-= Gametoast.com =-

Hello all!

For years i wanted to thank the gametoast community, but somehow I never got around to actually doing it.
I guess I am a little late to the party, but I am doing it now anyway.
(And regardless, of how many people, who were around when I was around, are still going to read this)

I would have never started modding SWBF2 without the gametoast community. It was and still is the most helpfull and civil community that I have ever known.
I learned english from reading and writing on this forum.
I learned 3d modeling and texturing.
I learned to familiarize myself with complex systems I did not understand at all. (with the great tutorials and helpfull community members)
I learned to self-organize and to work together with others.
I learned how to find resources to teach myself new topics.

All these things helped me tremendously when I studied computer science and I\m still profiting from them today.

For this I want to thank the community, the moderators for shaping it and guru for keeping this site alive!

Since I stopped modding SWBF2, I sporadically worked on understanding and modifying a few other games, but not in the same extent as SWBF2.
Through university and now other obligations and activites, I had and still have no adequate amount of time to dedicate to modding.

However, Gametoast shaped me tremendously at the time I was active here and I will never forget it!

Great to hear from you again, D.U.C.K.! Glad to hear you're doing well.

Cheers Duck,

I can sign this statement one by one (just that I study electrical engineering)

And actually you had a big part in the progress that made me become a modder. Always wanted to make a RC model that comes close to yours

And finally I even reached your GT VIP rank it's just a pity that the old Yoda rank icon is gone

Good to see you, dude. You've always been a pleasure to have around!

I'm glad you posted this! Seeing the word "curriculum" jogged my memory of some thoughts I'd had recently of how GT has contributed to my career, in my own strange way. Might as well share them here!

I teach elementary music, which you would think is totally unrelated. But weirdly enough, all the time I spent modding Battlefront as a teenager has helped me get a position on a task force that is updating the school district's music curriculum. I'm one of several people who is responsible for creating new music scores in Finale (very powerful music notation software, but with a high learning curve), and more to the point, I'm the person responsible for doing the final editing pass on all of the music scores created by everybody else. The reason I have that role is because I know my way around Finale far better than anyone else on the team. And the reason I'm so good at using Finale has absolutely nothing to do with my musical abilities. It's all the soft skills I learned from countless hours modding BF2 back in the day. It taught me how to research and solve problems. It taught me to bug-fix. It taught me to be patient. It taught me to develop a methodical workflow. It taught me to keep your work clean on the "back end."

Most importantly, it taught me to be absurdly detail-oriented.

No matter how much time you spent making a custom map, you could guarantee that within minutes somebody would find that floating rock you left in an out-of-bounds corner. Or that tiny sliver of floor that was missing collision detection. Or that bit of bad pathing that caused the AI to get stuck in weird places. Or in one very specific example, there was that Taris-themed SWBFFiles contest where I made an underworld map that needed a simple black sky box. I foolishly took the shortcut of just removing any reference to a texture in the .sky file...looked fine to me, right? Well, it turned out that doing that was a terrible shortcut, because on some other peoples' systems, missing textures would instead appear grey or blinding white. I'm still a bit salty over that.

We finished our first round of curriculum updates last year, and I went about editing those hundreds of scores in the exact same way I would go about polishing the final version of a mod. Checking every last minute detail, even the ones you would think nobody would ever care about. Tearing out things that were done in an inefficient hack-job way, even if they appeared good enough on the printed score, to re-do it the "right" way. I'm super proud of the finished product. But again, that success had absolutely nothing to do with my music degree. It was ALL descended from the things I learned on Gametoast, whether by reading tutorials, or by gaining valuable life lessons from my mistakes.

Eggman wrote: ↑

Fri Aug 28, 2020 6:40 pm

No matter how much time you spent making a custom map, you could guarantee that within minutes somebody would find that floating rock you left in an out-of-bounds corner. Or that tiny sliver of floor that was missing collision detection. Or that bit of bad pathing that caused the AI to get stuck in weird places. Or in one very specific example, there was that Taris-themed SWBFFiles contest where I made an underworld map that needed a simple black sky box. I foolishly took the shortcut of just removing any reference to a texture in the .sky file...looked fine to me, right? Well, it turned out that doing that was a terrible shortcut, because on some other peoples' systems, missing textures would instead appear grey or blinding white. I'm still a bit salty over that.

HAHAHA I actually did the exact same thing! I was showcasing my Europa map campaign at Vancouver Full Indie a few years ago. A lot of the map was still in greyblock, and as such it wasn't textured. On my desktop this caused all the objects to appear white, but on my laptop they were all black! So I was literally bugfixing at an event because nobody could see the .

On that note, I don't have much of a curriculum story to tell, other than that I am now a Battlefront modder-turned-Gameplay Scripter at a AAA studio. 8D Honestly I would not be where I am today without Gametoast, so a big thank you dearly all of you who have helped me along the way.

Great to see you guys here and doing well ! I love gametoast and it’s all
We’ve all done here! Thank you guys for making it a 20 year adventure!