User:Rodzilla

From SeriousEngine.com

Contents 1 Bio 2 High School 2.1 Academic Involvement and Honors 2.2 Athletic Involvement and Honors 2.3 Boy Scouts 3 College 3.1 General Information 3.2 Academic Involvement and Honors 3.3 Athletic Involvement and Honors 3.4 Pi Kappa Alpha Fraternity 4 Employment 4.1 ACE Computer Camp at Emory University 4.2 UnrealTournament.Org (UTO) 4.3 Seriously! 4.4 2JD Hosting 4.5 Additional Employment Information 5 Gaming Involvement 5.1 Unreal Tournament 5.1.1 FragFacility 5.1.2 Capture 5.1.3 Nali City 5.1.4 StarCraft: UT / UnrealCraft 5.1.5 Titanium Wars 5.1.6 UnrealTournament.Org (UTO) 5.1.7 Carpe Imperium (Clan Ci) 5.1.8 Unreal Tournament 2003 5.2 ASUS Scandal 5.3 Serious Sam 5.3.1 Seriously! 5.3.2 SerousEngine.com 5.4 Credited Games

Bio

• Real Name: Jason Rodzik
• Current Nicknames: Rodzilla, Rod, Rodzik
• Retired Nicknames: DarkReaper, [Ci]DarkReaper, [UTO]DarkReaper, DethFromAbove
• Hometown: Marietta, GA (Just north of Atlanta, GA)
• Current Residence: Terre Haute, IN

High School

From grades 5-12 I attended The Walker School (or Walker), located on US Highway 41 in Marietta, GA. Walker is a small private school which encompasses students from Pre-Kindergarden all the way through high school graduation. My graduating class included 76 people, and collectively held the highest SAT average in the school's history; the mean SAT was 1315, with the top 20% ranging from 1450-1600.

Academic Involvement and Honors

• Graduated Cum Laude with a GPA of 3.96
• National Honor Society Member
• National Merit Commended Student
• ACT Score: 34 (out of 36)
• AP Scholar with Distinction
  • AP Computer Science AB - 5
  • AP Chemistry - 4
  • AP Statistics - 4
  • AP United States History - 4
  • AP Government - 4
  • AP Calculus BC - 5
• Medals awarded for top grades in classes (Gold = Highest grade, Silver = 2nd highest, Bronze = 3rd highest)
  • Gold - AP Computer Science, United States Government and Economics
  • Silver - Honors Physics
  • Bronze - AP Statistics, Recent World History

Athletic Involvement and Honors

• Varsity Cross Country (Sophomore - Senior) - Coaches: Mike Rink, Chris Golden
  • Team Captain (Senior)
  • Region Runner-Up (Senior) and 5th Place (Junior)
  • State Qualifier (Sophomore-Senior)
  • School Record: 17:49 for 5,000 Meters (Senior)
• Varsity Track (Sophomore - Senior) - Coaches: Mike Rink, Chris Golden
  • Team Captain (Senior)
  • Region Champion (Senior) and Runner-Up (Junior)
  • 6th Place in State with a time of 2:04.10 (Senior) and 2:05.80 (Junior)
  • School Records
    • 4 x 100M (Senior)
    • 800M - 2:04.10 (Senior)

Boy Scouts

• Eagle Scout
  • 26 Merit Badges
  • Organized a community service project which involved over 175 volunteer hours.
  • The project involved building six raised flower boxes at Powers Ferry Elementary School

College

Growing up near Atlanta and having a strong interest in computers from a young age, I was determined to attend Georgia Tech upon graduation of high school. However, during a period of numerous college visits and tours during high school, I realized that a large school wasn't best suited for me, and at the same time became aware of a small engineering school named Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology, which has now been rated #1 in all fields of undergraduate engineering for seven straight years [1]. Though I pursued most of the application process for the United States Air Force Academy, in addition to Rose-Hulman, I ultimately decided that I wasn't so sure that I wanted to join the Air Force that I would commit myself to the required 6 years of active service following graduation from the Academy, and I accepted my admission into Rose-Hulman at the very beginning of my senior year of high school.

