About Me
By day I'm a Sales and Marketing Product Specialist/Engineer. I hold a degree in Electrical Engineering and a minor in Acoustics. I work for a company that manufactures Industrial Automation products (if you think of a factory that makes stuff, cars for example, I make stuff that make up those assembly lines). Anybody that has an idea what kind of stuff that might be, I work for a company that sells Proximity Switches, custom Cordsets, and Network products. I won't bore you with more, if you're curious let me know and I'll talk your ear off (or type your eyes off, whatever…) My job responsibilities include creating marketing materials such as: brochures, fliers, catalogs, websites, instruction manuals. I also work with customers in a direct support position, both technical support and general product selection support. I also conduct trainings and every once in a while I find an opportunity to do some programming. Most recently I completed the first phase of an embedded program to run on a PocketPC that we'll sell to customers with a special CF card. The program was written in eVC++, and I've never done C++ before (closest was a little Java in college) so it was a bear to learn on the fly.
By night I'm a husband to my wife and father to my 3 children. My daughter turned 3 on Christmas Eve, my first son turned 1 this September, and my second son was born on election day. Around the house I am the onsite handyman, gardener, cook, medic, plumber, electrician, and auto mechanic. I love to learn new things, and its hard to believe but I think being a "Jack of All Trades" is genetic. I like to tinker with just about everything electrical or mechanical. My greatest mechanical accomplishment would be last year I did a complete rebuild on the engine in my Saturn SL2 (complete meaning I had the pistons out of the block). I'm very cheap, so any way I can get away with saving a buck I usually do it, even if it takes me more time to do. I'm very much addicted to Craigslist (CS)…many many good things have I gotten from there.
As far as my gaming side goes, I would consider myself a light gamer. I started out with an Atari back in the day, until I was able to upgrade to an NES. I got a Game Boy (which I still have the original by the way, and for the longest time I only had 1 game "Bart Simpson: Escape from Camp Deadly"). Those two things had to tide me over until high school when I purchased an N64 when I started working. I played a lot of SNES at my friends house, but never got one myself. The N64 was what I had until one of my ex's mother got me a PS2 while I was in college. That is what I have today, along with an XBox I was given at some point. I play a lot of NES, SNES, and Genesis emulators, along with 4 DVD's worth of Arcade MAME games that I hope to turn into a cabinet one day (see Non-GZ2 Dreamt Up Projects). I really have never done any hardcore gaming, so you'll never see me have a "Gaming Rig". I should also mention that I have been playing "Ultrastar" (Singstar clone) and "Deadliest Catch: Alaskan Storm" lately.
I read a few comics, so you may find some inside jokes from them stemming from me. I currently am religiously reading (in order of favorites): Dilbert, xkcd, Ctrl+Alt+Del, Achewood, and just recently Penny Arcade and Least I Could Do.
FM Completed Projects
Modswitcher
I run FM from my media center, which means I only have a remote available to me and no keyboard or file manager. I also really enjoy all the Mods that people do and commonly change the mod everytime I play. I created a VB6 app that will look in a folder in your FM directory, list out all the folders there as seperate mods, give you a preview of the menu music and the main menu background, allow you to choose a mod, it will copy the necessary files to FM and launch guitarstar. It's designed to be used from a remote, but I've also added a few things in to make it useful for MAME cabinets as well for those that have a mouse but no keyboard or remote. I have also expanded this to include some simple config.xml editting and stage selection, but nobody seemed all that excited over it so this project has all but stopped except for the features I've wanted for myself.
Super Mario Mod
My first mod I embarked on. Thought I'd choose an easy subject matter that would have plenty of resources and many images I could just grab screenies from an emulator. I also copped out a lot on this mod because most of the menu's were just the main menu screen from the game. I did this to save me some time and I was after all just trying to get a feel for this "modding" stuff. From this stemmed a few requests for the game, a few bugs for the game, a FAQ for mods going through every aspect, got me started in simple 3D modeling for new notes, and created a tutorial detailing Milkshape3D to FM. I might expand this if requested, however I never got any comments on it so I didn't bother.
Installer
I recently created an Installer for the game which will install all necessary pre-requisites of the game while installing the game to a Program Files directory and adding it to the start menu. This was a piece asked for by Callisto that I had done recently for another project of mine so I was already familiar with the concept. I used InnoSetup, a free scripting tool that does a real nice job with installers. I used the redistributable version of all pre-req's so the installer does not even need to be connected to the internet (except for it comes without any songs) I had to release 2 versions for XP and Vista because Vista did not support the standalone install of .NET 2.0 SP1.
FM Wiki
Been working on this wiki to give it a facelift. Sensay is the man in charge, but I wanted to help him out with the looks. I jacked the layout and images from CB's website, and I'm hoping to work with GZ's current community to create a unified web presentation for the game, utilizing the strengths of a website, the wiki, the forum, and FTP storage space. We got big hopes so keep an eye out.
