Plan for SF
by SF · 02/09/2001 (12:17 pm) · 0 comments
Boyakasha!
This is my very first .plan! My first step in becoming a world famous game developer... or not. Any how, I guess since this is my first entry I should use it to tell you a little bit about myself. I'm currently 21 years old and live in northern VA. I've been working fulltime as a Software Engineer since I graduated highschool in '97. I mainly develop n-tier Internet applications on the MSFT DNA platform, but I have some experience with Java 2 EE (as well as ColdFusion but that's old news now). The company I currently work for has a mish-mash of different platforms: JRun on Win2k, Weblogic on Solaris, Weblogic on Win2k, and finally the straight MSFT DNA platform (IIS, MTS, MSMQ, & SQL). Any how, I tend to prefer the MSFT product line even though sometimes you run into really dumb bugs, but MSFT usually handles them fairly quickly. When I started at my current company I evaluated Weblogic to familiarize myself with it... what a fuckin' piece of shit!! For a server that costs thousands of dollars (per CPU) you would expect an easy update process, but instead you get a bunch of readme files saying: "Put this JAR file here, that one there, etc." When it comes to Java 2 EE I think I prefer JRun a lot better. Or even some of the OpenSource stuff out there. Apache Jakarta is pretty nice as well as JBoss. I haven't messed with them in a while, but if I had a low-volume site that needed to be developed in Java I would definitely choose Linux+Apache+Jakarta+JBoss. When it comes time to do heavyduty enterprise apps though, you just can't beat the price/performance advantage that you get from a solid Intel (or AMD) server running Win2k and the DNA architecture (contrary to what McNealy and Ellison would like everybody to think).
Well, enough about boring Internet apps bullshit. This is a gaming site dammit! I'm a big fan of the LucasArts X-Wing series of games. In fact, the original X-Wing space sim was what got me into PC gaming (I was mainly a Nintendo and Arcade gamer up until then). Lately I've been working on a couple of projects dealing with X-Wing Alliance (XWA) mod'ing. A great site for Star Wars mod'ing is Code-Alliance. The site might not look like much, but they've got the best docs and apps for nearly all LucasArts games: X-Wing, TIE Fighter, XvT, XWA, Dark Forces, Jedi Knight, MOTS, Outlaws, etc. Using their specs for OPT's (the ships in the space sims) I've been able to write a little OpenGL OPT loader. Unfortunately I got stuck on a texturing problem a few months ago and haven't worked on it in a while now. I've also been working on mission editors for the whole series of space sims. Thanks to a guy named V'Lion who's been very helpful in sharing info on the file specs I've been able to read and write X-Wing and TIE Fighter mission files. I'm currently working on XWA mission files, but there's not a lot of information on them so I've had to screw around with UltraEdit a lot (it's a pretty neat hex editor). I've gotten pretty far, but I've been really busy lately so I haven't had a chance to finish it up yet. My goal is to make an X-Wing series game studio that will allow you to make missions for any of the games in the series as well as convert the missions from the old games to the XWA spec to take advantage of the newer engine and better graphics provided by the awesome guys at XWA Upgrade. My ultimate mission, though, is to create a completely new game engine (new AI, graphics, multiplay, etc.) to run any of the missions using the XWA Upgrade graphics.
Well, this is already pretty long so I'm going to sign off. Email me (or use the forums) if you'd like to talk.
Respect.
This is my very first .plan! My first step in becoming a world famous game developer... or not. Any how, I guess since this is my first entry I should use it to tell you a little bit about myself. I'm currently 21 years old and live in northern VA. I've been working fulltime as a Software Engineer since I graduated highschool in '97. I mainly develop n-tier Internet applications on the MSFT DNA platform, but I have some experience with Java 2 EE (as well as ColdFusion but that's old news now). The company I currently work for has a mish-mash of different platforms: JRun on Win2k, Weblogic on Solaris, Weblogic on Win2k, and finally the straight MSFT DNA platform (IIS, MTS, MSMQ, & SQL). Any how, I tend to prefer the MSFT product line even though sometimes you run into really dumb bugs, but MSFT usually handles them fairly quickly. When I started at my current company I evaluated Weblogic to familiarize myself with it... what a fuckin' piece of shit!! For a server that costs thousands of dollars (per CPU) you would expect an easy update process, but instead you get a bunch of readme files saying: "Put this JAR file here, that one there, etc." When it comes to Java 2 EE I think I prefer JRun a lot better. Or even some of the OpenSource stuff out there. Apache Jakarta is pretty nice as well as JBoss. I haven't messed with them in a while, but if I had a low-volume site that needed to be developed in Java I would definitely choose Linux+Apache+Jakarta+JBoss. When it comes time to do heavyduty enterprise apps though, you just can't beat the price/performance advantage that you get from a solid Intel (or AMD) server running Win2k and the DNA architecture (contrary to what McNealy and Ellison would like everybody to think).
Well, enough about boring Internet apps bullshit. This is a gaming site dammit! I'm a big fan of the LucasArts X-Wing series of games. In fact, the original X-Wing space sim was what got me into PC gaming (I was mainly a Nintendo and Arcade gamer up until then). Lately I've been working on a couple of projects dealing with X-Wing Alliance (XWA) mod'ing. A great site for Star Wars mod'ing is Code-Alliance. The site might not look like much, but they've got the best docs and apps for nearly all LucasArts games: X-Wing, TIE Fighter, XvT, XWA, Dark Forces, Jedi Knight, MOTS, Outlaws, etc. Using their specs for OPT's (the ships in the space sims) I've been able to write a little OpenGL OPT loader. Unfortunately I got stuck on a texturing problem a few months ago and haven't worked on it in a while now. I've also been working on mission editors for the whole series of space sims. Thanks to a guy named V'Lion who's been very helpful in sharing info on the file specs I've been able to read and write X-Wing and TIE Fighter mission files. I'm currently working on XWA mission files, but there's not a lot of information on them so I've had to screw around with UltraEdit a lot (it's a pretty neat hex editor). I've gotten pretty far, but I've been really busy lately so I haven't had a chance to finish it up yet. My goal is to make an X-Wing series game studio that will allow you to make missions for any of the games in the series as well as convert the missions from the old games to the XWA spec to take advantage of the newer engine and better graphics provided by the awesome guys at XWA Upgrade. My ultimate mission, though, is to create a completely new game engine (new AI, graphics, multiplay, etc.) to run any of the missions using the XWA Upgrade graphics.
Well, this is already pretty long so I'm going to sign off. Email me (or use the forums) if you'd like to talk.
Respect.
