How did UberHack come to be?

Before TA, I didn't like RTS games. I didn't care for Warcraft or WC2 in particular, though I had friends who spent hours playing both ... to me, too many things about the interface (number of units you could select, in particular) seemed clumsy and they didn't seem all that inspired.

The first time I noticed TA was the magazine ads with the terrain blurring into a 3D grid. Cool, but not enough to draw more than a passing glance. Then, one day, a guy named Dave Perkins posted a glowing and excited review (9.5/10) of TA on the late lamented OGR.com, and I knew I had to try it. I bought TA the next day, and so it began ... I think that was about a week after TA first appeared on the shelves.

I mostly lurked on Cavedog's forums until the dawn of the Penetrator. [grins] That's really how it all started ... I just wanted a Pen that was worth building. That's why I d/led the HPI utilities, though I eventually puzzled out that the thing I wanted to tweak (turret speed) must be in the COB or the 3DO (not knowing at the time which was which). I dove into countless Pen-related flamewars at cavedog.com, signing off as "Brave Sir Robin, Self-appointed Gadfly and #1 Penetrator Hater." [laughs]

Finally I conspired with a guy who posted as Doppleganger, and we actually managed to decipher which value to change in the COB file (no script compilers back then) to tweak the turret speed ... thus the Penetrator V2 was born.

If I recall correctly, the next thing I did was to write/post the Gaffer (unmodified to this day, amazingly enough), and then I got into customized AIs shortly after that ... which resulted in the posting of BSRAI. It sucked by any current standard, but it was somewhat tougher than the 3.1 AI if it somehow managed to survive the first ten minutes of the game.

BSRAI had been posted for a few weeks when Switeck posted an AI that was just plain better than BSRAI. [chuckles] Somewhere in the middle of it all (this would be summer of 1998, I think) the idea for BAI was born, though it was stillborn until Lord Admiral mentioned that the AI could be given the ability to build human-inaccessible units by modifying SIDEDATA.TDF. BAIv4, the fourth major build of BAI, was posted a few weeks after that ... and it's still killing people two years later. Amazing.

After I finished BAIv4 I was rather burned out on AI tweaking, but I had plans to finish out the profiles/units and post it as BAIv5. Somewhere in the middle I had created a few units (the original Pit Bull). Then, the Cavedog forums erupted into a brutal flamewar over the Phalanx. [grins] Raise your hand if you remember the buggy Phalanx? I thought so. Those of you who don't remember that period of CD Forum history never saw the most amazing series of argument threads in its history ... [laughs] culminating in this massive dissertation that I posted, in which I invited DM Frank to print a copy and drop it in Ron Gilbert's inbox. It was kinda funny, actually.

Anyway, the Phalanx fix was just one problem. The 3.0 engine also had horrible, horrible pathfinding problems ... I mean, REALLY bad. CD wanted to post version 3.1 because it included the Phalanx fix, but they were very close to a major pathfinding improvement that they wanted to include. [grins] Steve Kuo of Cavedog contacted me via email and told me about what was going on, and essentially convinced me to use my powers for good instead of evil on the TA forum. ;)

Some time after that, when it became apparent that 3.1 was probably going to be Cavedog's last major patch for TA (and when I was tired of posting "BSR's TA Bug List" of typos ... about fifteen items in all), I noticed a gem of a data file called REV31.GP3 and realized that I could re-pack it with HPIPack just like a unit UFO.

Thus was born the idea ... I could assemble a fixed version of REV31.GP3, with the typos corrected (Bear brakerate, Thud CTRL+P, etc.), and maybe people could be convinced to use it instead. Then one fateful day it occurred to me ... could I override regular unit stats with my modified REV31.GP3? Yep, no problem. So I posted a question to the Cavedog forum one day ... if you could change one thing about five Arm units (Stumpy, Warrior, Spider, Zeus, and Luger), to make them worth building, what would it be? The concept of UH was born.

I worked with UH for a while in total secrecy (while I was supposed to be doing unit reviews for TAEC!), only hinting to my comrades that I had a cool project under development. Finally one day I explained the idea behind the mod ... basically a hacked version of the Cavedog data file, but the grandest of all possible hacks: hence the "Uber" hack. I've said it before though [laughs], it was never meant to be anything more than a working title. Sheez, what a lousy name I picked for the mod! ;)

Anyway, UH went through about a dozen private builds inside TAEC that progressed exactly like Gecko mentioned ... we'd get together once a week, play games, and discuss tweaks. After a few months of that, we posted the first beta and I announced it on the Cavedog forum, which was the first place that started to clutter up with "UH spam." Wolfshund suggested that we create a dedicated forum for the mod, which we did ... thus the TAEC forum was born.

The rest of the mod's history is more well-known ... up to and including the point where we basically moved the primary discussions from TAEC to A.com. For myself, that was the result of one inescapable fact ... in general, I can only visit and pay full attention to one heavy-traffic forum, and given A.com's bigger audience I ended up spending most of my post time here.

It goes without saying that the scope of the mod has expanded far beyond what anyone ... most especially myself ... ever expected. When I first started tweaking unit stats, there were no script compilers, english-langage GAF builders, or a fully-functional 3DO Builder. The tools that this community has produced for editing TA files are extraordinary ... probably better than the original Cavedog utilities almost without exception (barring a few script oddities). I honestly never would've thought that I'd still be working on it in the year 2000, or that we'd learn how to modify nearly every aspect of a unit's appearance and behavior, or that we'd even be able to tweak parts of the interface itself (multi-directional factories, Big Buttons, etc.).

UH would have been a poor mod (indeed, it was a poor mod) without the time and effort expended by dozens of veteran TAers to play-test the mod and contribute feedback (no matter how harsh, at times!). I've said it before, I'm amazed by what we've accomplished.

-BSR 4/25/2000