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About Spooner

Who am I?

Bagpuss

In the real world, I am Bil Bas and live in the United Kingdom of Great Britainland. If you can’t find a better way to get in touch with me, you could do worse than to try: bil dot bagpuss {at} gmail dot com

I’m a vegan. It isn’t as exciting as it sounds unless you fetishise lentil sprouts.

Ruby

For my own projects, I realised I only wanted to work in languages that were didn’t hate me. Ruby is that language and, although it is slightly limiting regarding performance, in every other way it fulfils exactly what I need; most importantly it allows me to work quickly and to have fun while doing it!

When I’m developing, I use the Rubymine IDE, but also use Notepad++ for throwing together little scripts. When making games, the main libraries I use are Gosu or Ray. I also don’t know what I’d do without Github!

Ancient history

Train not-spotting

I once wrote software to drive the electronic customer displays on railway station platforms. So if your train is late, you can blame me (for ensuring you know that it is late).

Arma-less

I spent a fair bit of time, a few years ago, modding Arma 1, a game with more than its fair share of bleakness (both in terms of quality and subject matter). I started modding because I felt the game wasn’t great, but even after years of work, I never really made the game satisfactory for myself! SPON Scripts were a collection of scripts that extended the game, some of which are still being used, though I finally gave up on the game soon after the sequel was released and stopped supporting them.

SPON Scripts

  • SPON Core - A common library that all my addons used. A significant chunk of this I ported into CBA which is now used in Arma 2 as the base for the ACE mod among others.

  • SPON Holomap - Drew a scaled 3D representation of the world and updated it in real-time.
  • SPON Map - Made the existing game map screen into a networked whiteboard.
  • SPON Money - Shopping interface.
  • SPON Radar - 1950s style radar display.
  • SPON Scuba - Underwater swimming and demolitions
  • And many more!