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    Name: ldlework (Dustin)

    Age: 34

    Languages (Programming and/or other):


    - Longest professional use: Python, Javascript

    - Current daily: Typescript, C#

    - Previously professional or daily: Java, Golang, Emacs-Lisp, C++, X86 assembler, 68000 assembler

    - Non-trivial experience: Rust, Nim, Lua


    Skills / Experience:


    I was around as a player and hacker of GunZ around the time the first PDB symbol file was discovered in an early release (the humor of that is what got my attention in the first place. I mentored under CBWhiz and stosw who were responsible for the "Unnamed" unpacks. As full disclosure, most of my time during that period was learning, not producing. While I had some experience writing assembly for game development on embedded devices, reverse engineering was completely new to me.

    The single thing I can claim credit to, but have no way of proving (that I can think of), is that at some point I released a technique (pretty sure on the now defunct private forum The Unnamed Forums) for a 1 byte patch that removed a check for whether you had released the mouse button before again handling the fact that it is currently down. This allowed you to melee attack at the speed of the network and I coined it the "lawnmower" hack.

    If you google "gunz the duel lawnmower" you can find some janky youtube videos published years after that, years after I left, where the term is still used. It's no amazing feat, and I can't possibly prove it, but it is what it is. In any case, reverse engineering x86 assembler was never my strong suit, software development is. The source was leaked after I left the scene so I never got to play with it.

    That said, I have been doing software development for over 20 years and professionally for 15 years or so. I have used too many technologies to account for them all, but I have spent long periods with everything from machine code to web-development.

    My professional experience includes being an early employee at Docker where I built one of the first experimental container orchestrators. Publicly, I built Docker's Automated Build service by myself. I've been doing web-development and cloud infrastructure stuff since.

    Proof of work:


    My github is a good place to see the volume and variety of things I've worked on: https://github.com/dustinlacewell/ but I'll highlight some here.

    https://react-ecs.ldlework.com/

    I recently wanted to write a machine learning experiment, but I wasn't really jiving with the web frameworks available so I built one that replicates the "entity component system" model ontop of react. Then I built that experiment: https://react-ecs.ldlework.com/examp...e/EaterExample

    http://type-tetris.ldlework.com/

    I recently came across this github repo that has a bunch of puzzles that utilize the TypeScript type-system (https://github.com/type-challenges/type-challenges), but it's just a bunch of files you have to view through github interface. So in a day or so I built a site that integrates the VSCode editor component (Monaco) into a site that allows you to do all the puzzles in your browser.

    http://ldlework.com/chess/

    I've built react-based Chess ( https://github.com/dustinlacewell/react-chess ) and Go board ( https://github.com/dustinlacewell/tsgo ), though I don't have a deployment of the latter.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y7XLrValfMk
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PWDuswy9x2Q
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UqZCzys1hBg

    I've implemented a Unity VR app where I can stream desktop windows as textures into the game, and by integrating the Roslyn C# compiler, allowing myself to use Visual Studio to edit the code of the app I'm inside, in realtime.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=npkbdtAKnSM
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_3TmeTko7Gs
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FfRRfo3tKoE

    I implemented a VR demo that integrated an old C-based midi library onto the Quest android environment

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dOf6...M2VlQ&index=14

    I worked for three years trying to convince myself I could do solo indie VR dev and made significant progress on a procedurally generated VR FPS where I worked on and solved so many problems, many demonstrated in the playlist, from locomotion, level generation, AI, pooling, occlusion and many more.

    http://ldlework.com : https://github.com/dustinlacewell/blot

    When it came time to implement my site, I didn't like how any of the existing static site generators worked so I wrote my own that had an API that I thought was novel at the time ( https://blot.readthedocs.io/en/latest/ ) though it turns out there's a JS thing like it called Metalsmith ( https://metalsmith.io/ )

    https://github.com/dustinlacewell/hades

    I've written a powerful Discord bot framework based on dependency injection with powerful decorator support.

