Robin


> I don't go around telling everyone how terrible I am with programming, but when I realize there is something I can't figure out, I've always try to ask questions and explain them as clear as possible to try and get the reader to understand. It's too bad that I wasn't there when Konfuze or Mirage where being developed as its early stages before it died, yet I have my opinion of my person list of top 10 programmers who I learned the most on this forum through out the years. > > > > 1\. Robin Perris > > 2\. Mark Morris > > 3\. Damian666 > > 4\. Marsh > > 5\. Deathbeam > > 6\. JeffSverlora > > 7\. Zesh > > 8\. Richy > > 9\. DFA > > 10\. Mr.Miguu > > > > -Thank you Damn man, that list is retro as fuck. :P

> I'm sorry you typed too much for me to want to read. > > That seems like a lot to type just to say if you want to have Thanksgiving dinner with me or not thou. Yeah, I replied to your post but it was more a reply to this entire thread.

> All to the contrary, the thread was aimed at people still active in Eclipse and VB6 programming lol. > > How was anyone to know Robin was gonna come back and drop bombs!? > > > > Honestly, a good programmer doesn't sit around proclaiming to be, they show it with what they've accomplished. > > Robin, Jacob, Dmitry, and a few others, I'm sure. Have already shown it. People link me to topics of interest from time to time. Sometimes I like to log in and show my face. x)

> I've never actually seen you say a bad thing about your work around here. Not without some excuse like "It was done in a rush." or "I was drunk." Not that those are excuses I've actually seen you use. > > Anyways… Take that how ever you want. Thanksgiving is coming here soon, I was hoping you could celebrate with our family, turkey and pumpkin pie, the whole shebang', you know... since you missed us on the fourth of July and all. There's a difference between constantly self-deprecating on a public forum and knowing & discussing your limitations and mistakes with people you know. Ask Stein, Jacob, Rory or just about anyone who has worked with me. I'm not a programmer at all in some respects. There are some very smart people who sit around and discuss exactly how we should serialize data, exactly how we should send data between terminals, exactly which algorithms we should use for calculating this that and the other. I'm the guy who takes all of those things and puts them to use, builds a front-end, integrates it with a nice solid website and gets it to the point where people can actually use it without tearing out their hair. I'm the guy who makes sure that when you press control whilst using your mouse-wheel you'll do a horizontal scroll instead of a vertical scroll. I'm the guy who spends hours making sure presentation controls have an EnsureVisible() method when editing existing data. I'm the guy who spends hours explaining to people why having 10.txt listed between 1.txt and 2.txt in a file list is not the right way to order things. Jacob wrote the first drag & drop system, Dmitry wrote the first BltToDC system, Rory designed the graphics… I took those things and built a UI system based around it, with hotbar, inventory, spell icons etc. That's my job, and I'm pretty good at it. Ask me to write a flood-fill algorithm implementation without having Jacob go over and tell me exactly why it's taking 7,000ms to run through 900 tiles and I'll be left hanging. The reason I'm remembered as a good programmer on here is because I got very good at a certain discipline and surrounded myself with insanely talented people. Seb, Rory, Jacob, Dmitry and I did things that no one else could even dream of back then. We looked to Japan and Europe and tried to make things which matched the insanely high quality projects we saw. We took games like Final Fantasy and Zelda and asked ourselves "Why can't we make something like this?". As each of us developed our own skillsets we taught each other about them too. Seb (ZoSo) taught us about graphics design and game balancing. He taught us what it was to make a game **_fun_**, and actually feel like a game. He had a real skill when it came to making do with what he had. He took our old, silly features and made them do things no one ever dreamed of. He built the first projects which gave items worth, which made bosses fun to fight. He made people care about their characters. Jacob (Dugor) taught us how to program properly. He brought OOP techniques and philosophies to our code. He spent his time making re-usable, readable code and we built off of that. He implemented the fully functional form-based UI system seen in the unreleased Crystalshire source. He built the login server and forum integration. He built the WoW-style armory system. He wrote the byte-array packet system for crying out loud. His games never went anywhere, but he was always miles ahead of everyone else, and he was kind enough to share this with all of you people without anyone bothering to credit him in their work. Dmitry (DFA), whilst a very unstable man, brought a metric tonne of new ideas and systems. Some he took from places like vbGORE, but he was still good at making things which worked. He was the guy who really pushed himself to develop systems to truly show off Seb's fantastic graphics in games like Megalith. He was the driving force behind MS4 and a lot of the improvements between MS3.0.3 and EO2 were done by him. Rory brought a fresh look and some amazing website design ideas to the table. From him we learnt how to make a website feel good. He knew the importance of an integrated forum, of a consistent image and colour scheme. He knew what it took to make a good UI and how to make it feel good. He's the one who pushed me to develop animated buttons, add sound effects to menus and transition between screens properly with fades and wipes. Out of everyone in our group he's the only person to actually go to school for this stuff, and he brought back a lot of amazing things from there too. He's the guy who's been by my side through absolutely everything and one of my oldest friends. As for what qualities I have which made these people want to work with me… well, I'm not really sure to be honest. I'm just happy that I was lucky enough to meet and work with such a talented group of people. The lists in this thread are nothing more than a popularity contest. None of you even know of the people who would take up half of the positions on that list. Normally I'd find that kind of sad, but knowing these people like I do I know they're just happy to have the work they created used by so many people.