General Information

• College: Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology
• Size: Approximately 1,900 undergraduate students
• Location: Five miles East of Terre Haute, Indiana
• Ranking: Ranked #1 among undergraduate engineering colleges from 2000-2006 by U.S. News and World Report.

Academic Involvement and Honors

• Cumulative GPA: 3.84
• Double Major: Computer Science; Software Engineering
  • Major GPA: 3.89
• Inducted into the Alpha Lambda Delta Honor Society as a Freshman
• Dean's List every trimester
• Honor Societies
  • Blue Key
  • Upsilon Pi Epsilon (Computer Science)
  • Pi Mu Epsilon (Math)
  • Alpha Lambda Delta
  • Sabre & Key

Athletic Involvement and Honors

• Indoor and Outdoor Track and Field
  • Top 25 800M Runner in SCAC Conference
  • Academic All-Conference (SCAC, HCAC; 2005-2007)
• Gun Club
• SCUBA Club

Pi Kappa Alpha Fraternity

• Pledged Pi Kappa Alpha, Iota Delta Chapter winter quarter of Freshman year
• Vice President and Ritual Chairman of Associate (Pledge) Class
• Initiated into the Alpha Pi Class spring quarter of Freshman year
• I.T. Chairman (June 2005 - November 2006)
  • Wrote a calendar system for Rush and other Fraternity events from scratch, using PHP and MySQL
  • Maintained the chapter's two Linux servers, one as a router to serve internet to the 60+ people at the house, the other as an internal web server and test system
  • Maintained house network services, printers, copiers, and scanners
• President (November 2006 - November 2007)
  • Led chapter of over 100 men
  • Recognized by Pi Kappa Alpha International Headquarters
    • Chapter of Excellence
    • Scholarship Plate
    • Ritual Award
    • Runner-up for Risk Awareness

Employment

Currently I have done a significant amount of work for myself, for the companies that I own or have owned, and contract work for others. I have also held several positions as an employee of other companies.

ACE Computer Camp at Emory University

• Position: Counselor
• Duration: Spring/Summer 2001
• Responsibilities Include:
  • Maintain computers and network
  • Organize gaming tournaments during free time for campers;
  • Conduct courses pertaining to computer hardware and programming for campers.
  • Write new coursework for C++ Windows programming.

UnrealTournament.Org (UTO)

• Position: Director of Operations
• Duration: 2000 - 2002
• For more details, see below

Seriously!

• Position: Owner, Director of Operations, Editor-in-Chief
• Duration: May 2002 - Present
• For more details, see below

2JD Hosting

• Position: Owner, Co-Founder, Director of Operations
• Duration: February 2004 - Present
• Responsibilities Include:
  • Co-Founded Company
  • Maintain appropriate business registration forms and licenses
  • Organize company's finances
  • Procure new clients through online marketing, online contacts, and personal contact
  • Manage and troubleshoot current client accounts along with creating new accounts for existing and new clients

Additional Employment Information

• Resume available on request

Gaming Involvement

Since early childhood I've tremendously enjoyed video games, but around 1996, following the release of Command and Conquer: Red Alert, I became increasingly involved with computer games. Following Red Alert and its two expansions, Counterstrike and Aftermath, I found my way into the online gaming scene with StarCraft and its expansion, Brood War, in 1998. I was not interested in much more than playing games until early 2000, when I read an article in gaming magazine PC Gamer, which discussed how to create custom levels for the new games Quake 3: Arena and Unreal Tournament (UT). Based on the article, I decided that I wanted to design levels using the Unreal Editor, and purchased Unreal Tournament solely because the editor was not freely available. Upon playing the game, I enjoyed it immensely, and found it to be much more enjoyable to play it than to attempt to make levels for it, which I soon discovered I wasn't very good at.

