An Interview with THE ONE AND ONLY, degrave!

Remember when you readers were supposed to vote for our next interviewee?

Drakas placed first, but unfortunately we couldn’t get ahold of him lately. Drakas, however, was followed at a narrow margin by, inter alios, degrave!

Fear: “degrave” is a name we hear a lot around the sauerbraten community, for those who don’t know you, do you mind giving an overview of who degrave really is?

degrave: What do you mean? :)

hades: We mean, do you mind telling us some things about yourself?

Fear: like your age , your hobbies.

degrave: I am 25 years old, studying my last university course, i like programming, lifting weights and riding my bicycle.

Fear: Talking about lifting weights, how much do you lift?

degrave: Not much at the moment, my maximum weight for 1 rep: deadlift 140 kg, squat 120 kg and bench press 100 kg.

hades: Nice.

Fear Would be too much for me :(

Fear: Anyways back to sauerbraten, we know you started your sauerbraten career ages ago, but when exactly? Also how did you find this game?

degrave: I started playing sauer in 2007 and in half a year we founded RB. At the start I found Cube 1 on a CD disk from some game magazine and the most interesting thing there was the source code, but then I found that i can’t understand it, so that was a stimulation to learn C/C++.

Fear: Holy shit, so i guess, we can say you are on of the oldest players in this game? What edition was out in 2007?

degrave:  It was summer or spring edition, not sure which one exactly.

Fear: From what i heard, summer edition was one of the best!

degrave: Yeah, ictf mode wasn’t there.

hades: Also makes RB one of the oldest clans in sauerbraten! How was this founded? Who is “we” that you mentioned earlier?

degrave: When i started playing sauer I often met saper, Undertaker and YA_DURAK on capture servers and we had the same skills and were kicking everyone’s asses, so before the new year we met on an IRC channel and decided to create a new sauer clan and chose a name for it.

Fear: Haha saper was also one of the first players I met in Trooper Edition. :)

degrave: saper and YA_DURAK are some of the oldest players, they start playing cube 1 when it was alive.

hades: So with RB being such an older clan, what (even to this day) keeps you guys strong, active and interested in sauerbraten?

degrave: I am the only active founder at the moment. To be honest, RB is not very active these days. I’m not interested in other games because games take time so I am still playing sauer but not as much as some years ago.

Fear: Talking about RB, can you drop a short comment which describes your former teammate Honzik1, the best?

degrave: He is also one of the oldest players, he was in the same clan with saper in Cube 1, “Gj” or something, so saper got him for us. He was a good player but too impulsive and it made that kurwa leave us with the words “You all noobs!!!”

hades: lol

Fear: haha i like that. :D

Fear: Which of the dead/inactive clan(s) would you like to see active again? And what do you think is the strongest line-up/team in the history of RB?

degrave: I want to see old TC playing capture. Our strongest line-up was degrave, honzik and syem. That’s true only for ectf, YA_DURAK and Undertaker are strong for ctf but I don’t remember us ever playing with that team. saper was strong in capture, anfes in regen and capture, rmax in mapping. :)

hades: Was looking forward to a “3 degraves” answer :D

Fear: Me too. :D

degrave: that is utopia.

hades: :D

Fear: Also, if RB didn’t exist anymore, whats your favorite active clan you would join then?

degrave: I will be the last player from RB who will stop playing. :)

Fear: But dont you have a favorite active clan, besides RB?

degrave: Maybe vaq.

Fear: Awww, I like!!:D

hades: :D

hades: Lets change over to some questions regarding the community.

hades: How do you feel about the current situations in sauerbraten, with ddos, hacking, but also with the tournaments that are hosted?

degrave: ddos is not a big problem, there are always some private servers which are not on the public server list and not reacheable for ddos. When the master server is down, there is always local cache with the old server list. I haven’t seen many hackers in the last years, only some flying guys who immediately get banned. Tournaments are always good, it holds interest to the game.

hades: I agree.