    https://github.com/dustinlacewell/jin

    I've built a modular plugin system for Minecraft that adds dependency injection to Bukkit and built a few tools based on it, https://github.com/dustinlacewell/MCPlayerTP , https://github.com/dustinlacewell/MCPlayerEffects

    https://github.com/dustinlacewell/tower-of-babix

    I made an Emacs distribution built with Nix, that allows you run snippets of basically any programming language you desire in an easy to install Nix package.

    https://github.com/dustinlacewell/pw8-lawnorder
    https://github.com/dustinlacewell/pw10-wabble
    https://github.com/dustinlacewell/pw5-murmel
    https://github.com/dustinlacewell/pw11-prismbreak
    https://github.com/dustinlacewell/pw9-darkpastel

    Over the years I have participated in game-dev competitions ( https://pyweek.org/u/ldle/ ), some of which I actually have surviving code for. A couple of which still work. Some I've even tried to update and port to the web: http://ldlework.com/wabble/ : https://github.com/dustinlacewell/wabble It's tragic thinking about all the work you can "lose" over the years if you're not careful...

    https://github.com/disunity-hq

    I lead the Disunity project (with help) in creating a completely open-ended modding platform for arbitrary Unity applications that allows you to develop mods in Unity, custom code or assets, and then inject them into games. It was born out of the Risk of Rain modding community which you might have seen they recently got VR integration working. (Though that work has nothing to do with Disunity which kind of lost steam during a complex refactor while standardizing our package format.

    https://github.com/dustinlacewell/vatts

    I built an entire VSCode extension for doing Lua development for Tabletop Simulator including debugging integration.

    Is all proof of work your own work?


    Yeah, all of it. Since I don't have a lick of GunZ work to showcase, I really wasn't sure how many projects to mention. Sorry if I landed on the wrong side of "just enough" hehe

    Closing:


    Look, I know that was a whole lot of stuff not related to GunZ. If you take a look through my repository list, you'll find even more variety including a ton tools and frameworks in various domains from games to low level linux utilities.

    My only goal with all of that is to convey that there's no worry about whether I am a developer like you and whether you will will have to do any of the hand holding you can expect and for which this application is certainly intended to filter out.

    I can barely remember *some* details of my time with the GunZ client, things related to its BSP map format, or the way the lobby system and item persistence worked with SQL, or some details about the low-level implementation of certain locomotion features but it's all vague memories.

    My primary interest in getting back into things is to take much of what I've learned in the last decade with regards to AI and machine learning and see if there are any fun things to do with the co-op Questing sides of things. I've always been interested in building built-in training tools. Ways to increase accessibility with regards to grinding out one's k-style without having to either 1) find willing peers at your level with compatible schedules 2) throwing yourself against all the players currently better than you 3) grinding it out against very simple quest mobs

    In addition to my own creative interests regarding training accessibility, I'm also interested in a wider sense of looking to do what is possible to preserve the life of the game through things like improving code quality, setting up a test-framework and test-suite, to improve or establish automation around build processes, and automation around the cloud-ops dealing with server deployment and scaling.

    I don't have the time or will to go through the classic gauntlet of reconstituting the state of art with regards to GunZ development knowledge and materials and tooling through a divinci-like historical puzzle by mining decades old forums to prove whatever that ultimately proves. If there is a way for me to join in on your prior art and be helped by it, I would love to contribute what I can in turn helping to improve it. I would love to be a contributing force to the new interest in the game.
    Last edited by ldlework; 05-23-2021 at 03:55 AM.

  2. The following 11 users say thank you to ldlework for this useful post:

    Amamin (05-24-2021), Bangarang (05-23-2021), Eran (06-17-2021), GeorgeGFX (05-23-2021), ImComming4U (05-23-2021), Jonathan pls (06-03-2021), Kyousuke (05-29-2021), Polar (05-24-2021), Puma (05-23-2021), TomasEdison (05-23-2021), Zaku (06-07-2021)

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