User:Graham

From Pigasoftware

Graham Lawrence Wilson (born May 13, 1994) is a co-founder of Piga Software and serves as the organization's webmaster and main game engine developer. Graham's most important role (other than maintainer of the Piga websites) is to develop the Gambas Genie real time strategy engine for Free Empires - the star project of Piga Software.

His main programming experience is for Visual Basic 6, Game Maker, QBasic, Liberty Basic, and Gambas (he also knows HTML and some CSS for web development). He has also done some slight experiments with Visual Basic.Net, C++ and Java, the later two he wishes to study more thoroughly at a later time, as well as Perl and shell scripting.

He started programming when he was six years old (jump started after learning the ".show 1" Visual Basic command), trying to make a cartoon mystery themed game called Sherlock Mcgruff and the Case of the Bloody Elephant. The first program he ever completed was a program showing off clip art of various computer equipment he wished he would one day own. His first major project was a first person adventure game called Mad Bully in the Haunted Mansion. The game was set in a fictional afterlife for animals, which was their heaven, but in strange parallel appeared like hell. Mad Bully, an important bull, was forced to deal with various ghouls in a haunted mansion.

Some other early Visual Basic projects included Kawo (an experimental desktop/file manager utility that operated similar to a desktop environment), early drafts for Wilson Net, and Kitty File Manager (a front-end for Windows Explorer which added some features normally only found in word processors). One project that was completed was an example first person adventure game, simply titled 3D Example, featuring a variety of rooms, a few different objects, and a code the player needed to find. He also worked on some turn-based puzzle games, one being called Mouse in the Pond, though these projects never really went anywhere due to a very impractical graphics engine.

He continued experiment with Visual Basic 6 until he moved to Game Maker in 2005. There he made much more advanced games as he had in the past, at first by modifying the Game Maker example programs. Although he experimented with many game genres his most advanced experiments were for real time strategy games (including early drafts for Free Empires) and even simple 2.5D first person shooters. Many of these games are going to be released as part of the Piga Windows Entertainment Pack. The large amounts of raw code files Piga has created are also being considered for an unsupported, unpolished, release. In 2005 he also started to learn QBasic programming, where he made little text adventure games and slide shows with QBasic graphics code. A more modern QBasic project he is working on is Free Empires: Age of War, a statistics and probability based ASCII graphics strategy game, which was started in March 2008.

He moved to Gambas in 2007, starting with a small little top-down puzzle game featuring Tux. He later expanded on this, starting work on Gambas Genie and Free Empires in April 2007 (releasing two Source Releases). He also started various other projects that year, such as Linfarm, Piga Nation and the modern incarnation of Piga Brain. More projects were started in 2008 such as Windys and Piga Animator. That same year he released Piga's Pumpkin Carving, a recreation of a program he once made in Game Maker, which received a notable update on its first anniversary. Windys was released on August 12, 2009 and he also has supervised the release of PigaVision and Alexei: Part IX. The first source release of Lamp Refugee, a "playable" Gambas Genie test environment, was released on October 26th. He has supported free software right from the beginning of his programming, having learned about the ideal from his father's stack of old copies of Linux Journal.

He is fifteen years of age and suffers from myopia (near-sighted vision) and scoliosis (curvature of the spine). He is a full Canadian citizen as well as a citizen by descent of New Zealand. Graham is interested in political economy, philosophy, hacking/hacker culture, gaming, fan works, writing, computer animation, paleontology/history, reverse engineering, naturalism, marks/craftsmanship, and ranching/poultry-raising. On May 16, 2010 he scored 82% on his ham radio exam and thus has attained the qualification of Basic+ in Canada, his call-sign is VA6GPL

Contents 1 Preferences 2 Projects Graham is BDFL in 3 Released Software 4 Graham's Other Roles

Preferences

Note: this is my opinion on the various software tools around, I hope that my recommendations and comments are useful

Graham prefers GNOME over KDE, describing the KDE desktop as "bloated and increasingly unappealing" (particularly version 4), however he does commend the K Project for its programs as typically better than those that come with GNOME. He prefers the VIM ("VImproved") editor over Emacs; though he prefers GNU Nano as his favourite editor as "when I need to edit a system file it has to be quick and direct". Graham prefers Mozilla Firefox and Epiphany over Opera, Internet Explorer, and Konqueror (though commends the latter as it is Free Software). Also he uses GFTP for FTP transfers and Pidgin for instant messaging. He runs his computer with the Fedora GNU/Linux distribution, however he wishes to try out Debian, Mandriva, Gentoo, and Slackware. He also wishes to experiment with FreeBSD, FreeDOS, ReactOS, OpenSolaris, Minix 3 and Haiku. He currently programs almost exclusively with GAMBAS; occasionally using QBasic, Visual Basic and Game Maker (though specifically not version 7); he web develops using the Bluefish editor and he uses OpenOffice.org for all productivity suite usage which is mostly for writing (using GEdit as his main text editor). Finally uses XMMS, MPlayer, and Audacity for most of his audio needs and for graphics he prefers KolourPaint, GIMP, and KIconEdit.

Projects Graham is BDFL in

1. Piga Nation (For GNU/Linux, Made in Gambas)

2. Gambas Genie (For GNU/Linux, Made in Gambas, Some Source Released)

3. PS-Tech-1 (For GNU/Linux, Made in Gambas)

4. Piga Brain (For GNU/Linux, Made in Gambas)

5. Free Empires: Age of War (For FreeDos, Made in QBasic)

6. Piga Animator (For GNU/Linux, Made in Gambas)

Released Software

• Donut Quest, head programmer (Microsoft Windows, 2006)
• Free Empires: Chiefs and Warriors Source Release 1.0, head programmer (GNU/Linux, 2007)
• Free Empires: Chiefs and Warriors Source Release 2.0, head programmer (GNU/Linux, 2007)
• Gambas Genie Mouse Movement Tech Demo, head programmer (GNU/Linux, 2008)
• Piga's Pumpkin Carving, head programmer (GNU/Linux, 2008)
• Alexei: Part IX, supervisor (GNU/Linux, 2009)
• Windys, co-designer, Gambas Platform Engine developer (GNU/Linux, 2009)
• Lamp Refugee Source Release 1.0, head programmer (GNU/Linux, 2009)

Graham's Other Roles

• "A GNU Body" artwork (2007).
• Assistant Moderator of the Blood Wiki (2008-2010).
• Head Moderator of the Blood Wiki: Shogo Sub-Section (2008-2010).
• Co-moderator of Tongue Tied, the Red Dwarf wiki. (2009-2010)
• Co-moderator of the Warren Zevon Wiki. (2009-2010)
• Author of A Game Development Essay, Freedom, and Software? (2008) and Technical Literacy is Empowering (2009).
• Symel GIF Animations (2006-2007)
• Contributor to Wikipedia (2006-2010).
• Head editor of the Tome of Blood collection of fan fiction (2008-2009).
• Head editor of the Shogo: The Expanded Canon collection of fan fiction, author of Shogo: The Aftermath and Shogo: Hidden Life (2008-2009).
• Occasional contributor towards the Brogo web comic strip (2005-2010).
• Assistant developer of the former "Klingon Web Development"