Blogs - Aliah

So, the past year and a half or so I've been really quiet, worked on the mod for a long time, but just last year my father passed away. He was supporting most of my family with the disability, social security, and retirement funds he received, he passed away from cancer that metastasized from his lymph nodes to his brain, and it was a fairly slow ordeal, one that he was not entirely lucid through. I'll spare all the grueling details, because I don't think I can type them out. Needless to say, the government and everyone else took away everything he was giving us, and on top of hospital bills and a home that was now beyond our means, with our cars breaking down on us and everyone else out for their share of what remained of my father's life, we ended up down-sizing to a smaller home, having to buy a new car and get rid of two older ones, and I had to find a new job, one that I now work full-time, five days a week, with an over-night schedule.

What does that mean to the mod? Well, Homefront doesn't pay my bills. Infact, the one time we put up the option to donate I think we received five dollars in a five month period. I don't blame people for not donating, and we could have been more pushy or used something like adf.ly, but people protested, or refused it, and well, again, I can't live off a mod that is doubtful to even get me a job with a game company. So I had to leave the mod in all but a background advice/teaching capacity, helping occasionally when I could, and tending to my job and my own livelihood first. That's just how it is. I'd love sit here and mod all day if it paid the bills, but it just doesn't.

HHF is looking for a new coder, and I have voiced my willingness to both teach and be there to advise a new coder if need-be, so if you want to see the mod completed, it might be a good idea to actually put forth the effort to get it complete, that's what I originally did when I first wanted to join. I originally was simply giving some advice, and instead decided "well, it's not gonna get done if I wait on someone else to help them", and joined myself to help do it, and sure enough, we actually got a UNSC release out of it.

So please, help them out, learning how to code in itself is not difficult, but it is time-consuming, and you need to be able to devote yourself to it.

Lates.

Hello, to anyone brave enough to venture in here and read this!

My name's Aliah and I work as the primary coder on Halo Homefront, the mod for Homeworld 2 based on the Halo universe(with some original additions).
I was hired on in early May, first mostly consulting and helping to solve an AI problem(AKA, the AI not working at all), but since then, the present build has changed so much from the original, it'd be hard to tell the difference. Couldn't have gotten there without Zero and Velo, however, whose collaboration and literal contributions to the mod far exceed my own.

I'd like to share a bit about myself. I'm twenty-four, currently live in the American Midwest, work as a Department Manager of Electronics in a retail chain, and have worked in retail most of my life, my previous job being at an entirely computer-based store before they folded and left the state.
I do coding and modding in general in my spare-time, combining existing mods, often, re-engineering them for my own personal enjoyment. I've had to learn how to texture/re-texture, code in lua, C++, and various other languages, and even do some rudimentary modelling on my own, mostly since I hate making requests of people. I've made two mods for Fallout: New Vegas and one for Fallout 3, which were released on New Vegas Nexus and Fallout Nexus respectively, but haven't released other public mods very often, being as I tend to suffer from a bit of laziness and I'm easily distracted, and making a mod for the public is often a lot of trouble, more than people think.

I play All Points Bulletin: Reloaded, Lineage 2, Left 4 Dead 2, Grand Theft Auto 4, Minecraft, Fallout New Vegas/Oblivion, and gave up in the past five years playing Combat Arms, World of Warcraft, Crimecraft and various other minor MMOs, but I'm always playing at least one or two MMOs at any given time, I like to feel busy.

I'm a novelist, I'm currently writing a science fiction novel in my spare time, my personal favorite authors being Robert Heinlein and Frank Herbert(Dune is my favorite novel series of all time).

What I hope to bring to Halo Homefront is, well, its release, to be frank.
To elaborate, I've a very broad view of sci fi, having experienced so many in novels, TV shows, various movies, as well as being an avid learner of military history and technology, I hope to bring a new level of tactical design to the mod, while still keeping it fun, and while the mod may seem foreign to hardcore Bungie fans, the way the action flows should more than make up for that.
Frigates will chase and dogfight each other, and destroyers, fighters escorting in heavy bombers to concentrate fire on shielded areas and drop bomb-loads, large fleet engagements being won or lost by the make-up of the fleet as much as the numbers.
There will be some deviations from "Halo-lore", but only so much as makes sense or makes the mod believable as much as possible, and keep the fun Homeworld 2 can bring to the equation.

I'm not big on blogs, don't expect much more, but in place of Velo posting some news on the site, I figured I'd post some of my own. The bugs that plagued past builds are almost eliminated, optimization is the primary concern, new ships are on their way to being added, a workable beta is far close than ever before, and will be worth the wait!

"Seacrest, out!"