Though I found I was inept at level editing, I began to expand my programming knowledge into the game's proprietary scripting and programming language, UnrealScript, and gradually became more and more involved in online gaming communities, including a custom map review site, several mods teams, a site dedicated to the Capture the Flag gametype, a CTF clan, and I eventually took the reigns at UnrealTournament.Org (UTO), one of the largest UT sites from 1999-2002. Following my departure from UTO, I focused my time on Seriously! and the Serious Sam community, as it offered more of a chance for me to expand my skillsets.

Unreal Tournament

Note: I have attempted to accurately describe my involvement in the UT community in the following paragraphs. However, as I was actively involved in numerous projects at the same time, and this all occurred years ago, I probably left out a lot of information and details and may have even made incorrect statements.

FragFacility

FragFacility was a custom map review site for Unreal Tournament, hosted by PlanetUnreal. It was the very first project in gaming that I was a part of, and it helped start me down the long path of involvement in other websites and projects. Though I originally applied as a map reviewer, I was too inexperienced to write proper reviews and instead posted news on the site as well as handling some administrative tasks.

Capture

Capture was site focusing on all aspects of UT's Capture the Flag (CTF) mode. It included news, strategy guides, editorials, and more. I was involved with many aspects of the site, including routine news posts and programming on the back-end for the news script.

Nali City

Nali City was the largest custom Unreal and Unreal Tournament map site in the world, with thousands of user-submitted maps and hundreds of staff reviews. The site also had a large forum with thousands of topics on level design as well as general topics. In addition to helping with daily updates and other administrative tasks, I also frequently consulted with the site's director and helped moderate several of the site's bustling forums.

StarCraft: UT / UnrealCraft

StarCraft:UT was a modification for UT that aimed to incorporate the elements of the StarCraft universe into a first/third-person shooter environment. The mod was in production with the permission of Blizzard Entertainment, the copyright holder of StarCraft, and the name was later changed to UnrealCraft at their request not to use the StarCraft name. My work on the project involved UnrealScript work on the mod itself, as well as heavy perl scripting on the site's message boards.

Unfortunately, Blizzard eventually threatened us with legal action if we did not cease development, despite our agreement with them, and stated they were working on their own game of a similar nature. It has recently become known that they began developing StarCraft: Ghost at the same time, a third-person shooter set in the StarCraft universe.

Titanium Wars

Titanium Wars was a modification for UT set in the future, involving armed combat with mechanized robots similar to those in the MechWarrior series. In addition to mechs, there were also tanks and various other combat vehicles. Substantial progress was made on it, and there were numerous internal releases, but the mod was never completed due to various reasons. My work was heavily focused on UnrealScript programming for the mod, as well as general playtesting and feedback.

UnrealTournament.Org (UTO)

UnrealTournament.Org, more commonly referred to as UTO, was one of the top UT and Unreal Engine coverage sites on the internet. I joined as a news writer with Demigod running the site, and ended up learning PHP/MySQL from him and eventually took over full ownership and managerial responsibilities of the entire site. I honed my new PHP/MySQL skills through continuous modification of the site's forums, going so far as to seamlessly integrate the forums with Unreal related Newsgroups. One of my favorite things about the site itself was its design; we had Epic Games' permission to use images straight from the UT menus, and our site resembled the look and feel of the menu system in the UT single player ladder.

Eventually I let UTO fade away, as BeyondUnreal had stepped up to handle the community after the PlanetUnreal Fiasco and I had been spending increasing amounts of time working on Seriously! After unsuccessfully trying to find someone who could run the site, I redirected all traffic to BeyondUnreal and stopped maintaining the website.

Carpe Imperium (Clan Ci)

Carpe Imperium, Seize the Power in Latin, is a clan for the Unreal Tournament series of games, and is often abbreviated as Clan Ci or just Ci. Members of the clan denote themselves as such by preceeding their name with [Ci] - for example, my in-game nickname was [Ci]DarkReaper. Being a part of Clan Ci involved several weekly practices and inter-clan scrimmages (Every Saturday the American squad would scrimmage the European squad...and we...er....held our own...kinda...sometimes...), as well as league matches.

