You might know him as one of the admins on the forum Freedom Reborn or as the mighty coder that helped to build up and maintain Dr. Mike’s FFX add-on, but does anyone really know the mystery behind the enigmatic Stumpy? That’s a case FRP2 decided to take on as we shine our spotlight on Stumpy to see if we can lure any secrets out of him. Hmm, I wonder if he’s related to Stimpy (Ren & Stimpy)?

FREEDOM FORCE

You started out as just a fellow member of Freedom Reborn, but you eventually became an admin, no? How did you learn about the game and its community?

A friend in grad school recommended Freedom Force after I mentioned that I wasn’t a video game player, but I had played some PnP games like Champions as a kid. At some point, I saw FF sitting in the bargain rack at Best Buy and I bought it, only to have it sit, uninstalled, on my shelf for months. Finally, bored one day, I installed it and started playing. And playing. And playing. I was totally hooked; I think I got about 14 hours total sleep over the next several days.

I came to Freedom Reborn after googling the game to get some game help (I believe I was – shock! – stuck defeating Shadow) and lurked for a while. Eventually I registered when I wanted to post a question about hero files. People were so friendly and had such an enthusiasm for the game that I stuck around. Being a fairly level-headed sort, I was eventually tapped to be a moderator (along with Renegade, so the “Ren and Stimpy” reference wasn’t far off, as Epimethee noted at the time) and then to be an admin last year.

Names typically have a story behind them, right? How did you come up with your Forum name?

I have the honor of holding one of the dumbest forum names ever. I initially tried registering under a user name that was a chunk of my real name. But, some glitch kept me from activating that account, so I created a new one based on a comment someone made that I sometimes solved problems that were stumping others (“pulling stumps”). It was a complete lark and I sort of figured I would change it when I came up with something better, but people had gotten to know me as Stumpy, so I kept it. The odd thing is that people sometimes assume that I am physically short, which isn’t the case. That has led to a couple amusing encounters at real life FR get-togethers where people are meeting me for the first time….

Python has been described as something that’s difficult to comprehend. Would you agree with that assessment, and how did you go about learning it yourself?

Mastering any programming language requires getting into a certain mindset that’s unfamiliar to most people. But, I think Python is pretty easy to learn, compared to most other languages. Honestly, I am not a computer scientist by training or profession and I am pretty lazy, so I probably wouldn’t have bothered with it if it had been too much of a chore. I’ve had to learn other languages for school and work projects, though, and python may be the easiest to learn that I’ve come across. Can you imagine if FF scripting were in Perl or something? It would be a nightmare!

After I first joined FR in 2004, I was reading through some of the posts on the scripting forum and thought, “There must be a cool way to make that work,” and that got me interested in learning Python. I had never seen a line of Python code before deciding to see how FF missions were coded. Once I saw some code, I was impressed at how straightforward it was, so I read through the tutorial at python.org (still a great intro for people looking to learn), and I was off to the races.

You’re a much better coder than I am, but you mostly stick to the technical side of things. Is there a particular reason behind this choice?

Thank you, though your coding has served you (and the rest of us mod players) well. For me, the focus on the more technical side of the game came upon realizing that many people in the community were already light years ahead of what I was thinking about in other areas. At the time, it seemed like there were only a handful of people focused on coding, which is an interest of mine since I like to poke around “under the hood” when I can. I had initially conceived a mod I wanted to tinker with, but I was very frustrated that I couldn’t do obvious things like create a python list and still have it there when loading a saved game, and there was no scripted way to look up basic info about a character in the mod, like attributes, powers, etc. When I started checking into those things and saw there might be a way to do them which others hadn’t tried yet, I was hooked. By tackling those problems I hoped I might contribute something useful behind the scenes and give those guys who were coming up with cool stuff a few extra tools to use when making the mods, adding features to FFX, etc.

You contributed quite a few things to the development of FFX before and after Dr. Mike retired. What are some of the items you’ve added, and how was it working with the various members of the FFX team?

