~MH-Razen~ Wrote:(and waiting for Marshalls )
You know me so well, MH... Knowing that topic titles such as this would attract me lawl
I'll be brief, because I am still making a poster for the orchestra...
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okay... I started playing LF2 when I was in my first year in secondary school. At that time, I was a boarder at school, so I had quite a lot of free time after school and one of the activities was to go to the computer room to play random computer games. LF at that time was pretty popular, though I hvn't really played it, then one of my classmates told me abt LF2 when I was sitting next to him in the computer room, so I downloaded it (under his instructions) and got addicted to it. That was 8 years ago... Later on, I got all my fellow boarders to play the game as well, and it was all F6 spam and no such thing as stage mode existed. Anyways, I kinda stopped playing it until my friend told me abt LouisEX, which I got bored after a while (but initially I was like ZOMG AWESOMENESS!!11). The same applies to Firzen, but when I heard abt Firzen, 1.91 was almost out, so I waited patiently for it. Due to my habit of F6, I am (still) a helpless fighter, so passing stage mode in difficult was impossible, thus Bat, Justin, Julian and Co. were elusive till one of the fan sites instructed me to rename Julian.dat to Template.dat XD From those sites, I also played around with the so-called "data-changing", such as renaming john_biscuit.dat to firen_flame or renaming john_ball.dat to henry_arrow.dat
Later on, I got bored again and clicked on the forum hyperlink on the official site. It was the first (or second, I forgot, because at some point there was a class one) ever forum I have joined. That is how I discovered that "new" characters existed such as DeepEX, Freeze-X- etc At that time, it was already the old phpBB forums rather than ezboard and I have already missed out quite a bit. It was (still am) a computer illiterate and I didn't know how to make the forum display the Chinese characters instead of messed up symbols :P Finally, I got some help with that, but I still ranted on in English in the Chinese forums since I didn't know how to type Chinese and remained mostly silent in the English channel because not much took my fancy, until HC released Sharpe :P So I was a bit of a weirdo in the old phpBB forums, but because of that ppl remembered me.
My behaviour was every inch an earnest rookie admiring everyone's sprite edits and data changing skills w/o learning a thing myself. Eventually, I had so much downloaded characters and backgrounds I decided to make a site dedicated to downloads, just like Do's old site which hadn't been updated since I discovered it. I combined all the downloads which I thought were the best/most creative (at the time) and hosted the site from my own computer. LF2 Unlimited was born. It was aimed at being the heaven for modded characters/BGs/weapons/skins, and later, whole mods (at that time, mods were still a relatively new concept) while giving the correct credits which original authors deserve. In the process of making this site, I became good friends with a number of the best modders of the day, including Sam2003, Mike Liu, HC, KobeIp, LokLok and QQQ etc
In mid 2003, the old phpBB was attacked by 777 and players of LF2 have lost a common cyber space to hand out. I still went to LFFusion, but it sank (either server or domain problems?) pretty soon afterwards. My site was in the meantime getting bigger and more popular by the day due to almost daily updates. Of course, the network of contacts that I have established enabled me to get the most up-to-date creations, so eventually it became the official hosting space for LF2 Mega. At the same time, my comp got infected by the blaster worm virus and all my data was wiped clean. I gave up on my site and decided to quit LF2. Till that day, I haven't released anything at all other than some collaboration single-layered BGs
Two years later in early 2006, I had a dream about LF2 and me combining everything into one mod. I went to the official site again and found out that it had a completely new layout. Last but not least, a new forum has been set up. It looked like an awful mess with Mgccl (I didn't know him back then) running rouge, but I did see "Havoc_creator" and Sam2003, which was enough to get me to re-register =)
After getting a grasp of the general situation of the "new" forum and it's members, I became comfortable hanging around the forums again and decided to venture into DC as well. During the period, I did a small project of remaking frozen's Electro, which was mildly successful. Later on, a (big) conflict concerning Mgccl as a person and who should moderate the forums broke out with me emerging as the winner, though I have to admit there wasn't much competition anyway and I had the backing of HC and Dark Lord. The Chinese section in the meatime was totally not involved because it was still extremely un-active.
