Trenton Shaffer

Account Type:

member

Location:

Phoenix, AZ 0

Member since:

July 3, 2004

Last Login:

April 21, 2018

Last Update:

December 12, 2009

Bio:

Skills

Primary Skill:

Skilled Programmer

Secondary Skill:

Skilled 3D Artist

Tertiary Skill:

Advanced Scriptor/Mod

Summary:

While I tinkered around with the Commodore 64, Apple I and Apple II, my first pride and joy was my TRS-80 4P. At the time this thing was top dog around town and was even portable. All the other TRS-80 (Trash 80) models did not stand a chance. With a 4MHz Z-80A processor, 64K RAM, 14K ROM, and two built-in double-sided 368K 5-1/4 inch drives. Its display worked in 80 x 24 (Model 4 mode), 64 x 16 (Model III mode), or double-width 40 or 32 characters per line. Upper and lower case and reverse video (Model 4 mode). 96 text, 64 graphics and 96 special characters. All using different shades of the wonderful color green. Looking back it was like working in the Matrix.

The TRS-80 4P came with Microsoft 5.0 BASIC and this is where I started learing programming. I wrote a few text-based games and a couple of other games where you would move a special ASCII character around--they actually had a smiley face as one of the special ASCII characters--which worked out great as you could use it as your avatar for your game.

As time passed and my father and I started building computers, the 286 and 386 came along. I starting using and learning Q-Basic and GW-BASIC (which I stole from an old Compaq). Some of you should remember the old Gorilla.bas or nibbles.bas. Gorilla was a game in which the player takes on the role of one of two gorillas standing on top of buildings in a randomly generated skyline. Players take turns to enter an angle and velocity with which to throw explosive bananas. Nibbles was the standard navigate a virtual snake (or worm) through an enclosed space, while consuming objects and growing as you eat them. If you hit a wall or your own snakes body, game over.

The years passed and I coded many 2D games in CGA, EGA, and VGA (sorry had to sum up these years, not much exciting anyways). Then along came DOOM. Well about 5 years, 200 mods and 5000 hours later I emerged from the DOOM, Heretic and Hexen game world. This was my first real taste of modding a game and actually doing graphic design such as creating sprites, wall textures, even creating my own levels. I even played DM against Carmack, Romero and a few others from the Id crew. I still have my autographed doom disc, thanks guys!

Then there was QUAKE. This is when I decided I wanted to be more than a hobbyist game programmer. This game blew my socks off! I created over 50 mods for Quake, i ran the X-Clan and competed in tournaments. I even had the X-Clan listed on the first page of the Id Software website once upon a time when they had a clan list with profiles and all. There were not many back then. Well Quake and Quake 2 came and went and Quake 3 Arena was released. The Q1 and Q2 source was released by this time and I had been hard at work reversing what Id had masterminded and added my own little touches. This is where all of my math classes paid off. I started learing about Dot Products and Cross Products of vectors, matrix transformations, quaternions, and so on. I also bumped in to an individual who was programming a level editor for Quake and Quake 2. It was called BSP and the person programming it was Yahn Bernier. The engine was fairly primitive but was steadily gaining speed as Yahn was pumping new features in to it constantly. I ended up befriending Yahn and providing some suggestions which were actually implemented. Yahn eventually asked if I would be interested in creating some logos. I agreed and made a few for him. He ended up using some of the logos on the BSP website for a while and a couple were used as the splash screen on some earlier versions of BSP. If you want to confirm this you can download any version of BSP and my name is in the credits on the about dialog page. Yahn now works for Valve and worked on the entire Half-Life series amongst other projects.

While coding modified Quake engines and mods I came across a project called QFusion. This was a project headed by Victor Luchitz in which a small group of individuals had taken the Quake 2 source code and beefed it up to read Quake 3 MD3 models and BSP maps and render/play them accordingly. The only problem QFusion had by release 4 was it had absolutely zero bot support. No computer AI at all. I took it upon myself to start coding a AI Bot for the engine. A years worth of work later, I had released and almost perfected my Fusion Bot for QFusion. The bots were very smart and would run around any level, seek out enemies in Deathmatch, and Capture flags in CTF. They would pickup weapons, switch them according to distance from enemy (no point-blank rocket launches), use ladders, swim in water, and many other nifty tricks. This was fairly easy due to the awesome programming skills of John Carmack who had implemented several things that helped my bot check for lava, water, ladders, etc. I also programmed the ability to manually add waypoint nodes for the bot, you could even creat Jump nodes in which the bot would jump exactly when reaching that node and target the next closest node. You could literally train these things to jump ledges, avoid lava, get keys to unlock doors, it did not matter.

I eventually dumped the Fusion Bot project which I started back in 2002-2003 and it was taken over by several other people and evolved over time. It is open source and available to the public on the QFusion website.

Around this time is when I started using the Torque engine. I had downloaded and compiled about every other open source game engine out there. Ogre, Nexus, Neo Engine, Crystal Space, Nevraxx, the Nebula Device, so on and so forth. I finally broke down and bought the Indie source for TGE. I was HOOKED!

The years have passed and I am still hard at work using TGE. I have a game prototype that has been in the works for almost a year now and is very exciting. I am not sharing any details right now, but as soon as a working beta is in ready, you will get all the juicy details, including a downloadable/playable beta demo.

I am also part of the Garage Games Test Project (aka GG Beta Tester) and tested ArcaneFX for both TGE and TGEA, TorqueX, and various other products before becoming available to the public. Arcane FX is absolutely Awesome. Torque X is very exciting and promising as well. I am starting to show interest in Torque Wii and am putting some stuff together for my niece and nephew.

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