ESLive.com interviews SoUlFaThEr :)

[SoUlFaThEr]

here is this interview. to see the real one you can go to eslive.com, but you have to register there to view the whole interview so i decided since I have mentioned bots-united and some of its members here, i should show it to you all.

here we go

eSLive's founder, SwaT has taken some time to interview a very important member of the gaming community, but one that until now has remained quiet, working in a corner, without ever really getting a chance to get interviewed. The person in question is Tim "SoUlFaThEr" Lippert, from the mapping concept Kreedz. Most of you out there I am sure have heard of the kreedz map, which use the "kz_" alias ingame. Those maps enable the players to play against the gravity, in order to reach the top of the map, which usually can only be done after jumping over hundreds of steps, and where each fall usually means starting over again.


Your name is Tim, and your are one of the key members of the Kreedz concept. Could you please introduce yourself with more detail and tell us more about your position within Kreedz Climbing?

Hi, my name is Tim "SoUlFaThEr" Lippert. I am a 35 year old American and I have been living in Ansbach, Germany since 1990. I stayed here after I finished my tour with the Army in the first Gulf War in 1991.
In the gaming world, I have been extremely active with Half-Life, Counter-Strike. I have been mapping for Counter-Strike and Ricochet for 5 years now and have produced close to 40 fullscale maps for these 2 games(6 for Ricochet). I used to write map reviews(over 70) for Squid on cs-maps.co.uk, probably the biggest map download site on the net boasting over 6000 maps. I am one of the leading POD-Bot waypointers(over 300 custom maps waypointed by me), and was nominated by the Nukebox community to Moderate their main waypoint forums with The Carpenter. I have had a hand in creating a better POD-bot which has been ported to metamod, after Count Floyd gave up the code, with Pierre-Marie Baty, Austin and sPlOrYgOn from Bots-United, with passing on suggestions, beta-testing and I rewrote, with Austin, the entire waypoint editor making it a much faster process now to waypoint the maps and I waypointed all of the official standard CS maps for it. I'm personally sponsored by the Bots-united crew (Thanks again Sebastian) and moderate also the podbot forums there, as well as their mapping and waypoint forums too. I mostly have spent a great deal of time helping others learn how to map and help with fixing their maps problems and waypointing/waypoint helping. Have a Visit my personal site at http://soulfathermaps.bots-united.com for a look at my work. I made the site myself as well, so don't laugh, I'm a Level Designer, not a webmaster!


Presently, I am one of many Admins of www.kzmaps.co.uk in the role of Project Manager/Lead Level Designer for the Kreedz-Climbing Mod for Half-Life2 on the Source engine, and I continue to stand as Quality Assurance with Kreedz and MC-Sk8r for the Counter-strike 1.6 Maps that come through to us(us means kzmaps.co.uk which is run by MC-Sk8r, Bambi, and now Merk, our main Sponsor and owner of Killer Creations (www.killercreation.co.uk). The website boasts over 12,000 members! I help the mappers imrove thier maps before an official release of with. I often fix them myself if the problem is too difficult. Many of the kreedz mappers were jumpers first, and then decided to map, so I help them with thier mapping problems and give them as much knowledge as I can so that they can release an official Kreedz map using the kz_ tag on them. We have specific criteria to meet for this allowance.


How did you get introduced to Counter-Strike? What other games do you play?

I've always been playing games since I was about 12 and had the first Atari and Intellivision game consoles. I kept up with what was new always through my life and later acquired my own computer. I had a problem with it that I couldn't solve at that time, and went to a friends house with it, and he is the man who showed me Counter-Strike. This was around version 7 or something. I found out later that the funny looking blue and green player models he was using (and had given me) were a cheat! Since then, I played about 3 years of CS in Clans, had my own clan and mostly was the tactical leader for these teams. With one clan we reached the top 50 in the German Clanbase ladder. I also began mapping as soon as I found out there was an editor for it in my first CS clan SoUlFiGhTeRs, which is where my name spelling comes from, SoUlFaThEr...as one of the leaders I had to spell it like this and use at least "Soul" in it, and since I was by far the oldest, I used "father".
I don't actually play other online games besides Ashen Empires, which is a MMORPG that has a super nice community. I often get single player games from the stores and, for example, I love the Splinter Cell, Swat, Project IGI, and Hitman series. I did play Americas Army: Operations for a good while even with a clan, but this was short-lived once I was introduced to Kreedz maps for CS1.6. The whole Kreedz concept grabbed me, because I saw, from a mapping aspect, you could do anything with it.


How did you guys come up with the name Kreedz? What about the whole concept?

