02-11-2008, 03:05 AM
Warning: the following post is a short novel 
I'm pdescobar; it is an easily typed version of P. D. Escobar which is a completely fictitious online name chosen because of a joke between a coworker and myself several years ago. My actual name is Dave Schmitt. The last name isn't exactly a secret since it's on copyright notices of anything I bother releasing, but I still generally only share it in trusted situations .
Anyhow, I started programming in Atari BASIC before some of you were born. I learned C about 10 years ago from a really neat textbook and have since picked up some C++, x86 assembly, and Java from various university courses. I also taught myself perl when I was exposed to unix-based systems at school and use it all over. I have some PHP and SQL experience from a summer job (and occasional personal experiments) as well. I never did much pawn scripting but since the DP releases of MTA I have been fooling around with Lua quite a bit and like it alot.
Regarding game development and modding, I first got into it when hacking Civilization II save files. I also did a lot of experimenting with mods in Diablo II to learn more about the game mechanics to help with character development since a couple friends and I refused to follow the "cookie-cutter" character modes 99% of the online players used and would rather come up with our own crazy combinations and see how far we could take them. I also worked alot with Civilization III modding in a variety of ways including writing some never-released perl tools for automated documentation and combat calculations. My work with Civ III landed me a summer job at a local QA company and I got to be a game tester for the Civ3: Conquests expansion pack as well as some less-memorable titles.
Since the release of GTASA, a huge chunk of my free time has been spent modding that. I found the program Radio Free San Andreas (RFSA) which extracted all the ogg files from the audio streams on the PC version, and after the developer didn't want to implement some of my suggestions for making the metadeta file more windows-friendly, I took it upon myself to modify RFSA to implement my changes... and then to do stream importing as well as extraction... and then I did some research and investigation into the SFX archive formats and made the tool handle importing and exporting of all the SFX files as well. The result of those efforts is my only serious public release: SAAT (San Andreas Audio Toolkit.) I also do some script modding and tool-writing mostly for use in the GTAF Chain Game or investigations into single-player game mechanics and I have spent quite a lot of time trying to improve our understanding of the SA save file format (with results posted on the gtamodding wiki.)
Better late then never, eh fellas?
I'm pdescobar; it is an easily typed version of P. D. Escobar which is a completely fictitious online name chosen because of a joke between a coworker and myself several years ago. My actual name is Dave Schmitt. The last name isn't exactly a secret since it's on copyright notices of anything I bother releasing, but I still generally only share it in trusted situations .
Anyhow, I started programming in Atari BASIC before some of you were born. I learned C about 10 years ago from a really neat textbook and have since picked up some C++, x86 assembly, and Java from various university courses. I also taught myself perl when I was exposed to unix-based systems at school and use it all over. I have some PHP and SQL experience from a summer job (and occasional personal experiments) as well. I never did much pawn scripting but since the DP releases of MTA I have been fooling around with Lua quite a bit and like it alot.
Regarding game development and modding, I first got into it when hacking Civilization II save files. I also did a lot of experimenting with mods in Diablo II to learn more about the game mechanics to help with character development since a couple friends and I refused to follow the "cookie-cutter" character modes 99% of the online players used and would rather come up with our own crazy combinations and see how far we could take them. I also worked alot with Civilization III modding in a variety of ways including writing some never-released perl tools for automated documentation and combat calculations. My work with Civ III landed me a summer job at a local QA company and I got to be a game tester for the Civ3: Conquests expansion pack as well as some less-memorable titles.
Since the release of GTASA, a huge chunk of my free time has been spent modding that. I found the program Radio Free San Andreas (RFSA) which extracted all the ogg files from the audio streams on the PC version, and after the developer didn't want to implement some of my suggestions for making the metadeta file more windows-friendly, I took it upon myself to modify RFSA to implement my changes... and then to do stream importing as well as extraction... and then I did some research and investigation into the SFX archive formats and made the tool handle importing and exporting of all the SFX files as well. The result of those efforts is my only serious public release: SAAT (San Andreas Audio Toolkit.) I also do some script modding and tool-writing mostly for use in the GTAF Chain Game or investigations into single-player game mechanics and I have spent quite a lot of time trying to improve our understanding of the SA save file format (with results posted on the gtamodding wiki.)
Better late then never, eh fellas?