Dream 1 – Write a Piece of Software for the Gaming Community

Part 1 of 10 of My Dreams to Achieve Series.

While I don’t consider any of my dreams small (or easy to achieve) this one is probably the easiest and the one I will achieve the soonest. In fact, I’m getting ready to start working on some soon.

I’ve been a long time fan of super heroes (especially the X-Men) and a few years back I got into the MMO game City of Heroes. But I’m also a die-hard Mac user. I was born to use Apple computers and with one exception I’ve only ever owned Macs. But the only Triple-A MMO title on Mac is World of Warcraft and I’m not terribly fond of that game. But just yesterday NCSoft announced a partnership with TransGaming to bring City of Heroes to Mac OS X.

There are a few incredibly useful utilities for City of Heroes namely HeroStats which parses chat messages from the client and tracks statistics (mostly combat) related to CoH, the Titan Network Tracker which is built on top of HeroStats to link up with CityInfoTerminal for badge tracking and the various build planners.

Utilities like these will be needed on the Mac side too and my plan is to be up and running with the release of Issue 13. The build planner will be the easiest to start because you don’t need access to the game client information. So I’ll probably start laying out an interface and the datasets soon.

This will also help me accomplish one of my smaller goals which is to learn how to program in Objective-C (the language of choice for Mac developers).