I came pretty late to this scene but I do know that the entire concept was developed by Kreedz himself, hence the name Kreedz maps, or the tag kz_mapname. He found jumping around in the standard maps to be fun, and found you could do more with the airmovement than most ever use...and made a concept map with shooting and jumping aspects...then he slowly went to only making jumping maps and has now made over 40 of them himself to this date. He stopped this for a while in the beginning until he noticed that his maps were being played on quite a few servers so at this point the concept really began to take off as he began producing one map after another. The concept is simply to jump your way across different sized platforms and eventually, with some level of skill involved, reach the top. Strafing is a very important part of Kreedz maps. Some of these jumps are complete 180° turns around blocks or even more on some of the extreme level maps. Also something quite important is being able to jump much farther than normal by using multiple strafes while sailing through the air. The average 1.6 player can jump 220 if he is trying hard, but some of our "Pr0" jumpers are reaching distances over 250 units using up to 4 and 5 strafes in a single jump! Few can actuallly manage this though. I know that people who dont understand it, watch jump movies and think we are simply cheating, but everything is kept within the normal settings of CS1.6. We have record lists on kzmaps.co.uk for all the maps and have made programms to check settings in demos to make sure they use these standard settings. There are special entities in the maps set up as a timer so we can also check time. It's the record setting that attracts the most people and the cup races we organize through Mirc channel bots(#kzmaps, #xtreme-jumps, and #kzfr on quakenet). The community is presently over 12000 strong and this is only mentioning the main site of kzmaps! We have a large French and German community community also who have thier own websites.


As Counter-Strike is slow paced compared to games like Quake 3 and Unreal Tournament games, why develop such a mod for that game?

Mostly because it began with CS. I think if we were to speed it up by making the KZMod for Quake or UT, we would lose our croud. The speed of CS, or better yet, in this case, HL2, is perfect for such a thing as it is very difficult to manoever through these maps as it is! Speeding it up would make it rather impossible to handle with the present way we create the maps. If I had a huge company in China, I wouldn't move my factory to New Zealand if I intended to expand.


You guys are working on a Half-Life 2 mod of Kreedz. Can you tell us a little more about it and the progress you guys have made on it so far?

When Half-Life 2 came out and I saw these really superb graphics (compared to HL1), I thought it's time to update kreedz maps. I contacted Kreedz himself, and presented him with a few quick ideas about what I had in mind. I know a great deal of developing people from mappers, modelers, to Artificial Intelligence Programmers and thought I could surely gather a group together to give Kreedz maps it's own Modification on this new engine. Kreedz was first suprised and also very happy about this idea so I simply began putting it into motion by searching for people who could help make it happen. It's called Kreedz Climbing MOD right now or simply KZMOD. The MOD will appear in your Third Party games list once it is installed. This mod does not need anything but HL2 to play, so a Counter-Strike:Source installation is not necessary. I must clear that one up, because there is much confusion so far on this topic.
About progress, we have completed the movement coding (compliments of programmer Lord_Draco) and have come as close to 1.6 movement as possible with more ability to bunny-hop than before. We presently have 8 completed maps, 1 "climbers tool" that only is there to break things like a crowbar would and to give you more of the feeling that you are a climber, and 1 player model whos skin is not quite finished yet. We have something that wasnt possible in CS1.6. We have an integrated timer, and the possibility to have multiple timers in any map. One fun thing about our maps is that very often besides the main map, mappers make little, fun, minimaps, but with 1.6 you could really only use 1 timer so the mini maps got sort of left out of the records. Now you could principally make a record on the minimaps as well. We also plan to integrate a checkpint system that was previously done with various confusing plugins involving metamod....for this game its just in there and it'll be one type of system and server admins will have the choice wether they are on or off.
I would say we are at 90% in the developement of the beta which has only half of my ideas in it. 1vs1 mode and 2man races and the bunny-hop mode are not yet included in this beta version. The 1vbs1 and 2man modes would be similar to Ricochet's arena maps, which is a tournamet actually. It would replace the need for our present Mirc run cups, and just could take place online and I plan to have some scripts written that deliver winners and stats to our website. This will all happen at a later date after the beta, as people need time to get used to kzmod, and we need time to program these things. If there should happen to be any programmers out there who may be interested in a challenge....please contact me! Help is always welcome.


What kinds of challenges did you guys have to face so far with your projects?

The biggest challenge so far for me personally, was keeping a Programmer or a Modeler on the team and finding a person who could actually make the entire website in PHP, which has still not happened. Since we are not shooting or even not able to die in the game, and it's only jumping skillz needed, it's hard to find a dedicated Programmer who enjoys the game also. The same would apply to a Modeler, because most of them love making military player models and weapons. Since our game is non-violent, it's not as much fun I suppose. I have seen 11 programmers and 8 modelers in and out of my door since the beginning. Aside from that it was to duplicate the 1.6 movement on the Source engine which I still consider impossible although we have come very close. I attempted to get help from Valve and only got a short message from Yahn Bernier saying that the code is all there you should be able to do it. That really helped a lot....


