Stay awhile and listen...

[eezstreet]

Greetings. If you haven't quite figured this out yet, I'm eezstreet and I'm one of the two administrators of the site here (the other one being @@Circa). I'm also a coder, and one of the key people involved with (or formerly involved with) OpenJK and Jedi Knight Galaxies. I've also had a large burden to bear, as I've been the de-facto communicator with Raven Software, the developer of both JK2 and JKA. When Lucasarts shut down, it was I who communicated with Raven on releasing the source code, and I was the first to have the source in my possession. It was I who established a line of contact between Kotaku's Luke Plunkett and Raven's Matt Gummelt for a very widely-publicized interview as the source code was being released.

 

My tenure here at JKHub has been a bit interesting. I was a huge asshole in my past, and for that I apologized before, and I'll apologize again. While I've been here, I've put pressure on improving relations with the competitive community and helped doctor sweeping changes to the frankensteining and porting policies. Admittedly, I haven't been as actively involved with the community recently as I was once, but I have important reasons for this. In addition to school and a small web design job putting me with little time, I've also had relationships come and go, and a slew of my own personal problems.

 

I hate to talk about myself too much, so I'll get right to the point. A few weeks ago, I applied for three jobs at Raven Software, one of them being a QA testing position. The people I've met in the past at Raven helped put in a good word for me, and this made a considerable impression on the interviewer. I discussed several mods which I worked on in the past, as well as some other projects (the interviewer had heard of OpenJK, so that made for an interesting bit of conversation). One of the things that struck me as being different from other interviews is that they talked to me about what games that I played. I've been interviewed a few times by different software companies, and it was fairly atypical to say the least. I think I pretty much fucking nailed it though.

 

This has put me at an interesting crossroads though. They need people as soon as possible, possibly within the next month, but I'm still in school for the moment. There's a wide variety of different things that could happen at this point- either a better candidate could roll around (not too too likely), they may need me like...now, or they would be willing to wait until May. If I am needed in March, I'll have to drop from university and move to Madison. Obviously, that's a bit risky, but there's a good payoff: I'm willing to bet that their next game (I wasn't told what it would be) is Call of Duty, and having CoD on your resume is golden. Plus, I kinda have a soft spot for Ravensoft. Whatever happens, if I'm hired by them and move up to Wisconsin, I can no longer continue my tenure as staff, as I need to devote 101% of my resources towards my career, hoping to move beyond QA testing, but realizing that by proving my worth, I can insure a permanent position in the company.

 

tl;dr- I might be retiring from the staff soon. I'll keep everyone posted.

[Boothand]

That's very promising, eez! Good luck with the choices you may have to make, and good job finding your way into Raven. That really is excellent.

[afi]

That's one way to infiltrate raven

[Oobah]

Take Raven Softwares form of yavin_trial and find the cage at the end that holds the harddrive with all the unreleased patches and cloth physics to the game engine.

[Link]

I wish you all the best for this possible opportunity Eez seems like it'll be a dream come true for you!

 

(If you get hired, store the master server under your desk with a VGA cable handy ;D)

[mrwonko]

Interesting. Subscribed.

[therfiles]

So excited for you, eezstreet! It's awesome that your modding experience has helped you land get this opportunityurtunity. 

[Mandalorian]

Go for it.

[Futuza]

Good luck, glad to hear about the opportunity eez and I hope it works out in your favor.  Always great to hear about modder success in the real world, especially people I know.  Be sure to visit us once in a while though.     

[Syko]

Wow, that's awesome. Good luck eez. I had kind of thought you might apply to work at Raven some day. I guess that day has come. 

[Onysfx]

You'll probably get in. Nice knowing you so far eezstreet, wow, it's been what, 3-4 years? Remember the witch hunt? Whatever happened? .

[hleV]

Excuses.

[Mysterious Stranger]

Hope you get it! That'd be superb for us all. But damn, first Caelum and now you

[ent]

*Make JK4 joke*

[ensiform]

I wish you all the best for this possible opportunity Eez seems like it'll be a dream come true for you!

 

(If you get hired, store the master server under your desk with a VGA cable handy ;D)

Its hosted on Microsoft servers now. (Off site)

[Link]

Okay, you might need a REALLY long cable then ;D

[Smoo]

Oh boy another cod game, but holy shit if ravensoft is making it. Would be epic if it's like Soldier of Fortune

[Smoo]

I'll like to be a coder for the JKG team, I'll place my app soon. I only know basic stuff atm but I'm sure they'll need as much help once you're gone.

[Circa]

Oh boy another cod game, but holy shit if ravensoft is making it. Would be epic if it's like Soldier of Fortune

Raven has been a co-developer for the past few Call of Duty games. Nothing new here.

 

 

I'll like to be a coder for the JKG team, I'll place my app soon. I only know basic stuff atm but I'm sure they'll need as much help once you're gone.

 

JKG is open source now I believe, so you can probably contribute without "applying".

[Smoo]

Raven has been a co-developer for the past few Call of Duty games. Nothing new here.

 

 

 

JKG is open source now I believe, so you can probably contribute without "applying".

 

My bad, I dont pay much attention to cod lol herp and ok then thanks for the reply

[Xycaleth]

JKG is pretty much dead. The source code might be open-sourced, but I don't think anybody will be there to review any pull requests.

[eezstreet]

Well, hopefully in a few days I'll be receiving an offer. I've made the decision that it's worth leaving mid-semester to go up. Since I know several of the people working there and they can vouch for me, it "puts [me] in a unique position." I'm hoping that "unique position" = pole position.

 

The contract is for a year of temp work. If that goes smoothly, another year and a half. Depending on projects, I could move up. I'm fairly confident that Raven won't be working on CoD for forever, so yeah.

[eezstreet]

I'm getting another interview next week. I'll be interviewed by the same person as well as the project head.

[Kessno]

I'm getting another interview next week. I'll be interviewed by the same person as well as the project head.

 

Best of luck to you! Should be exciting being on the other end of things.

 

Does this mean your Jedi Outcast restoration project will be put on permanent hold, or you'll be handing it down to someone else to finish working on it?

[eezstreet]

Best of luck to you! Should be exciting being on the other end of things.

 

Does this mean your Jedi Outcast restoration project will be put on permanent hold, or you'll be handing it down to someone else to finish working on it?

It's on hold, and I'm more or less giving @@redsaurus the keys to the kingdom as his SP stuff for JKA implements everything I did, sans the extra lines of dialogue and JK2-specific fixes which I made by hand. Unfortunately I don't have any of the hand-fixes to the maps anymore due to two hard drives failing almost simultaneously. These fixes are easy to make- if I told @@therfiles what to do, he could probably implement them in .IBI scripts.

 

However, I'm still very much interested in getting my JK2 restoration completed, and with glNext coming out soon, I want to take the time to learn graphics programming proper. Being part of Raven will allow me to take a look at the design flow (hopefully..) of JK2 and see if there's more missing.* I'm already aware of a few things after reexamining some old PR stuff circa 2000 that I could implement.

 

So...while I have interest, I'd be devoted 101% to my job and getting myself a permanent position. But if anyone wants to be my lackey and make changes to .npcs, .IBIs, .bsps, ..., feel free to sign up!