User:Arthmoor

Hi! I'm Arthmoor, and I'm a TESaholic!

My Background

I've been involved with computer related stuff for quite a long time. Got my start back in the good ol' days of the Commodore 64. Tinkered with a few things in BASIC, played some random games here and there, wrote my own application for keeping track of high scores achieved in the games. It wasn't long before I realized my love of RPGs and got ahold of a copy of The Bards Tale.

I've played many of the single player games that have been released since then. Most notably the entire Ultima series, though not all were finished. Numerous gold box D&D releases, and of course my all time favorites, The Elder Scrolls series.

I developed an interest in MUDs during this time and one could say my early modding got started when I became an "immortal" on one called Crystal Shard. Immortals being the ones who actually run the game as opposed to playing it. I built several areas there during my stay. Then the evils of internet drama and politics brought the place down, so I and some friends there opened our own MUD and spent (or wasted?) a little over 10 years working on it in various capacities, from building more areas to radically altering the source code to do things more how we wanted them done.

For those who may not know, MUDs are basically text versions of modern MMOs and have been around for at least 30 years. Possibly longer as it's unclear if there were any privately run ones before then. Many of them follow D&D style rules and take place in settings that would feel familiar to just about anyone who tried one today. MUDs cover a wide range of genres from fantasy to medieval to sci-fi and even the American old west.

As a result of having worked on our MUD for so long, I developed a decent understanding of working with C/C++. Nothing you could call professional but certainly enough to know how to debug things when they blew up and enough to have written a number of "snippets", analogous to mods, that other MUD administrators could use in their own games.

I also developed a bit of an interest in PHP as a result of needing to have a website for the MUD and the need for a forum at the time to discuss issues relating to it, and to the AFKMud source base we were developing. Since none of the existing forum software did exactly as we liked I ended up doing some development work on the package that most closely matched what we wanted. That spun off eventually into a fork of our own, in collaboration with others who held a similar interest in modifying the code to suit their purposes.

So it's a natural fit that I'd end up interested in TES modding. I got my start with a couple of simple things for Morrowind. A set of merchants who had enough gold to buy things you'd loot - no matter the price. A set of transportation agents who did the circuit around the Ashlander camps because it made no sense that you'd be forced to walk that much distance to get to them all. And of course a completely over the top failed attempt to do a massive conversion of the MUD world Dwip, myself, and several others, were responsible for into a Morrowind mod. We barely got past a few experiments before realizing we were in way over our heads. :)

Oblivion of course is a whole other animal. I've managed to become involved with a number of things since taking a serious interest in it back in March of 2008. I had of course already played the entire game through, twice, and used a few mods, before deciding I wanted to start fixing up my favorite: Open Cities. And I think the rest is history....

Skyrim Modding Projects

Open Cities Skyrim
Live Another Life
Gildergreen Regrown
Bring Out Your Dead
Ars Metallica - Smithing Enhancement
The Paarthurnax Dilemma

Contributions to other Skyrim Modding Projects

Unofficial Skyrim Patch

Oblivion Modding Projects

Open Cities Classic
Open Cities Reborn
Really AEVWD (RAEVWD for short)
Faregyl Village
Vergayun
Feldscar
Molapi
New Roads and Bridges Revised
Cyrodiil Travel Services
All Natural (in collaboration with Wrinklyninja and Brumbek)
Unique Landscapes: Brena River Ravine
Cell Sized VWD Water Plane
A Brotherhood Renewed
Tamriel Immersion Experience (TIE)

I have also been on the UL Council since late February of 2009.

Contributions to Other Oblivion Projects

Unofficial Oblivion Patch - Updates and other fixes from the UOP Supplementals
AFK_Weye - Playtesting and some minor mesh retextures.
Elsweyr Anequina - LOD for buildings, trees, and bodies of water.
Reclaiming Sancre Tor - Phase 1 beta testing and editing + mod conflict resolution.
Various UL mods - Cleanup of old mods that didn't have the benefit of modern tools.
Old Crow Inn - Cleanup and conflict resolution for version 1.5

Other Internet Related Activities

Blog - Where I rant about whatever comes to mind. Lots of political stuff, and other nerdy game related things when the mood is right. Not politically correct. The software used for the blog is also one of my side projects I dabble in from time to time as the need arises.
QSF Portal - A community portal and lightweight CMS package written in PHP, derived from Quicksilver Forums.
SmaugMuds.org - The Smaug MUDs Community Center. A MUD forum more specifically dedicated to users of Smaug codebase derivatives, I am the founding administrator.