> this topic is going to make a ton of people who are full of themself about their "skills", gonna make them rage. just saying. The more you know the more you realise you don't know. If you're a good programmer you know how bad your programming is.

> Can you pick any good picture of Sunohara? 

> 7\. Who the hell is This Robin Guy 

Thanks guys. Was nice seeing all your faces pop up on my facebook feed.

The project had run its course. Previous generations of Eclipse had devolved in to stagnation due to inactive developers and moderators clinging on when they had no interest in the project any more. I didn't want to do the same. I handed development over to J.C, sold the rights to the project and wiped my hands clean of it all. It would be unfair of me to stick around and complain about the state of a project I didn't want to actually develop. We had too much of that before from other people. I still work on Crystalshire in my spare time, but with a job, house, car, family etc. I haven't much time to do that kind of thing. All the old friendships and teams are still around, we're just a bit more spread out due to people getting jobs, going to university and otherwise moving on with their lives. We still have huge skype conversations, we'll still get people together for gaming on the weekend and we'll constantly plan games which will never take off the ground. The medium has simply moved on to GTalk and Skype. I'll log on every few months when someone links me to a thread (like the whole J.C vs Robin rubbish) but I don't really come here any more otherwise. Anyone is free to hit me up on Crystalshire or by e-mail. It's pretty humbling to hear all the great things people have gone on to achieve with my little engine & tutorials.

@Erwin: > How do you do that? Mark the boot tick in a variable. For any timer calls return the boot tick substracted from the current tick count.

@Just: > It has the most impact on CS:DE from what I've been told, It boosted the FPS client side about 5 times for some people. I personally haven't found much use for it in EO, aside from the fact that GetTickCount will break a after your computer has been on for a long amount of time, and it will eventually reset and start over, resulting in it breaking every loop based function we have in EO. You can fix that by simply doing a differential check and running the timers off an unsigned data type. The rollback won't damage anything then.

Go read the guide on install VB6. [Link to the guide.](http://www.touchofdeathforums.com/smf2/index.php/topic,68399.msg736833.html#msg736833)

The centralisation problem comes because you ported over the DX8 font width method rather than using the DD7 native to EO. ``` Public Function EngineGetTextWidth(ByRef UseFont As String, ByVal text As String) As Integer Dim LoopI As Integer 'Make sure we have text If LenB(text) = 0 Then Exit Function 'Loop through the text For LoopI = 1 To Len(text) EngineGetTextWidth = EngineGetTextWidth + LetterWidth(Mid$(text, LoopI, 1)) Next LoopI End Function Public Function LetterWidth(ByVal text As String) As Integer ' You can use this function to specify the width of each letter you'll be using, if unspecified space will be 4 pixels. Select Case text Case "!", "1", "I", "i", "|", "l", "¡", "'", ".", ",", ";", ":" LetterWidth = 2 Case Else LetterWidth = 4 End Select End Function ``` Remove all that. Replace all calls with getWidth(). Pass through the DC and the string as the parameters. Will perfectly centralise everything.

It simply removed a bodged FPS-based movement modifier that someone made a while back. Ignore the bloke with the gold name. This system works fine as it's the default movement system used in every single Mirage-based source ever. We tried something new and it didn't work. That's it.

@Joost: > /strokes beard Sup bro. Hit me up on GTalk or something sometime. Haven't seen you for years.

@MrMiguu: > *Waits for the admin panel to be updated visually* (it's still basic VB6 GDI) Gonna be waiting a long while, then. I retired a good 18 months ago.

@jcsnider: > -snip- 

Don't get other people to do something if you can learn it yourself. Origins is an entry point in to the industry. Learn everything you can about it, including programming. If you go around asking people to join your team when they know more than you do then you'll be sorely disappointed. Would you join the team of someone who has considerably less experience than you? Didn't think so. Just because this is the internet doesn't mean general life rules don't apply. Good programmers are one of the most sought after commodity on this forum. If you learn how to do advanced systems then you're going to have _everyone_ trying to get you to join their projects and plenty of people throwing money at you. Why would they join your team when they can work for someone else with considerable financial backing?

@Justn: > I looked at ur project and I noticed that most of your playermsgs don't show up.. > examples: welcome message , number of players online, message when u warp maps, notification when learning a spell, all resource related messages and others.. some do work like ur map msgs and "invalid trade target". I'll keep looking but not really sure what to look for now :\ maybe someone can point u where to correct this Sounds like a packet issue, then. You probably screwed up the header enumeration so they're not synced. This'll cause all kinds of problems.

@i: > I think its chrome. It happens on my family computer, school and my own computer. Yet IE and Firefox doesn't do it. Does it just fine on Firefox both at home and at work. What the hell are you doing?

No.

@Noth: > Robin, that looks awesome. Did you ever end up completing it? And thanks Andi! Got all the farming things working. They're easy. It was just a case of making instancing and eventing which was way beyond me at the time. I'm still planning on adding a similar system to Crystalshire for farming.

I remember making something like this. God I feel old sometimes. 2005/2006. 

How is it a problem showing globally? Works just fine. The only issue Origins has in this regard is that the server will not send out the attacking packet if you're not actually attacking anything. Move the attack packet to the start of the battle logic so it doesn't get skipped on an early exit and it should work just fine. Showing things 'globally' is just a case of keeping people's clients synced whilst keeping data usage to a minimum. It's a juggling act, but not a hard one.