I'm curious : historical and background infos about ydnar

(Browser [ICE]) #1

Hi, I 'm just curious about ydnar so I thought I should ask.

  1. Before you started working on the Q3MAP2 tool, what were you doing/working on ?

  2. What got you into Q3MAP2 ?

  3. What is your technical background for all your vast and outstanding knowledge :wink: ?
    Did you get all that from school, work or intellectual hungryness needs ?

  4. What did you have to start learning since you started on Q3MAP2 ? You may have had a feature you wanted to implement but needed research/learning.

  5. What’s your favorite game ?

  6. Did you ever created a full game map or model ?

  7. I’ll bet once your working day is over, your mind is still working on Q3MAP2 stuffs, even after you’ve gone home. Right ? That’s gota hitch !

  8. Are your kids talking to you in Q3MAP2 techno talk ?

  9. Are you working on anything else besides Q3MAP2 ?

  10. Are you a nerd looking type, a beach surfer lookalike type, an Half-Life scientist lookalike type ?

  11. Someone who hates these questions and try to avoid them at all costs ?

[mental note]
I realy should start looking at my typing before hiting the dunip bittin !

(MadJack) #2

Hey Browser!

Salut de La Baie (ou Saguenay lol) :smiley:

I certainly wouldn’t like to answer for ydnar but iirc he started having fun with q3map’s source code as I was a frequent poster on Q3W. From there he branched off to the now reknowned q3map2. :smiley:

As for the rest, he’s the best person to answer them :slight_smile:

(obsidian) #3

  1. Well, ydnar’s certainly not the nerdy looking type. IMO, he actually looks remarkably like Moby (the musician) - same face, about the same age, same hair (or lack of).

  2. You’ll find out by the end of the week.

(ratty redemption) #4

Moby is a cool dude, especially in interviews… how old would you say he and ydnar are? …I`m hopeless at judging ages.

I too have been curious about ydnar since he is now a big part of our lives, well for us guys who hang out a lot in his forum and are into shaders, q3map2 :slight_smile:

I had got the impression he was not a youngster, and that he was cooler headed then me, but thats about it... it certainly would be interesting to learn more about his background, and any personal snippets, if he doesnt mind divulging any?

I`m not suggesting we start a fan site for him as that would be a little sickening imo, but some more info would be nice :wink:

(kat) #5

14 ) a person that once had his one fiefdom where the people were happy, until he told the sun that it’s light didn’t “quite look right”…!

(Gringo Starr) #6
  1. A person who should have an enormous ego after reading this post. :slight_smile:
(ydnar) #7

1/2. I was working at Raster Productions on RTCW for PS2, doing textures, cleaning up shaders, and tinkering with the RTCW Q3Map there for internal use. Mainly I fixed bugs and removed some silly bits of code that had snuck in there over the years between it bouncing back and forth between Id and Gray Matter. That was in the late summer/fall of 2001.

On my drive to work on Sept 11th I was trying to set up plane tickets for my girlfriend who still lived in San Francisco to come up to Seattle to visit. When I stopped for coffee I heard what had happened on the radio. Things didn’t go so well after that for various reasons…

Anyway, I found myself with lots of free time. So in December I began working on the public Q3Map in earnest. But I really should give credit where it’s due. It’s all digibob’s fault. It was a conversation with him on #qeradiant that inspired me to “fix” the compiler and do proper automatic caulking.

The first release of what would become Q3Map2 was called simply “q3map_facecull” and after a couple revisions that worked so well that digibob removed Autocaulk from Bobtoolz completely. Since then there have been a few hundred releases, almost one every other day. And the rest is history or something.

  1. I didn’t graduate from college. After a couple months they politely asked me to leave. I moved to New York and helped start a now-defunct game company called Double Aught Software. We developed Marathon Infinity, where I was a mapper and texture artist. I had already released a couple games prior to that, one shareware and one shrinkwrapped, for the Mac. Been coding since I was 10. Crikey that’s over 17 years. I read lots of books and teh intarweb. Computer graphics is a subject with an exhaustive amount written about it.

  2. Working on a piece of software used by so many people for the creation of levels was definitely a learning experience. Having a quick feedback loop thanks to all my victims, er users was invaluble. Coordinating development with different coders on the GtkRadiant project was also very educational. There are lots of selfless guys who have donated tons of time to the whole project. Q3Map2 is just one part of it, albeit the one with the most aggressive release schedule. Except for GtkRadiant 1.5…spog seems to be putting out new releases every day.

As far as learning new stuff or researching for a feature, there’s always room for improvement. Faster algorithms, cleaner code, new tricks… Radiosity was one area I didn’t know much about before implementing it. It took a year or so after that before the code was actually somewhat close to a “real” radiosity processor.

Doing phong shading, lightmap texel placement, projection, optimization, were all interesting challenges. There’s a lot of code in there.

  1. I don’t have a favorite. I prefer first-person shooters, and my top 10 in no particular order would be Marathon 1/2/infinity, Quake 1/2/3, Doom 1, Half-Life, NOLF 1/2 and Deus Ex. Outside of FPS games, Carmageddon 1, certain other driving games like NFS 2, Wipeout 1/2. Halo MP is pretty fun.

I lied. My favorite game of all time is Pinball Construction Set by Bill Budge. It’s the reason I got into coding and making games.

  1. I was in the Marathon “mod” scene before being hired to work on the last Marathon game. Made plenty of MP and SP maps back in the day. Only released test maps for Q3, RTCW, and ET, except for one monster called Ishii which was a botmatch map designed for visuals at a club 3 years ago.

  2. I no longer work full time on Q3Map2 or games. Too many other interests. :slight_smile:

  3. I don’t have any kids. That I know of.

  4. Work, cycling and spending time with my friends. And websites, a CMS, mod_perl stuff, learning Python and going to the pub.

  5. I’m flexing.

  6. What?

(ratty redemption) #8

@ydnar, very interesting :slight_smile:

and dare I ask, do you ever foresee a time when you stop dev q3map2? I hope not, but it would be understandable if you moved over to one of the next gen engines.

(neotic) #9

I see a documentary coming out of this! jk

(ratty redemption) #10

or maybe even a hollywood biopic? …if so I wonder who would play the role of ydnar? :wink:

also perhaps the forum trolls could be dressed in troll costumes, with special effects make up and have annoying little voices added in post production :uhoh:

(Browser [ICE]) #11
  1. I no longer work full time on Q3Map2 or games. Too many other interests.

Who is then ?

You will undoughtedally transfer the work to someone else within a year or 2.

Q3MAP2 is entirely in C, not C++, right ?

  1. Work, cycling and spending time with my friends. And websites, a CMS, mod_perl stuff, learning Python and going to the pub.

Hummmm,Python and beer. That’s a brainstorming potion !