The clan was founded as a highly organized Capture the Flag clan, which competed successfully in numerous ladders and tournaments, but has since expanded into UT2003 and UT2004 and now encompasses Capture the Flag, Bombing Run, Onslaught, Deathmatch, and Assault. Unfortunately, due to time constraints I left the clan sometime around the beginning of 2002.

Unreal Tournament 2003

The release of the UT2003 demo was a breath of fresh air for me, as I'd been a fan of the now-aging Unreal Tournament since just after its release in 1999. Unfortunately, the game wasn't what I'd hoped for from the successor of Unreal Tournament. However, upon learning from a friend that the game's Redeemer and Ion Cannon models were hidden in the demo, I was determined to use them if possible. A day later I'd published the code that unlocked the weapons in the game, followed by posting screenshots of both weapons in action. While this was not a significant amount of work on my part, it did lead to tens of thousands of hits in the 24 hours after it was posted, leading me to have to relocate the images five times due to bandwidth usage. [2]

ASUS Scandal

In 2001, ASUS, a technology company which produces consumer computer parts such as video cards, began offering specialized software drivers for its video cards that allowed users to cheat in online video games[3]. The cheat involved enabling a setting on the video card that allowed the player to see through walls in games, allowing them to see where enemies are located when the enemy is actually hidden on the other side of a wall. This was particularly catastrophic in online first person shooters, as someone who can see other people when they themselves can't be seen could very easily ruin any and all fun in the game for the other players.

Once I learned of the drivers' existance, I was not only infuriated but also worried that I would be unable to enjoy playing games such as Unreal Tournament online anymore. Resolving to have ASUS cease production and distribution of these drivers, as well as help undo some of the damage they had caused, I created a petition and through the help of dozens of gaming sites such as Blue's News, ShackNews, my own UnrealTournament.Org, and others, the petition garnered over 14,000 signatures in under a week. Part of the petition reads "We, the gamers of the world, would like ASUS to completely rid the internet of these drivers. This includes deleting them from download sites, mirrors, and forcing any sites containing the drivers to remove them, as well as doing everything in their power to make the drivers non functional."

Eleven days after initially releasing their drivers, ASUS realized their mistake, removed the drivers, and made some half-assed attempt to help others detect the cheat[4].

Serious Sam

Seriously!

Seriously! is a general coverage site for Serious Sam and other Serious Engine games. It features regular news updates, free file downloads, screenshots of various games, coverage of gaming conventions, the largest Serious Sam message board on the internet, and more. I joined the site in the spring of 2001 as a forum administrator and news poster, doing extensive PHP and MySQL work.

In March of 2002, one year after the release of Serious Sam: The First Encounter, I launched the first version of my proprietary Serious File System. The file system started off as a way for us to mirror all of our downloads to eDome, Fragland, FileFront, and Gamespy's FilePlanet. This was prompted by the extraordinarily long lines that our visitors were required to wait in on FilePlanet in order to download a file. I felt that it was entirely unnecessary for our visitors to have to wait in line for five hours to download a small file from our site, so I worked out agreements with other file mirrors to allow us to upload our files to them at no cost. This provided users with several different choices located around the world, three of the four requiring no lines at all. Currently the file system mirrors to eDome, FileFront, an HTTP and an FTP PlanetMirror server, and Horde.org, for a total of five file mirrors, none of which require registration or waiting in line.

A month and a half later, following the release of the 1.07 patch for The Second Encounter which was first posted on our multi-mirror file system, Gamespy made it known that they considered the file system a threat to their business. Their Hosting Agreement and Terms of Service expressly stated that hosted sites were allowed and in fact encouraged to host files on non-Gamespy network sites to alleviate load on Gamespy's own servers. Despite this, however, Gamespy took action against the site by secretly modifying the source code of the file system in such a way that broke the entire system, rendering it unable to serve files to visitors. This was discovered by the site staff and quickly fixed, but they continued pursuing action against the site, first by granting themselves unauthorized admin access to our forums, which I owned, and banning me, and later by continuously banning any IP address that I used to access Seriously! from the entire Gamespy network.

