Good evening everyone & well met,
I'm 'Konesky' and I've been lurking in the shadows for years now, I guess it's time to get under the spotlight...
I was first introduced to Crack -er- UO back in October 1997 by a good friend of mine participating in the Beta program UO. I got my own account and well I guess the rest is history. The world was different then as many know, no Tram, no uber items or super templates... it was simple and I loved it! I was born in Skara by the name of Konen on Atlantic, I used to walk out of town with a pack horse and chop trees for a living, walking them back in town and selling them to the fletcher for peanuts. At least that is when I made it back alive from the Reds, they were greatly feared then although by todays standards they wouldn't put up much of a fight. If you got lucky and a few of you banded together you might kill one and turn his head in to the guard for a reward!
Myself and 3 friends played for several months saving up money and when we got ourselves approximately 37k we bought a fieldstone house deed, walked out of Skara together and plunked our house down beside the first field leaving town. Of course then we had to find a tinkerer to make copies of the keys for us... but I digress!
I played on and off through High School, University and beyond. I've quit more times than I can count but I keep getting suckered back in. In my years I've had my own UO sites, been a broker and Moderator for Tradespot (before Lynn drove it into the ground), I did a lot of IDOC'ing and Real Estate over the years and was always a self proclaimed "Master Merchant" buying and selling anything and everything for profit. Of course back in the Tradespot days I was high on my noble steed and would never condone scripting but I think it was because I never understood it. I find myself encountering people these days who are like I used to be and I just laugh at the ignorance toward scripting. It's almost like voodoo magic that is evil and can hack anything.
Roughly 2 years ago I had been on the 'wagon' for a couple years... didn't even have UO installed anymore and the accounts were all deactivated. That is when I learned about EasyUO *shudders*. Programming always came naturally to me and I enjoy it, my brain is wired in such a way that its conducive to scripting although I've never done it as a job or in school (beyond electives for fun). It was EasyUO that was the sole reason I got dragged back to UO kicking and screaming this time. I found it incredibly interesting that you could use a simple script with minimal lines of code to perform complex actions and beyond that, I couldn't believe I suffered for years with carpal tunnel from incessant clicking in UO when an aid such as this existed!
I read in a post by TM something about people enjoying scripting more than playing UO... I certainly fit under that category, I was more interested in the satisfaction gained from identifying a problem or tedious action in UO, learning enough script language to hack together a solution then bug testing it, lag proofing it, revising it over time and troubleshooting. From there the simple tasks turned into larger and larger ones requiring more knowledge of the script functions. I wouldn't say my code is as elegant as some of the legends out there nor are they usually as complete. Being that I could whip something up from scratch in a few minutes to perform any menial task, most of my scripts are menu-less, comment-less and stripped down to get the job done. I've created some monsters over the last few years as well but I'm still learning a lot of the built in lesser known functions.
My first script ever began a few Halloween's ago when black pumpkins started appearing in patches around Sosaria. It started with finding pumpkins on the ground and manually checking color. When I learned the #findcol command it was revised to only sort out the black ones. Later a sound was added (ringin.wav) to tell me when one popped up. I eventually learned the pathfinding command and eventually incorporated a bag of sending. After a while it was bug free and grabbing 9/10 pumpkins that spawned despite hoards of people running around. I made millions and never looked back!
To date I've got over 400 scripts saved mind you many of those are multiple versions of the same thing as they get improved, or simple subs etc. I've written fully automated mining scripts and logging, rails and rail writers, a host of IDOC related stuff, champ spawn related stuff, event stuff, login things, bod related scripts, vesper rewards turning, the latest spring ticket handling and quests, tons of skill gain assistants, pvp related scripts... you name it! I wouldn't say I could even come close to knowing it all, one look at my rudimentary style tells you that and there are still some tasks that escape me but fortunately for us theres guys like TM out there pumping out subs that cover any really difficult or trick function. The nice thing about scripting and programming in general is there are many ways to tackle the same problem. You can beat your head against a wall and hammer through a problem and as you get better you can use more advanced functions to tidy up the script and make it more efficient.
I'm not sure if I've ever posted on EasyUO, scripting might be acceptable among fellow scripters but its generally frowned upon so I never wanted to be part of the public community. I don't feel I ever took advantage of the boards in terms of leeching scripts off them, in fact I was usually on wiki.Easyuo.com teaching myself scripting. The odd time I would download something by s7, CEO, Cheffe etc. to see how the pro's do it but in the end I usually wrote my own scripts for everything even when they already exists. I always found there was scripts doing what I wanted but the setup was always generic. Perhaps a script was meant to run from a bank and I wanted to run it at home...
In my 11 years of UO I've developed approximately 50+ characters and only wish I knew about EasyUO sooner, perhaps I would have been one of the GURU's like TM!
I haven't tried ScriptUO yet, just found the site about a month ago and never got around to dnloading it until today. I'm not sure what it's all about but it seems to be getting rave reviews so I might as well do myself a favour and learn. I was just looking around at some of TM's posts and scripts and it seems to be one hell of a collection but I couldn't figure out how to access the scripts... then I read the board rules lol so this is my first post...
Anyway I've never really taken advantage of fourms as a tool yet always had questions I wanted answered so I guess the only way is to Introduce myself and start taking part! I know there's lots of guys out there like me, have enough characters of your own to have a full army and entire guilds but at some point its nice to be able to bounce ideas off one another or ask for help when you encounter a roadblock!
...So here I am! Thanks for having me!
P.S. I'm kind of excited because I've got some questions right off the bat and would love to have them answered!
