You started with the website, but that isn't where the association with Turbulent stops. Walk me through the timeline of Turbulent's involvement with CIG. Where do you go from that original crowdfunding platform?
TL;DRAfter the web platform, Turbulent moved into authentication, launcher accounts and game services such as the Arena Commander leaderboards and the party, chat and voice systems, and is working on updating the leaderboards with the AC team.
Right, so from the platform, obviously, even starting right at the hangar module, that's already an extension of the web. We're no longer just doing web, we're doing authentication work, account systems for the launcher, the very first launcher. The OG before Doug. Fun memories of that. And so we still had to power that. So we're already pairing web platform engineers with game engineers designing APIs to support that. And so that was the first touch point. You've got to remember at the time, CIG is a company that's being built, right? The game scope is also being assessed. And so there's a lot of people that are working on the engine, right? We're talking at the time porting the engine to 64-bit, entity port systems, item port systems, everything's coming online. And so there's no time to build services, right? Or we don't have a team to build support services for the hangar module et cetera. And so that's where we started, over the years, to get involved on that side, to try to help out getting a bit more firepower there. So if I remember right, the very first service we made was the Arena Commander leaderboards service, which is now very old.
But due to get some updates in the upcoming 3.18?
Yes. We're working with the AC team on that for sure, to sort of put them back into shape a little bit. I mean, the interfaces are still perfect, but the service is really old school, very legacy. That was the first one, right? So the way it's built is a bit bizarre because at the time it was extracting data from the game. There was no real game backend. Really, really the first one. Fast forward a couple of years later where there was even more need for game services. So the party system, right? So we got involved in helping out to build the first party system, group systems. That also came with chat and the first voice over IP and then ultimately face over IP transport in the back end. So that's teams that are literally contributing, working solely with game devs on implementing services.