's more that's thanks to
the millions of you out there.. the visitors of Planet
Lara.
My
expansion into the business world has also been thanks
to many of the companies I have delt with along the way
with Tomb Raider, the biggest being Core Design, which,
as many of you know, reformed into a new company after
Angel of Dakrness with many of the original Core
employees which is now
Circle plc
who I have been working for as their web design for a
long time. Its great to continue working with some of
the old people from the TR series such as Adrian Smith
and Susie Hamilton who I thank very much for their
support all the way back to Core Design.
The work!
I'm not going to pretend working on Planet Lara is a
doddle, far from it. This site has demanded thousands of
man hours to get to where it is today and many late
nights (and early mornings!) at computers getting the
site together. A funny thing that has always happened in
previous years has been that whenever I go away for any
length of time.. I'll be up a mountain or something
similar and EIDOS suddenly announce the next best thing
in the TR franchise! That's life I suppose but in the
end, its all good fun and that's what I do this website
for.
The
help
The site certainly wouldn't be what it is today
without the very special people out there that helped
out and made it all worth while... Take a look on the
right for just a few of the people who made that
valuable contribution to Planet Lara's existence.
Techy Talk!
If you're a techy kind
of fellow like us, you're probably wondering what kind
of technology the site runs on. Well.. In the early
years it was simple HTML and images and we progress
(pretty fast!) into dynamic Perl / SHTML pages. The
popularity of the site grew tremendously through
Chronicles and Angel of Darkness which led to a real
strain on our resources. This lead to me learning a new
technology call ASP (active server pages) and a mixture
of MS Access and MySQL databases, of which, we now
predominantly use MySQL for its SUPER-FAST engine, which
you need when you have well over a quarter of a million
forum posts and a million or so records site-wide. The
site operates on 4 Microsoft Web Servers for best
performance. we're also using a fair bit of the .NET
framework now for new features which is well worth a
play with!
The
reputation!
Out of all that is Planet Lara, one of the things I
enjoy the most is its reputation with the fans of the
games and respect from the game creators and developers.
We have had strong working relationships with Core and
Eidos for many years and that has paid off highly but i
also understand that this has come from a lot of hard
work which everyone appreciates.
The
content!
Now then, most of our content officially comes from
Eidos and official streams but probably my most proud
sections are fan work, when originally creating
the site I could never have dreamed up how much
commitment fans are prepared to put in and its been an
honour to showcase thousands of pieces of this work. You
guys, truly are amazing!
The future!
It looks to us like there's going to be a good few more
games yet and I'd like to think I can carry on Planet
Lara for years to come in one way or another. Some of
you may have noticed Dan (Daniel Barnes, see below) on
the scene a lot in the past few years. Dan is one of the
most talented guys out there when it come to his passion
for Tomb Raider and the graphics that go with it, not
not mention being able to put a top notch article
together!
From
now on Dan is taking more of a front seat in Planet Lara
due to my many commitments outside of the site but I
hope to oversee things more than previously and see the
site come alive once again with the new media to be
released for the next couple of games. This will also
hopefully give me more of a chance to so chat with the
community and get more involved with the forum and
evolving Planet Lara Imperative's features... that's the
plan!
To
wrap up!
What a fantastic 7 years it has been for us and what
an amazing 10 years for Tomb Raider. I hope to see the
series around for many many more years to come! Im sure
it will becuase I cant see a girl like Lara disappearing
very fast after the amazing 10 years she has had so fan.
BRING ON ANOTHER 10 YEARS!! |