Fear: So hacking was also a problem when you started in 2007?

degrave: it was problem before auth system but after that, there was always around guys with an authkey who can kick cheaters.

Fear: I see, but sadly the number of cheaters increased a lot.

hades: Did you have an authkey back then?

degrave: I have an authkey for a long time. I don’t see many cheaters now, maybe i’m not so active.

hades: Well ever since some guy made a new hack client, people now have the urge to cheat. Usually you don’t see this behavior on psl servers.

Fear: Well maybe you are just playing on the right servers, where no cheaters are around. :) Or lets say few cheaters, since you never can avoid them!

hades: Transitioning back to your involvement in the community. You said you saw a cube 1 disk and couldn’t understand it, so you learned C++, So what was the first script you made?

degrave: My first script was made with perl, but on C you don’t write scripts, you write source code then compile it :) My first modification to sauer was removing reload delay and infinite ammo but later I switched to enhancing sauerbraten server and started remod.

Fear: removing reload sounds interesting:D

hades: :D

hades: My mistake. So remod, when did you make this server mod?

degrave: There were guys from QS who were playing effic with only grenades, so within 2 days I made my first server modification which allowed to set up any weapon set, ammo, health, armour and weapon damage. That server modification was private. Later, when RB got a host for setting up servers we started to think about which server mod to use. There were 2 choices, hopmod and xsbs. Hopmod had memory leaks and used very much memory, then we tried to use xsbs. ^o_o^ made some changes to its irc bot which allowed for it to accept commands, but the xsbs developers didn’t accept these changes because they were too lazy or something. Then I remembered about my own server mod, removed all forbidden stuff from it, added an irc bot, some useful commands and made the first commit to google code. I also made a server available with things that modified gameplay, called remodex branch on google code. The first commit to remod on google code was made on Aug 18, 2010 but I started developing a year ago or more.

hades: Are there any more projects that we can expect from you in the future?

degrave: I am not planning anything but everything is possible, right now I am still developing remod.

Fear: Really nice, I like the new features of remod! :)

degrave: Soon there will be a scoreboard with full player statistic for matches, actually it is ready but it needs final checks and a good theme for web interface.

hades: That would actually be cool, come to think of it. Usually you would have to use a special client for this.

Fear: How much has Sauerbraten changed over the past few years? Also, do you think the game will have any future without major changes?

degrave: I don’t think that it has changed too much, some players left, some came, but it is sad that eihrul switched to tesseract and almost abandoned sauer. Without active developing Sauer will see the fate of Cube 1, but there’s no Cube 3, tesseract, by design, can’t be it.

Fear: I totally agree, its just sad. I’m not able to play tesseract without any fps lags.

hades: My fps in tesseract is pretty sad. Only about 150

hades: That’s off topic though. ;)

hades: So degrave, after years of you playing sauerbraten, what keeps you here in the community? What still motivates you to even open up sauerbraten?

degrave: Competition and fun, anything else related to minecraft, mmorpgs and others is useless stuff.

Fear: Maybe you can give some advice for new players. How can a beginner learn to play like degrave? Furthermore can you tell our readers your PC config and the most important settings in game, which help you to improve your playstyle?

degrave: New players should just play and watch the tricks of advanced players. In team modes, the most important thing is to know where your enemies are, map control and checking the radar, thats enough. Last year I was playing on a laptop and it is much worse than on desktop. The most important settings in sauer are mouse sensitivity, key bindings for weapon switch and turning off all things that take your attention.

Fear: Alright degrave, we really appreciated the interview and thank you for taking the time!

degrave: Thank you, too.

hades: Ok well degrave, it was nice getting to know you better! Good luck and see you in-game!

Fear: Indeed was a pleasure:) Cya!

For previous interviews check out our Interview page!

[Interview created and conducted by hades & Fear. Orthographic revision by Acuerta]