The quake community and game changed my life. Of course, when I started, it was mplayer. I had just traded my Playstation 1 for a 486DX, a huge mistake in eve

The quake community and game changed my life. Of course, when I started, it was mplayer. I had just traded my Playstation 1 for a 486DX, a huge mistake in everyone's eyes. I used my rich friend's grandmother's AOL login to get online. (This continued for 3-4 years, my mother still wonders what the "weird noise" was on the phone lines past midnight). The broken physics and quirks of Team Fortress in QuakeWorld is what really caught my eye. I was hooked like a fiend. I was recruited by many guilds and known for my 9600BP lagging , teleporting and fragging! Not to mention my 1MB cirrus logic integrated video card, it chugged along at ~12FPS in 320x200(?). I got interested in manipulating Quake. Living in MS, there were no mentors for learning to program or script. I went in blind and came out with a few mods. Years later, I ported team fortress with quakeworld physics into Enemy Territory, (Feb/Mar 2004?), but never found anyone interested in doing the sound or graphics. Obviously, my original endeavor into quakeC led to a whole new world of coding and languages! At this point, I had a few life changes. I made a handful of lifetime friends from IRC and my old clans. Now, looking back, it was Quake and my natural ability to tinker that led to my pursuit of a degree in computer science/bioinformatics. I am currently in my junior year. I emailed John Carmack a few times asking for legal advice regarding using shareware Quake 1 models in a development version of my port of QuakeWorld to ET. He gave me good advice and has been a great influence. Oh, and trying to figure out how to make VIS run faster on a BSP map was the end of me. VIS took forever, and I mean forever, to run on my 100mhz computer.