I think the first bit of code I contributed was a variation on the regTimer() function that allowed passing an arbitrary parameter list to the target function instead of just an event structure. Not long after FFvT3R came out, I wrote the lighting hexer (based on others’ notes on what values worked) that fixes the “dark mesh” issue with converted FF meshes. Both of those bits of code ended up in FFX, and the hexer was included in both SouperIan’s and Lightning Man’s mesh converters.

I’ve added the code for quite a few FFX attributes: from Body Armor to Volatile Storage, but most of those were ideas that others had, and I just figured out how to code them. Probably the most useful contributions I’ve made have been the under-the-hood Python modules that let people store a wide variety of variables (not just floating point values) in a saved-game safe way (missionobjvar), and a way of accessing the fundamental character data (datfiles) and making that easy to use for a mission coder (chardata). Most of that code is transparent to players and even to most mission scripting, but I think it has been useful in improving FFX, and I know M25 has been able to use some of it in his AI.

I must say that the others on the FFX team – coders and non-coders alike – are smart and talented, with a passion for ensuring that good stuff ends up in the final releases. Dr. Mike gave us so much with FFX and it’s been an honor to add to it.

The transition between FF1 and FFvtTR didn’t come without some bumps along the way. If you had a say in the development of the (hypothetical) next game of the series, what are some things you’d want implemented, changed, or kept?

My wish list includes many things that people seem to want almost universally: built-in support for flying melee, a return to the FF1 energy system (with more finely graduated EP cost levels), and knockback effects, etc. IG could fix the powers that don’t really work (like density max, remove active defense, etc.). There are also a few meshes that need fixing because they have bounding boxes or animations that make them immune to melee or beams or whatever.

From a technical perspective, I really wish that the game had better callback data structures for the event sinks. There is a lot we could do if the event structure had damage type (crushing, electrical, etc.), more consistent reporting (e.g. on-hit sinks should work for area and direct attacks), and so on. There are also a few broken scripting hooks that should be fixed (Object_DumpAttr() doesn’t work, Trigger_Power() doesn’t use all of its parameters, Get_ObjectPos() can crash the game, etc.). And, frankly, though I am proud of my datfiles module, the game should have built-in scripting hooks so that there isn’t any character information that we can’t access by scripting.

Inspiration and motivation can come in many different forms. What inspires or motivates you as a coder?

Inspiration sometimes comes from other coders. Obviously, Dr. Mike set quite an example with FFX and it really encouraged me to take up writing attributes. Epimethee did some very interesting work reading the log files and I couldn’t resist jumping in when he released the mlogreader module. M25 has really upped the ante for FF coders with the quality of his AI work. And many others have done interesting things that get the juices flowing when some new idea comes up.

Motivation for any particular bit of coding usually comes from Mother Necessity. I will be playing the game and some aspect of it will catch my attention. Then I check through the code and see that the way to do the thing I was thinking of hasn’t been worked out. Solving that sort of puzzle is a creative process and it’s very satisfying to me. Similarly, when someone posts a technical problem on FR, it’s fun to try and solve it.

Also, this can be fairly tedious, but I try to be something of a stickler for efficiency in my code. I would rather hold off on releasing some code if I am uncertain that people will be able run it without slowing down their systems too much. In my view, fast code is playable code, so if I can speed up something, it’s worth working on that, even if it’s not going to be a new feature.

Although the FFX team seems to be in hiatus mode that doesn’t mean you don’t have some projects waiting in store. Do you have anything in the works that the community can look forward to in the next installment of FFX, if there is one?

I have worked on a couple attributes that I hope to include in the next release. In addition, the FFX team is trying to clean up some of the structure of the main ffx.py file which has hit the limit of how large a python file the game’s interpreter will load. We have a system for taking many of the attributes housed there and moving them to their own modules, and I think that will give us some headroom. I have also done some work on a compiled C module to speed up some common computationally intensive operations in FFX (and elsewhere, potentially). I think that will be useful to keep things running smoothly as FFX grows larger.

Mods are really one of the important things that give this game longevity. If time and resources were not a problem, are there any ideas or projects you’d like to see modded?