After being entrusted the responsibility, I finally got the chance to contact with Marti directly. I also had plenty of free time at hand, so I worked hard in driving old ppl from old contyacts and new users alike to enliven the Chinese section, while working on a dream inspired project entitled CE LF2. Reviving the forum has been rather successful and now we have quite a diversified range of active users from China, Hong Kong and Taiwan which I am the most proud of during my time as moderator and later, admin. While working on CE LF2 (CE are acronyms for combined effort), I learnt quite a lot on data changing and at some point, was pretty on top of it (i think XP). However, the long process of creating what I can visualise and my bad skills diverted me into making backgrounds, which are in many occassions, quicker to make.
Throughout my time as admin in the official forums, I became affiliated with MH, Sinow, nesnoodle (aka tan00ki, Shanghai and Cirno), which ultimately led to me being part of the LFE site owners. Other than strengthing the old ties with HC and forraska, I made some really good friends other than the afore mentioned LFE team. ES, Travois, Mugen, Apo, Silva, Felix, Silva, Yinyin, Azriel, scribbz, xFire, Vermouth and Mystic Purple are all somehow interwoven into my real life.
In October 2008, I officially resigned my post as administrator of the official LF2 forums due to private reasons including academic and career related reasons. My impact on the community would hv probably diminished on an exponential scale had it not been Marti asked me to keep the title of being administrator. My inactivity of late has caused me to fall very far behind LF2 modifications and HEX editing, for 2.0 in particular.
Looking back, I conclude that my biggest success as admin was maintaining the harmony within the forum and manage to control disputes among different fractions of the community. I can also claim that I have revived the forum (whether directly or indirectly) and pushed it to new heights, no matter in terms of sprites, data changing, fighting skills and a place to share ideas and feelings in genral. My failure is my "dream" of being able to help out in every situation whenever Chinese and English translation is required. I think YinYin feels ignored sometimes, so apologies on that. Tutorials and guides are not completed... Ultimately, not being able to hang onto the post of moderator for a longer period of time.
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There have been requests... I've reread what I've written and realised that what I've written was pretty concise. Anyway, I'll expand a little and hopefully won't bore too many people...
Learning DC has always been a challenge for me, particularly when I initially associated with coding the actual game engine (messing around with C++). I tried various tutorials before and failed miserably, including Chinese sites, the one by MSSJSG and later, LFE, pretty much the tutorial widely recognised as the most comprehensive yet easiest to understand LF2 data changing guide. At this point, I would like to claim to have "never gave up", but that's more like wishful thinking. I did give up and it probably partially contributed to my first hiatus.
Obviously I came back and with a new mindset - copying moves + I'm-older-hence-have-better-understanding. It only half worked, because I still didn't understand what I was doing really and was more like trying my luck, until... One day, I stumbled across Windmill (aka Slipper)'s tutorial. I've forgotten how old he is, but definitely older than me and has finished serving the army in Taiwan at least two years ago. I have already heard about this bloke from Mgccl who seemed to praise him to sky high. To be honest, in terms of DCing skills he is a bit overrated (or did I overreact to Mgccl's propaganda? lol). Till this day, comparing the YinYin, MH, Jerry Hawk and Sinow of that era, I don't see any of these four are any less than him (yeah, I think Dark Lord was slipping already, earlier I'm not sure while Azriel, BP and Lauli comes later). However, I have to mention him because he successfully brought DC to the masses, just like LFE, but via another language and I was among those who benefited. Don't forget him, folks... The English board won't be the same without him. I can almost feel the rivalry flare up from my computer screen reading posts from MH. Had it not been him, I doubt the third wave of DC would not have developed so quickly.
Again... even with near handicap aid I had a long way to go. Just saying, practical DC-ing rather than theory-ing was the best way to glue everything together. Yeah... this is meant to be a message to the fence sitters out there, if there are still any at this point.
By the time I actually knew what I was doing, it was too late already. The only thing that resembles anything presentable was my remake of Loklok and KobeIp's Adeen. Till now I always regret my learning speed as CE LF2 is still not what I envisioned and when I knew how to achieve a reasonable level of that, my commitments where getting overwhelming and HEX was suddenly dawning on everyone with new possibilities. To a certain extent, I was probably too "old fashioned" and cannot be bothered to think how to embrace the new trend and use these new tools. A temporary switch to Background productions was made, which I can almost claim to be successful because of my partnership with Mugen and the lack of quality backgrounds available. So when I dominated in that niche, it was also the start of my... shall I say demise?
Well... It's been quite a while since I last visited a LF2 forum. LFE has changed quite a bit, with the new mods and stuff, so it's good to see new blood still pumping. Maybe I'll release a background or two, but in the mean time, keep going, folks!