What other Half-Life mods do you play, if any?

I have seemed to have also gotten myself involved in a pretty popular mod called Plan of Attack. It is sort of a cross between Americas Army:Operations and Counter-strike, but even this is not necessarily a good description. I have been touring around in thier forums helping out mappers with knowledge, making my own maps for it, and one of them may go official even. I have also helped them optimize one their new maps, and am part of their Beta Tester Program. I enjoy playing the game online, it has a good feel to it once you get used to it. It's a bit slower on movement and the fire fights take longer so its a lot of shooting until someone dies. fun fun!!


How many people are now in the crew of the project?

In the early stages we were 11 strong. Right now its only literally 4 people "developing" the game. Me tossing all my ideas to the Programmer, Cr3v3tt3(and earlier Lord_Draco), I made all but one of the present 8 maps, Millet has made one so far and is working on a second, and we have Ic35t0rm doing tool and player models and animations. I'd like to mention Tipii who has also been a part of this since the beginning and is the only original member still around who helps me find people, helps find sponsors and is handling our webpage for the moment. Since we are so few, with such large objectives to reach, it is taking much more time to produce than it actually should. I am not willing to release something half done, so the wait will be worth it. So far the project has been underway for 6 months. The Source engine is new so we all had a lot of learning to do. Recently 2 gentlemen have been added to this crew as movie actors and movie makers. I plan to have them produce an advertisement trailer for the game, which can hopefully be finished before we are ready for the beta release. This should help out a lot getting players to come check us out and even for Valve to maybe notice us.


What kinds of feedback have you been getting from the community?

The community is all compliments so far as they have only seen the screenshots of most of the maps and the models. They constantly offer me their support and cheer us on as a team. That makes you feel good and keeps you motivated. A few selected "Pr0" jumpers have had the opportunity to test it out at its present state and like it very much, especially the ability to bunny-hop better than in 1.6. The strafing, and movement as a whole, I am told, seems better than CS:Source so that's at least something good! I get written about 20 times a day, if not more, about when it's going to be released so thats a good sign also, even if it might get on the nerves a bit hehehe. Overall reaction is so far pretty positive. Kreedz is quite impressed with it and since its originally his concept, I guess we have have done a good job so far. The main thing that I like best is that we are not producing something you have already played a thousand times.....get weapon shoot enemy die, start over. We have a special, unique game concept and this will help us last longer than some of the other mods that are being made.


Different, small events have been based on your concept. Did you ever imagine that Kreedz could have that big of a role within the community? How do you feel about that?

I think it's great of course. I didn't really realize how big KZ was until I bumped into other people who are not actually regular jumpers taking part in the community who were talking about the "Kreedz maps". I also see people recognizing my name when I play other online games! I've been to a few LAN parties myself, here in Germany, and have seen them playing jump maps. In fact me and my friend had set up our own jump server with his linux machine after seeing others jumping around and there was a decent show on it. Maybe someday if KZMOD takes off the way I hope it does, I'll organize a LAN party for the jumpers here somewhere in central Germany. That would be a really cool opportunity to meet some of the guys I know from the scene. We can make a huge Tournament out of it.


What future projects will you be working on once you have released the mod?

I'd have to say that once this beta of Kreedz-Climbing is released, I will continue work on it to keep fresh updates going. With the release of the beta we have not yet reached the goals I have set for it. There is much left to achieve. I wanted multiple choices on climbing tools and player models, the 2 different tournament modes, the scripts that pass statistics to a webpage, and some other special features.
Other than continueing updates for KZMOD, I will most likely be working further on the Plan of Attack mod in the maps section. They only have 2 official maps at the moment and I can help it grow a bit faster. After a 5 year track record with mapping in Hammer, I have become quite fast.


Any last words as we close up?

Well I hope the interview was a good read, and that you now all now know more about the project and I'd like to thank Jeremy on behalf of my team and the kzmaps Admins and Kreedz for asking for the Interview. Kreedz-Climbing is something special as it is the first 3rd person shooter that is non-violent. It's just simply "Gamer vs. Gravity" and Why does this even exist? ....because gaming needed a change.
www.kreedz-climbing.com

Thanks and Peace!

[HangFire]

Interesting, never heard of the kz maps before this, I'll look into them.


Edito: Actually, after looking at screenshots of the new mod for HL2, I've got to say that that is going to make for some absolutely hilarious LAN games for me and my group. Can't wait for a public release

[Pierre-Marie Baty]

long read but good read

be sure to tell us when your beta is ready, I so wanna try it out !

[von Ryan]

Originally Posted by Pierre-Marie Baty

long read but good read

be sure to tell us when your beta is ready, I so wanna try it out !

Word!

My guess is that PMB will be interviewed next... RACC pwnz teh 1

[stefanhendriks]

nothing to add here