I’ve been lucky that in the past couple [of] years my favorite comic team, Legion of Superheroes, has gotten some attention from modders. Obviously, it’s hard to have too much of that. :-)

That being said, if there is one kind of mod that I would really like to see taken on, it’s the freeroam mods that Dr Mike introduced with Patriot City. The whole new campaign topology made available with this type of mod really adds dimension to the game, IMO. And, I like the added element of realism. For instance, a beginning hero should probably be aware of some baddies that he isn’t powerful enough to take on right away, but that he might find to be a reasonable challenge later on with more experience and maybe the help of a teammate.

Finally, many have discovered that their FF skills have transferred into other areas of their lives quite effectively. Has this been the case with you as well?

I am not a programmer by profession, so most of what I do with FF doesn’t come into play for me very often. However, since learning python to do game scripting, I have switched to it for pretty much all of my utility programming. Whenever someone asks if I can write something to do a little task, they know they will be getting a python app.

MISC.

I haven’t seen you participate in many comic discussions on FR, so I have to wonder what type of characters or comics interest you.  Do you happen to like anything from the “Big Two” or independent companies?

I have a hard time keeping up with comics the way I used to. I am a Legion of Superheroes fan and have been since the Levitz days, and I used to follow several Superman-related DC titles and even kept up with the Fantastic Four and Spidey in my comics heyday. But I have fallen behind even with LSH recently, an issue exacerbated by the local comic shop closing. It’s too bad because I poke my head into the comic discussion group every so often and it seems like there is some great stuff out there….

While on the subject of literature, what other types of prose or authors do you enjoy reading?

I am an intermittent science fiction fan – Verner Vinge, F. Paul Wilson, etc. My reading list usually is heavier with non-fiction than fiction titles, though.

As a coder, I can only imagine that you listen to some type of music to help pass the time. What songs or musicians would one find on your playlist?

Maybe most coders listen while they code, but I really don’t listen to music except in my car or at the gym. My tastes are sort of random though – Jem, 80s rock/pop, Jay-Z, etc.

You can’t spend every day coding, so what other hobbies take up your free time when you have it?

For better or worse, I don’t have many hobbies or time to pursue them. I play one other video game (Neverwinter Nights) and I do some woodwork once in a while. I suppose I spend a fair amount of my free time online, keeping up with news and policy issues.

Given the decline in TV and movie quality, I always find it interesting to see what others are watching. What movies or TV shows would you recommend to others?

I barely watch any TV these days; There just isn’t time. I still haven’t even caught up on this season of Heroes. I am planning to keep up with Lost this year and, one episode into the season, I’m not behind yet on that one. :-)

However, I don’t really see TV as having really gotten worse over time. I think our expectations have gotten higher, but there are plenty of shows that interest me, or at least would if I had time to keep up with them.

Like most everyone on FR, I am excited by the comic-book-based movies that have been coming out lately. I am awaiting the next Iron Man and I am curious [to see] how the Avengers movie will be handled. I will even give the next Superman movie a chance, assuming they dump much of what came from Superman Returns.

Words can have quite an effect on people depending on how they’re used. What three adjectives would you say describe you as a person?

Curious. I like to know about things, understand how they work, and maybe see if they can be made to do something interesting.

Funny. It doesn’t come up quite as much on the forums, but most of my friends in real life consider me to be a bit of a wiseacre.

Helpful. For me, it’s satisfying to give people a little boost over the hump if I can, especially if it involves an area where I have a useful skill.

BTW, I asked someone who knows me pretty well for a suggested adjective and her response was “bizarre.” So, that’s probably a more objective take on things… ;-) .

So what’s the lesson we learned here? Well, I learned that Stumpy finds Python to be one of the easiest program languages he’s picked up and now uses it for other applications he makes, he uses the word wiseacre, which I have never seen used on the forum, and he and the FFX team have a few more things in store for their next update. If you haven’t done it already, and you want to check out some of Stumpy’s (and others’) work in action, download the FFX add-on and get in on the fun!