The Basics

Pseudonym: rec0
Full Name: A06B4F020544072AEB2407568EFD5D93
Location: Hertfordshire, England
Positions: Scripting Programmer, Generalist Programmer

Involvement in Prometheus

When I first got involved with Prometheus it was for web development. I was asked to help out with HaloDev’s online system and its integration with the application. After creating the groundwork and planning out the way in which I was going to tackle this surprisingly complex system (some might point the finger at Nick for that, but I’d never even considering mentioning such an accusation in the context of an internet article).

I was asked if I could help out with the programming of the application. Having only recently learnt C# (after coming from a strong programming background), I was intrigued, furthermore Prometheus itself was and is a fascinating project, so I agreed without hesitation.

When I joined the project I was working on GUI development. This was a new experience for me and I learned a lot about the .NET framework and how to best use it in the context of GUI creation and integration with backend components. I provided input along the way during design of various aspects of the UI; coming from the CE community I had a lot of experience with the HEK, allowing me to communicate what users of the provided tools thought needed to be changed or added. Unfortunately this saw me saying yes to a lot of Nick’s ideas.

I’m now spending most of my days working on Scripting for Prometheus: hopefully transforming an aspect of modding that was very limited, and relatively inaccessible in the HEK, into a widely used and understood part of map making.

You May Remember Me From ...

I was fairly non-descript during the early days of Halo modding. After the release of CE, I spent time helping out newcomers to the HEK on halomods.com and spent a lot of time actually (gasp) playing Halo CE. I soon moved to the Gearbox Forums and began learning a lot of the ins and outs of the HEK and the tag system.

I was invited onto the Halo 2 Mod team (later named Halo2CE) and had a great many times developing maps and mods in a team environment. During this work I created the first (and only) method to synchronise basic states of game objects across a network game on Halo CE via scripts; an implementation of this method can be seen in the form of the Zanzibar wheel and gate, as part of the H2CE mod.

Later on, I began working on various applications to help the CE community with various aspects of Halo content creation that the HEK didn’t make so easy. With this came the “Vertex Weight Injector”. This tool helped get custom skinned meshes into Halo’s gbxmodel tag format from a biped rig in 3ds Max (without requiring manual editing of each vertex with complex weights).

After spending some time with MonoxideC working on adding functionality to Halo Server Tools (a form of admin plugin for Halo CE dedicated servers), I later made my own server extensions as a side project. This proved to be popular with a lot of CE-goers who appreciated new ways to have fun (and cause exception errors) on Halo in a dedicated server environment.