Chris Harrington alt
- Account Type:
- member
- Location:
- Tokyo, Japan
- Member since:
- January 24, 2009
- Last Login:
- February 7, 2009
- Last Update:
- February 7, 2009
- Bio:
Skills
- Primary Skill:
- Advanced Musician
- Secondary Skill:
- Intermediate Programmer
- Tertiary Skill:
- Beginner 3D Artist
- Summary:
- I spent about 12 years as a web coder, project leader, producer etc. for large scale commercial web and interactive tv projects in Japan and currently support myself as a Japanese to English translator so I have more time doing what I actually enjoy, namely, my wife, music, deep thought, and games.
I've always been the kind of gamer who buys a game and never finishes it because I have more fun hacking at it (read: cheating. what is worse than someone who cheats at single player games, eh?), but I was late to enter the world of 3D games and modding because I couldn't stand the simplistic graphics of the first several generations. I started switching over from 2D with Bethesda's Elder Scrolls series and am now neck deep in Fallout 3 modding, starting to feel silly messing around with other people's work for so many hours and finally thinking about making something original.
I'm almost exclusively an RPG player, so my design interests are in that direction. I'm also one of those socially concerned types so I'm more interested in creating games with an educational aspect and which do not focus primarily on violence. My real interest is in realistic AI, specifically procedural npc behavior that considers basic psychology/health as opposed to static scripting and also placing more focus in a game on realistic ambient npc - npc interaction. The project on my mind now is a realistic community simulation that could form the basis of any number of educational (overtly, for kids, not so for adults) games.
Strangely enough, I think MMO tech and concepts have a very long way to go, so I'm not terribly interested in them, but that's only because I got spoiled by reading Snow Crash years ago thinking "this is the future....". Not there yet, not by a long shot. I did play Anarchy Online for over a year (they had the cutest character models at the time IMHO) and experimented with Second Life after that, and that was enough for me to understand the incredible depth and scale of the sociological hurdles that the MMO genre faces before it becomes something that is both ubiquitous *and* possessing of a modicum of social merit (so we don't all end up in the Matrix...).
My skill set:
Design: Anything I come up with is usually impossible to implement or highly impractical.
Programming: Strong scripting skills (stemming from application scale javascript project experience for interactive tv as well as web server scripting) but I'm inexperience with compiled languages, though I wrote a command line rgb to clut converter in C once for the tv gig. I can read and understand source code in most languages with the exception of OS specific header gobbledy-gook and other related boiler plate. I understand most basic OO concepts but I'm still foggy about interfaces and polymorphism (whatever they mean)(edit:ok, I got polymorphism, sorta). I can usually compile from source on *nix after a few tries and allot of research, and on rare occasions I can even get a sample windows program to compile in Visual Studio. Years ago I was actually quite strong in Visual Basic, but that was years ago (Windows 95....). I'm hopeless at math, and I often find myself spending weeks independently reinventing stuff that I would have known if I'd paid attention in high school Algebra.
Music: I was a professional musician for a few years before I put down my sax for a PC so I could stop starving. I can compose, arrange and perform on sax and several ethnic flutes, but I'm usually too lazy to do any but the last one (the ethnic flutes: low maintenance).
Graphics: I enjoy sketching though I'm out of practice. My first computer job was as an architectural 3D artist, so I was well versed in the tools and techniques in the content chain for creating 3D walkthrough animations (CAD, modeling from blueprints or photos, texturing, animating camera paths, video editing) in the mid Nineties using Lightwave and some SGI equipment, but I lost touch since then so I'm currently catching up by relearning with Blender. I've messed with Poser since version 2 so I have a general grasp of character animation but I'm probably too lazy to ever model my own character from scratch and rig it (the very idea of vertex painting makes me dizzy). I know my way around Photoshop from 3d texturing and later web design splicing when we used to do it by hand (with graph paper). I also have a nice low end Cannon digital SLR for still photography and I'm versed in the ins and outs of shooting with natural lighting.
Other: generally, if you give me a few good tools, a net connection, and anywhere from a couple of days to a month or two locked in a room with plenty of spinach curry and chai, I can develop a solid foundation in whatever task or technology is needed, if I *really want to*. This rarely happens because there are usually about ten things I really want to do at any given time, not to mention the far greater frequency of things I don't want to do but have to, which result in failing at all of them. Usually the last thing I ever do is post a question in a forum somewhere(edit: emphasis on 'usually', exception being rants and claims), though I have been known to post the occasional answer.
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