Participants: Fallen Angel, Admiral Kirk Description: Admiral Kirk Interview Created: November, 2003 FaLLeN AnGeL+: Admiral Kirk thank you for agreeing to talk with us. I'd like to start by asking how you got involved with Subspace? Admiral Kirk: Well, along about '97 'ish a friend of mine showed me this cool game, SubSpace. It'd just come out on the shelves like days earlier and he got me hooked. Soon as I got home, I went out to the mall and bought a copy for myself. That very night I installed it, found a crack, and put the box on my shelf where it still sits today. FaLLeN AnGeL+: Which zones did you first fly? Admiral Kirk: I started off with Alpha, and then, I'm almost embarrassed to say, played Trench Whores for about 2 months. FaLLeN AnGeL+: You did not like Trench Wars too much it sounds like? Admiral Kirk: Well, I hadn’t at the time figured out that you could add zones to the list. Trench seemed like the best there was and I was about to quit SS because it wasn’t very good. I actually did stop playing for quite awhile, and then I picked it up again and found out how to add zones. Sorta by accident actually since most of the zones on my list were off-line (this was after VIE went under). FaLLeN AnGeL+: Which zone or zones did you settle in after learning of the zone download? Admiral Kirk: I played in USD Annihilation for awhile along about when it was starting to die, moved on to DZ for a while, then to SSCT 1stStrike, which is where I spent the better part of a year I think. FaLLeN AnGeL+: How did you select your name? Have you used Admiral Kirk from the start? Admiral Kirk: I didn’t really put a whole lot of thought into what name I'd use, I just picked whatever came to mind first and played with it. By the time I actually cared what my name in SS might be, everyone knew me by this one, so it was too late to change it. Believe me, it’s not my favorite. FaLLeN AnGeL+: .*smiles I see. FaLLeN AnGeL+: I understand that you were the previous owner of Metal Gear, a very successful zone. Can you tell us a little bit about the history of Metal Gear? Admiral Kirk: Well, this is a long story. It all started when I got back into SS after a short break. The first zone I happened to find was SSCT 1stStrike. I played there for months and months on end, and eventually became staff, mod, smod, eventually head smod, then sysop. Well after several server moves the zone started to die and 1st strike went on a sabbatical and left me in charge. To make a long story longer, me and Jules created a zone called T3 Realms (which was the zone 1stStrike was actually supposed to become, but that never happened quite the way I had planned). Anyway, we ran that zone for a long time, but it was never really successful. Admiral Kirk: Jules decided that he would completely redo the zone. He renamed it Metal Gear, and changed sets, tiles, maps, even staff for the most part, the whole nine yards. Unfortunately, at this time in Jules' life he had a lot of shit to deal with and didn’t have time for the zone, so I ended up Admining it for the better part of a Year. Recently he came back to SS and took over ownership of the zone again. And that’s the story of MG. FaLLeN AnGeL+: Are you still an active staff in any zones? Admiral Kirk: Aside from saving MG's ass every once in awhile, I don’t really participate in SS all that much anymore. FaLLeN AnGeL+: You have contributed some time and work for the community. What initially inspired you to start these projects? Admiral Kirk: Guy by the name of nintendo64 was writing a bot in VB. I had been learning VB at the time and was interested in his source code, he sent it to me and the bot eventually became my project, which then became KirkBot. KirkBot was basically an alias/ban bot with a few extras thrown in. Between Catid, nintendo64, SOS, Snarky and a few other developers I talked to, I really found the kind of support and information I needed to get things done when it came to coding for this game. The wealth of open source information available on the protocol and coding in general inspired me to take up learning my skills by coding for this game. FaLLeN AnGeL+: So did Kirkbot turn into Logicbot? Admiral Kirk: KirkBot was VB and LogicBot was C++, while KirkBot was based off nintendo64's source, LogicBot was done pretty much completely from scratch. FaLLeN AnGeL+: That's impressive work Kirk. Can you tell us a bit about Logicbot ? Admiral Kirk: I had been working on KirkBot for about 6 months, and had finally gotten so frustrated with VB as an incredibly incompetent language for writing bots that I said to heck with it and decided to teach myself C++ and rewrite the bot in C++. So I went out, bought a book on C++ and started writing LogicBot. I guess you could say LogicBot was my "Hello World" to C++. It was the very first C++ application I ever wrote. Admiral Kirk: What frustrated me most about KirkBot was that it would take about 5 minutes to look up a list of aliases for one name in its text based alias list. So when I did LogicBot I built it a MySQL back end, there are several LogicBots still running. DZ for instance, has one. Their Database is about 30mb large right now, and an alias resolves in about 2 seconds or less. :) FaLLeN AnGeL+: You used Logicbot to create a chat program for Continuum. I know people have been trying to integrate a chat program for years. Badly needed in my opinion. Admiral Kirk: Agreed. A stable chat interface for SS has been attempted for many years. Unfortunately none have gotten the support of Priitk, so they all pretty much turned into specialty applications for server ops and high end staff only. FaLLeN AnGeL+: Is your chat interface supported by Priitk? Admiral Kirk: No, nor do I ever expect it to be. Only talked to the man once before, and it was for something unrelated. FaLLeN AnGeL+: Well I am sorry to hear that. The game's heart is the chat and I would hope Priitk would support such. FaLLeN AnGeL+: How many hours of work have you devoted to the bots? Admiral Kirk: Probably about a year and half now. Between when I first started on KirkBot and what I’ve put into LogicBot and SubChat since then. FaLLeN AnGeL+: Do you have any projects in planning for the future? Admiral Kirk: Well, I had started writing a new Server for SS but that was before I had known that Grel was working on something similar. He was about a year and a half ahead of me so I changed that projects direction away from SS. I'm still actively developing SubChat, but aside from that I don’t think I have anything else planned for SS. FaLLeN AnGeL+: We just had an update not too long ago to the Continuum client from 0.38 to 0.39. What would you like to see added to the next updates? Admiral Kirk: Some method, whether it be scripting, server side client modules, or whatever, but some method by which the creators of zones can extend the client's abilities. Considering that Priitk is obviously only one man and even if this was his only project, he still wouldn’t have the necessary time to add all the worthy features that users of this program have suggested. There needs to be some way for the users to do this. I think LVZs was a step in this direction and I hope more steps are made like it. Along with the extensibility of Grels new server, if the users can extend both client and server to create a zone in any direction they want, the game will most probably live on well into the foreseeable future. Otherwise it might die of stagnation. FaLLeN AnGeL+: What can you tell players that are interested in contributing to the game? Admiral Kirk: "The game is free, the developers here rely on each other for ideas and information. Always remember how much you have been helped and try to help others in return. The best way I know how to do that is to open source your code. If nintendo hadn’t given me the source to his bot I never would have gotten started with coding for SS and I probably wouldn’t have even taught myself C++. OSS is the sole reason for the existence of some odd 50% of the coders in the world. (My contribution to SSOSS kirk.sscentral.com). FaLLeN AnGeL+: Where do you see the Subspace/Continuum community in the next two years? Admiral Kirk: One of two places, dead, or doing extremely well. I think it entirely depends on where the development of Continuum goes. ASSS has already provided considerable extensibility to the game, I think if Continuum can follow in its footsteps we may have a game that will last forever, assuming the core continues to be updated. As long as we don’t loose the population we have now to redundant and boring zones due to lack of zone development features, the game could well last forever. FaLLeN AnGeL+: I would really like to thank you Admiral Kirk for giving us this interview. You have been an awesome contributor to the players and the game.