RESTLESS ISSUE #1 - Interview with Necros / FM
Conducted by: jmX                   Via: EMAIL
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jmX: Hello Andy, thanks for agreeing to be inteviewed. I'm sure a
     lot of people have been wondering what you have been up to
     recently. I have noticed your absense from #trax. What have
     you been up to?

NEC: well i've actually taken a job at Origin Systems, i graduated
from the state university of new york and i figured well it was time
to get off of poverty and start working for a living :)

jmX: How has your job at Origin been working out?

NEC: It's been cool.

jmX: Do you primarily code or write music, and for which project?(or
can you say)?

NEC: Right now we are working on a new crusader-ish project, i'm 
helping out
with both programming and eventually the audio. Primarily i code 3d
stuff, but we're using some neat lighting systems and some cool 
particle stuff too,
so it's going to be pretty neat.

jmX: What OS are you programming for? And as far as coding at Origin
goes, is the style much different from standard "demo code", ie..stuff 
you
would find up on hornet.org?

NEC: well actually it's pretty strange; we are using Visual C++ 5.0
for code, along with Visual Sourcesafe for version control...
everything is win95 DirectX stuff, it's both a help and a hindrance... 
a lot of the low level blitter and rasterizer stuff is all in assembly 
though... so that stuff is exactly the same as demo coding... a lot of 
people around here are fairly familiar with the demo scene in fact..

jmX: How did you get the job at Origin and what tips do you have for
other
"sceners" looking for a job in the computer game industry?

NEC: i got this job through a this guy VladD on #trax giving me an
email contact here, and that led to my doing contract work for the
first two crusader games; and then they liked me so much they decided 
they wanted me full time :) (and i had nothing better to do ;) ...as
far as sceners looking for a job, well that depends on your
specialty... if you are a reasonably good 3-d programmer, there are
TONS of jobs out there, just start mailing out applications, they love 
people who know how to write a half-decent 3d system... however if you 
are a music scene person, there is unfortunately very little work in
the game industry; very few companies if any use any tracked formats, 
and unless you do really good redbook/cd-audio work, the pickings are 
slim..

jmX: Out of curiosity, can you say anything about the sound system
Origin is
using for their newest projects? Is it tracked? Midi? CD AUDIO?

NEC: well, i don't know for sure, but at least from the crusader 
perspective, it maybe be
cd audio, since GM sucks, and with DVD coming
out, the space constraints are getting less and less limited (this
doesn't mean that .IT/.XM is useless, but it's still a hobbyist thing 
as far as the game companies see it)

jmX: Ok, enough about Origin, now lets talk about you and the scene.

NEC: umm ok :)




****** BEGIN PART 3 **********

jmX: If I spit out the word "Demoscene", what pops into your mind?

NEC: bunch of finnish guys who figured out what a rotation matrix is

jmX: How do you feel about the scene? How much longer do you plan to 
stay
in it, and how active do you feel you will be during that time?

NEC: i think the scene is/was great; however we have to be honest 
here, there is very
little the scene can provide back to you except for personal 
rewards... eventually you have to get into the real world and start 
making some money otherwise creditors will start chasing your ass down 
:) it seems to me that game coding, at least on the graphics side, 
most closely mirrors the scene coding aspects

jmX: Do you have another major release planned? (musicdisk,demo,etc)

NEC: one more musicdisk, i know i've been saying that for a year now, 
but i _will_ finish it (hopefully soon :)

jmX: How do you feel about what some call the "tracking explosion" in 
the
scene, primarily the NA scene?

NEC: i think it's great (but to me seems a bit too much IRC-driven) 
... and people don't seem to want to try to live up
to the standards of the european stuff (in some cases because they 
haven't even heard euro stuff!)

jmX: How do you feel about the NA scene? What do you think is wrong, 
and
what do you think needs to happen for the quality of productions to 
improve?

NEC: well there are a lot of _good_ NA trackers out there, but 
unfortunately the bad ones are the ones that release the most (hmm 
could there be a correlation between time put in to song and quality 
of song? nah ;) ... the problem with music is that everyone thinks 
they can do it but it's actually far more subtle and complicated than 
one might think

***** END INTERVIEW PART 3 ******