These actions led to great discontent in the community, and through a series of events Vesto, the site's director at the time, stepped down and handed the reigns over to [dev]Mystic (now known as Louva-Deus), and Gamespy was given the false pretense that the site would remain on the network. In actuality, plans to move the site to an independent host had been underway for several weeks, and shortly following the transfer of ownership of the site, [dev]Mystic went "out of town" for a weekend and was "completely clueless" as to the events that then took place. During that weekend, I logged into the FTP server that the forums were stored on, transferred the entire forums and database over to a private webhosting account I had recently setup, and several hours later all traffic to the forums was being redirected to an off-site location describing the events that had taken place, something that could not have been explained previously as Gamespy simply deleted all posts on the subject [5].

Immediately following [dev]Mystic's return from a short vacation, he was greeted by a message saying that Seriously! was no longer welcome on the Gamespy network. Ironically enough, Gamespy had previously told him they were aware that I owned the forums and had actually been told to take them elsewhere, and that they would do everything they could to help him maintain Seriously! if I were to remove the forums from the site. Instead, we were left without the several weeks we expected to have to use to prepare a new content management system (CMS) for the site to be able to move from the network, and I had to rapidly develop a new CMS in order to re-establish the main site's presence.

Action was also quickly taken to move over all the files on the file system, and due to our three non-Gamespy mirrors we were able to continue to serve downloads to our visitors without impacting our bandwidth usage at all. Once all files were moved to our server they were deleted from FilePlanet.

Since then, Seriously! has served over 3 million files totalling over 65 terabytes of bandwidth transfer. The forums have grown to over 13,000 members with more than 700,000 posts, and remain the official forums of Serious Sam, Serious Sam II, and Alpha Black Zero. The site has received numerous pre-release copies of games, including Serious Sam: Xbox, Alpha Black Zero, Nitro Family, and Serious Sam II.

In May 2005, the site covered the E3 Expo live from Los Angeles, CA. The following year, in May 2006, myself and Vince Roczniak headed to Los Angeles to provide full coverage of the E3 Expo. As there were no Serious Engine products on display this year, the focus was on providing the best coverage that we could, taking into account the brand new PlayStation 3 and Nintendo Wii. I considered our 2006 coverage to be a huge success, considering we stuck together the entire time, had barely any resources, and Vince didn't know much about video games. Our coverage can be found here and here.

I am currently the Owner, Director of Operations, and Editor-in-Chief of Seriously!, and continue to strive to maintain it as the best Serious Engine site on the net.

SerousEngine.com

On May 17, 2003, the first version of this site, SeriousEngine.com, was founded by myself. The goal of the site was to provide a central repository for all Serious Engine information, and that has been accomplished through numerous tutorials located here as well as the general wiki structure, allowing anyone to contribute to the site. Since then, the site has grown and is currently officially handling Serious Engine 2 documentation.

Credited Games

Due to my involvement in various gaming projects, as well as being in close contact with several game developers and actually aiding in several aspects of the games and their design, I have been credited in several games, usually in the "Special Thanks" section or under a similar heading. There may be a game or two I don't know about, but these are the ones I'm aware of.

• Strangelove 2.01 Mod for Unreal Tournament - Credited as Jason "DarkReaper" Rodzik
• Serious Sam: The Second Encounter - Credited as Rodzilla
• Alpha Black Zero: Intrepid Protocol - Credited as Jason "Rodzilla" Rodzik
• Flares v1.0 Mod for Doom 3 - Credited as Jason "Rodzilla" Rodzik (Created mod - 2nd mod ever released for Doom 3) [6] [7]
• Serious Sam II - Credited as Jason "Rodzilla" Rodzik