GZimpsons
I helped out with this mod because I liked it so much, but when I first saw it it had no stage background or a good fretboard. So like the stuff you saw 10% of the time looked awesome and the stuff you saw 90% of the time was GH3. I decided to fix that by finding the stagebackground and creating the fretboard. I believe it was esc0rtd3w who added a bit of transparency to them, and he was the one who resurrected this mod from the grave. He did a great job, as did HulkHaugen before him.
FM WIP Projects
Frontman: AC/DC
Working on a complete game for my best friend. He was the one responsible for getting me started on this "Plastic Guitar" game in the first place, or as my wife likes to say "awoke the beast". I've been pretty much obsessed with this game since then, which I contribute to I love the idea of games being more than moving my thumbs. Don't get me wrong, I've played my share of thumb games my whole life, but it was definate time for something different. The Wii falls into this category, however I refer you to my cheapness factor mentioned above. So anyways, back to the project, my friend loves AC/DC and Guitar Hero, so I figured I'd combine them for him for a Christmas present. I'm hoping to create 8 tiers of songs, all difficulties, song sections, star power… and a mod to go with the whole thing. If our computers can handle it, every song will come with its own video stage. My friend's brother will be working to create the mod while I work on songs. I've been very fortunate so far as there has been a few people working on ACDC stuff over at FOF that I've gotten permission to use, so I've only had to do star power and song sections for a number of the songs.
Parade Float 3D Stage
As some of you may have seen, I created the first 3D stage that would actually import into XNA for Callisto. It was my first 3D ever, and included zero textures and a very low poly count. I have since found out that most of the issues with 3D graphics in XNA is textures, so I think once we have a clear understanding of that many people will be able to easily make good 3D stages. I once said that I'm very much an engineer, most of the time I love to make something that works and looks ok, and don't nearly have the patience or artistic talent to take it from "ok" to "gorgeous". I do hope however to finish this stage once stage support is implemented because ever since starting to play FM I've always thought about a stage where the band is playing in a parade as one of the lower "starting out" tiers.
Realistic 2D Stage
I'm working on creating a series of images that consists of me holding a guitar with my fingers on the various note combinations. I'm going to try to create a stage.xml file that will use the provided note triggers to show the correct image. I want to see if you can do that to effectively make something that will actually show somebody playing. Not putting a lot of time into this, but it's a filler project when I don't feel like fretting songs or whatnot.
FM Dreamt Up Projects
Here is a section where I'll throw out there all of my thoughts that I've ever had regarding potential projects. I'm not married to any of these, so if you have any thoughts, or think its a cool idea and want to do it yourself or would like to see it done, there is a damn good chance that I'll be receptive.
Non-Standard Instruments
Because of this when I started reading about Rock band I knew there was only a matter of time before there was an free game created for the Rockband style. I immediately starting looking for used drumsets for sale and at that time there weren't any, and they weren't selling them seperately in the stores either. I started looking into ways of building my own, and I have everything drawn out and ready to go, however when I went to pull the trigger and order the parts (~$35 bucks) I decided to check CS to see if there was any drumsets yet, and lo and behold there were about 5 for the same price I was going spend building my own. I found the one I currently have for $15, and its originally for the Wii. I may still go back and build that drum set so when I'm playing they can be positioned like a drum, instead of like a game out in front of you. This research also led me to believe that using similar concepts, the idea of Trumpet Hero, Trombone Hero, Piano Hero, and the like are all very feasible options. You will see me pushing to allow configurable instrument names and being able to choose them all from a list. Trumpet Hero could be done today as you will have a "Strum" action by blowing or making a noise into the mouthpiece, where something like Piano will have to wait until drums is complete. And actually, piano will only be fun when we can setup "Double Drums" and allow us to have 8-10 notes on 2 different fretboards.
Mods
Here is a short list of Mods that I have on a list of things I may make in the future or would like to see be made. Some of them are not feasible until something like an animated menu is implemented (Matrix Mod) but some of them could be feasible right now. Many of these are not complete ideas and I don't know if some of them would just be stupid once you started working to create stages and menus and whatnot.
VB6 Mod - Make everything look like a generic VB6 app, generic gray backgrounds, classic windows looking buttons, listbox for a setlist….
Media Center - Make it look like MCE2005 visually.
Winamp - Classic Winamp Skin
A/V Rack - Make it look like it belongs in an 80's A/V rack, like the stack of Turntable, Amp, Casset Deck, single CD player, Radio all on top of each other….
007 - Pretty self explanatory…anybody want to photoshop Bond with a Plastic Guitar?
Old School Black and White - Something that looks like it should be displayed on a 50s or 60s console BW TV…think Andy Griffith Show or Leave it to Beaver
Dilbert FTW!