User:Hauk

THE REAL HAU*

Well, eons ago, when I was in third year, a friend of mine(mine(this guy) started babbling about a game on the PC that his brother had picked up. So as there was nothing to do in science that day, I listened to him!

He told me you could nearly do whatever you want in this game. Fly jets, drive jeeps, pick up any gun you want, parachute behind enemy lines at night, or execute a stealth insertion on a beach head. You could be a grunt in a 10 man squad, or a special forces operative with years of experience. It instantly grabbed my attention. So I let him babble on about it! And lo and behold 40 minutes had passed and I was hooked on the idea of this game. So the afternoon dawned and he invited me over to his house to give it a shot.

This was the first game I had played on the PC since Commander Keen: Invasion of the Vorticons(still a highly prized game in my collection). I was amazed by the graphics, and hadn't realised PC's had gotten this powerful. So he let me play for an hour.............and I was addicted straight off. Serious addiction.

And that game was Operation Flashpoint: Cold War Crisis :D

So the week before our Junior Cert Mocks dawned and I couldn't handle not playing the game. So I begged and pleaded with my dad to buy me the 3 Campaign pack in Smyths in Airside. :D This was the first PC game I'd bought in the 2000's. So I raced home to install it on my PC. We had a Dell GX110 desktop(Yes, shitter than the lab PC's in L101 & L201), and when I installed it, I went to the mission editor and the entire landscape was white. ZOMG! Where r t3h 1337 gfx!11!1?!?!

So it turned out I needed a "graphics card". o_0 was my first thought, and the second thought was, "I didn't need one of these things for Commander Keen: Invasion of the Vorticons". So my dad went to PC World in Blanchardstown and came home with the graphics card I will always hold in my heart: The Nvidia Geforce 4 MX440 *tear*. What a trooper. My dad threw the card into the GX110(*shudder*), and BOOM! Sexy landscape! :D

So I played the campaigns and fecked around in the mission editor, doing everything! :D

So how does this coincide with me ending up doing a Computer Applications degree in DCU you ask??

Well, after downloading a few user missions from the Operation Flashpoint Editing Center I saw all these complex cutscenes that were nothing like the pre-scripted cutscenes provided in the editor! :-O

So I investigated my dear Watson, and it turned out the user missions were using these weird things called "scripts" to do this.... After finding this out I went and grabbed a load of tutorials from OFPEC and started working away on them. Gradually these scripts got bigger and more complex and I said to myself, "Hey....something I'm good at!!!111!!"

So eventually my parents noticed me on the computer a lot, and my dad mentioned to me that I may be interesting in programming. So I kind of let it go and went back to my Flashpoint scripting. Eventually I decided to make my own campaign for the game. But didn't have a clue how to link all the missions together. So I hopped on to the OFPEC forum and asked how to do this. And this guy called "bedges" said to use a "class" to link them together.

A WHAT??!!?!?!?!!

So he explained to me what it was and sent me in the direction of more blinkin' tutorials on writing classes for scripting missions together. Of course, I googled "flashpoint classses", and was greeted with Java/C++/Perl/C# classes and I thought "What the hell are all these!?" So then I found out about Java from a friend who(coincidentally) did a Java programming class in DCU during the summer of some year, and told me if I liked scripting to look at Java.

So I looked up Java tutorials and low and behold found classes! So blah de blah, did a bit of Java and rigorously churned out Flashpoint missions. AND BOOM! It was fifth year! And our careers teacher said we had to start looking at careers to aim for, so I thought to myself "wtf am I going to do when I leave school?!?!" I hadn't thought beyond school to be honest, and asked her about a career. She asked me what I do in my spare time, and, even though sorely tempted to say wanking, I told her I was interested in computers, and customizing games. So she went down to her office and grabbed a load of prospectusi from her office. She handed a few to me, and told me to flick through them and get back to her. So I found CA in DCU and said it looked good, and also a few others I can't remember. So she got me all the info on CA in DCU, and I became pretty damn interested in it.

So sixth year came, and went, and I was in Montreal,Canada for a month. My CAO placements were out, and we didn't have a computer in the house we were renting so my dad took me to his office, and "ZOMFGZ!!! A place @ DCU!!!11!".

AND KABOOM! I'm in DCU, on the brink of failing a few subjects and not being allowed into third year and having to repeat poxy second year. And it's semester two! :O

I suppose you want my hobbies interests etc!

Music:

Amon Amarth
Metallica
Nightwish
Blind Guardian
Iced Earth
Dark Moor
Satyricon
Manowar
Einherjar
Demons and Wizards
Bathory
Battlelore
Elvenking
Ensiferum
Wintersun
Korplikaani
Falconer
Avantasia
Falchion
Hammerfall
Sonata Arctica
Primordial
Mael Mordha
Mithotyn
Finntroll
Moonsorrow
Norther
Turisas
Cruachan
Dragonforce
Rhapsode(of Fire)
Eric Clapton
Dire Straits
Skid Row
Tuatha de Danann

Movies:

300
Tombstone
Black Hawk Down
Saving Private Ryan
Band of Brothers
The Da Vinci Code
Enemy at the Gates
Battle of Britain
The Great Escape

Another one of my favourite hobbies is Airsoft. It is possibly one of the coolest sports on the planet. And since the legality of airsoft guns since August 1st 2006, I have purchased three guns.

Tokyo Marui Heckler & Koch MP7 PDW
KSC Heckler & Koch USP .45
KSC USP Compact

And this summer I will be purchasing a VFC Heckler and Koch HK416 carbine. :)

I have pics of my guns in my photobucket album here

And finally, as everyone should have on their user page, their PC specs.

ASUS A8N-SLi Deluxe mobo
1 GB Corsair RAM
AMD A64 3200+ CPU
XFX GeForce 7800GTX gfx card
Thermaltake Armour full tower case
Saitek Eclipse gaming keyboard
Logitech G7 wireless laser mouse
Saitek Cyborg Evo Joystick
Trust HS-4100 headset

And thats just about it on me for me mo. I'll add more later when I'm meant to be studying for another C++ lab exam the next day! :D