During my Ph.D. I started playing online games with remote friends and both developed and sustained several friendships in this manner that would like have withered away otherwise. One of the games we played was Bioware’s original Neverwinter Nights. I had played and loved the first two Baldur’s Gate installments, and this was a sequel that allowed collaborative online play. I was also learning Python at the time, and in my spare time started writing an editor that would allow non-Windows users to produce content for the game as the game only came with an editor in its Windows version. With collaborators I ended up developing this editor far enough to use it for my Ph.D. research. In fact, I didn’t just use the editor, but also hacked the networking protocol for the game so I could control Non Player Characters programmatically and have them respond using some of the machine learning and natural language parsing work I was doing.
I recently imported the old code for this project into github to ensure it stays available in case anybody wants to refer to it.