HoT_Ho11oW_PoiNT
Alistair joined
I've been interested in programming since I was young, and in playing since even before then. When I was 13 I started by writing scripts for the chat program mIRC; channel watchdogs, file sharing tools, server stat reporting, etc. I became a Dungeon Master for an IRC network's Multi-User-Dungeon game, which got me other DM gigs for MUD's while I learned Basic and VB in high-school. I also mapped for Total Annihilation and more-so for it's spin-off TA:Kingdoms. I also became a world champion player for team "hi-" in a Half-Life mod called Frontline Force. I took a year of software engineering in college where I honed my language skills (and learned some C), and started Beta Testing and doing media for Frontline Force. I took up mapping for Half-Life, and joined the Source version of Frontline Force's team as a mapper. That mod was never released, so I made that FLF map into a basic CS:S map. Later, I became a top 10 Supreme Commander 2 player, and now spend my time modding that game.
A very old 'Official' promotional video I made for a Half-Life Mod called Frontline Force. I was on the team as a Beta Tester under the leadership of a guy named david. Having the best PC on the team at the time (a P4 1.7GHz and 4xAGP card) I was given the job of doing a video after the majority of beta testing was done (I joined the team just as testing was happening for V1.5 while playing the game and winning the world championship with a clan named team hi- ).
Video capture was not what it used to be; there was no FRAPS or live capturing software, and if there was then the _typical_ gaming PC of the day couldn't run a game and record to disk at any decent rates, PCs just could not handle it yet. I had to have Half-Life capture each frame into a giant file (at the speed the game ran, no less, regardless of your PC's framerate the demo replay did not have any time dilation options, so how ever many frames you could record is what you could get, it your PC had a hiccup you were S.O.L. and had to re-record that scene). Also, 80 gigs was the standard hard drive size, and most PCs at the time only had one HDD (as did the PC I used to edit this). The giant file would then decompress into raw BMP files which were assembled into the movie you see.
Despite chose challenges, I came up with this beauty of a video, the only thing that was missing is a decent 'Splash Screen', which some guy promised he would do for me personally, then backed out at the last second after the FLF team didn't hire him, even though he said he would do it FOR ME and not for FLF. WANKER!
Anyways, this was one of the best mods EVER created, and at one point was more popular than Day of Defeat for Half-Life before a version (that came out long before I joined the team as a tester) came out and pretty much destroyed the mod, meanwhile the mod's author got a job for Valve and could not update it as he wanted due to a lack of time. Thats when david took over before handing the torch to Tony Sergi.