Legacy:RegularX

RegularX/RGX/Inkless/Me

Age: If you are a gamer, probably older than you

Location: Chicago, IL

Profession: Web Monkey

HomePage: webcosa.com/regularx.html

Blog: Cathode Tan

Email: Contact Form

AIM: inkless1

notes on contacting me: I've had several emails and AIMs which I haven't responded to...there's like two reasons for this - I was too busy when I got it the first time (I do, oddly, work for living) or I never knew I got it.

UPDATE: inkless@inkless.com is an abandoned email now. I've occasionally gotten some emails since I put up the auto-responder on it like this one: "Hey man, chill, my yahoo account doesn\'t have a spamming system:) By the way, if you fear revealing your own address, why do you ask for mine? Heh. Anyways, I have no idea how you got spam from me. .... I never emailed you, nor received an email from you."

Look, it's an auto-responder. That means it automatically responds. That means it got an email and it responded to it. If you didn't intend to send me an email, that means you have a virus or someone you know has a virus. It's really that simple. Before anyone goes "but...", no. There is no but. That's what's going on.

Now, I apologize if you get caught up in all this mess, virus or no - but there's nothing I can do about it. And I can't put my email address here or on that auto-response. As that email smugly states "By the way, if you fear revealing your own address, why do you ask for mine? Heh."

Well, I'll tell you. There's this thing called email harvesting. Spammers spider virtually every piece of text they can get their hands on and look for email formats, and then they add that to their list. So now I have a level of anonmynity when it comes to my email address, and I try be sure you aren't some soulless evil bastard before I give it out. Why do I ask for yours? I don't actually, but obviously it's required in order to get a response (which this guy didn't want, which makes you wonder why he bothered emailing at all).

In short, use the contact form link above. Spammers are the laziest form of parasites and I know they won't bother with it. If you (or some program in your name) sends an email to inkless@inkless.com, it will get this RegularX/Spam_Response.

Quick Bio

Compared to some gamers, I'm older than dirt. I've been involved in game modding since Doom, but that was mostly just mapping and the like. My first foray into UT for coding turned out to be Freehold, a project which is now continuing in a much larger way on UT2003.

I mostly put this page up as a launching pad to put the source code and supplementary tutorials to the xpak mutators in a safe place. With the release of the XXXpak, all the source code to the mutators is included with the archive, but I thought this would be a good spot to replicate it and the UTutes.

Unreal Projects

Old Projects:

Freehold UT: My original Unreal Tournament mod, which added bounty rules, credits, inventory, thermonukes and the concept of "lofting" with Firestorm rounds. Containment is probably my favorite game mode here, a more objective based gameplay than Invasion. Unreal XL will be the successor to this project it seems.

XXXpak: 36 mutators for UT2003 in one package. The XXXpak can't be discussed on the official Atari forums because they think it's about pr0n. These mutators will not be getting a direct UT2004 port, instead they will be rolled into Unreal XL.

Riftwar: Riftwar was one of the (if not the) first mods for UT2003 to introduce class-based gameplay (Making_A_Class-Based_Mod). It also broke the two team barrier and was the first mod to introduce persistance in the form of a war campaign. Three races, Humans, Aliens and the Undead, cross between their homeworlds trying to control all three. Riftwar won first place for Gametype in Phase 1 of the MSUC, won third place for phase 2 and was a finalist in phase 3.

I haven't updated Riftwar's site in some time. The secret hidden link to the latest UT2004 version is here

Wong keeps updating SSP :) And his new PCP mutator makes me rethink the basics of Riftwar once again.

Grind: Grind is a movement mod, and I was trying to combine the gameplay of things like Jet Set Radio with things like Mario and, of course, Quake. Everyone starts with electroskates and a velocity gun and you get kills mostly by ramming other players at high speeds. Grind is also a finalist for Phase 2 of the MSUC.

Unreal XL: Unreal XL is the successor to both Freehold and XXXpak, and in the end will quite likely be massive. It introduces true akimbo weapons (any weapon with some tweaking and a few limitations can be made akimbo w/ any other weapon), weapon augments, personal augments, a flexible loadout, economy rules (including the bounty/balance system of Freehold), three large mutators (Games XL, Players XL, Weapons XL), new game modes (probably a Containment clone and a War Campaign mode), and god know what else I can cram in. The UXL mutators were an honorable mention in the MSUC. I'm currently looking at the akimbo & augment system to see what works best. The gametypes might get worked into UDS instead.

Defense Force Omega: Defense Force Omega is probably going to be one of my ambitious pieces. It is a pure coop, squad based game suited best for 3-5 people. The premise is that the Earth is under attack from an invading horde which is slowly reforming the planet under the darkness of night. There will be two basic modes, one where you plan and strategize at your home base, and then executing missions - which are planned to be all Darkmatch style night and randomly generated. DFO is very alpha right now, but is due to be released for Phase 3 of the MSUC.

Unreal Defense Squad UDS is the lovechild of DFO and Unreal. Basically it removes the TC components and places thing squarely on the Unreal Universe. I'm working on the single-player portion now.

Unreal Tactics Well, UDS is dormant right now. As noted in this blog entry, the combination of random/variable maps and bot AI was becoming overwhelming. Thing about UT bots - they're very single minded. I might do some research to restart it later.

In it's place, I'm developing a new turn based system (offline only). It's modelled after XCom, which much of DFO/UDS was anyway, so this will more or less complete the circle. Tactics is a working title for now.

RegularEngine - not a mod, per se, but an example of a mod for people to use and learn from to build their own mods. Includes code for player classes, campaign mode and versatile key binds. Has a playable example which is a Humans V Skaarj campaign.

UnrealMods.Org

I launched UnrealMods.Org on April 28th, 2004. I built UMO out of frustration of other mod databases being inclusive and restrictive (or just plain spammy, but that's another rant).

Update: Hunter kindly redesigned UMO's basics and I think it's looks right lovely. I've also added unrealmodsbot to the toolbox. umbot is a jabber chatbot ( unrealmodsbot@jabber.org ), and you can search the UMO database, show mod lists, browse news, etc. I might create an AIM version later, but there is a kindly lightweight quality to umbot that I kinda enjoy.

Sad Update: UMO got killed while I was doing a SQL update to delete spammers which were flooding the system. Sad that trying to give power to developers resulted in such a misuse, but that's the internet. The RSS feeds weren't really getting utilized anyway, so I will probably rewrite it for just personal use later on.

Unreal Columns/Writings/Rants

RegularX/Developer Journal go here.

RegularX/Rants - mostly about releasing mods and the insipid use of MOD over mod.

ucc make columns: From the old ModSquad. Now brought to you through the power of wiki.

UTutes: Tutorials for coding unrealscript for UT2003 (now with 100% more wiki!!)

Non-Unreal Projects

Glimmer: A cross-browser DHTML library.

GuestBook/Comments

ZxAnPhOrIaN: Hi and welcome to the wiki! :) :tup: (im not playing the game that your thinking, also! :) )

Wormbo: Wow, you here? :D Welcome to the Wiki, RegX! :) Please add yourself to the Project Contributors list. (Zxan, you play it as long as you keep refering to it...)

RegularX: Heya Worm, howdys Zxan. You know, I think I made this page on accident the first time  :D Now that I've officially contributed some actual content, I'll link up to the Contrib list.

Tarquin: Hi there. Welcome to the Wiki :D (a little late of me, sorry. I see you've already settled in very nicely). Your tutes are great :D

RegularX: Howdies back. No apology needed, it took me a few months to wave an arm around :)

EntropicLqd: I just thought I'd stop by and say hi :)

RegularX: *waves back* Heyaz :)