Icey MultiEdit Easter egg

[glenster]

I guess this qualifies as a programmers secret reference--an Easter Egg:

 

Icey

[email protected]

 

Icey made MultiEdit for "III." MultiEdit leaves a "generated by" note at the

top of pages it generates, and the VC carcols.dat file, at the top of the page,

has:

 

# Generated By MultiEdit V1.3 On 14/09/2002 22:46:02 [http://icey.gouranga.com]

 

Thanks to Ben "Cerbera" Millard and Icey for telling me about it.

 

****

 

"Vice City" came out on PS2 before PC, and Icey used the PC version, so he

learned of it from a letter from Spooky:

 

****

 

Segment of letter from Spooky to Icey

 

'ello Icey,

 

It seems R* north have been using your proggy for GTA:VC! This is taken from

the top of the GTA:VC 'carcols.dat' file...

 

"# Generated By MultiEdit V1.3 On 14/09/2002 22:46:02 [http://icey.gouranga.com]";

 

...well done man, they must have been impressed .

 

stys,

Spooky

www.GTA3Mods.com

 

****

 

Icey

 

A lot of other people e-mailed me about this over the next few weeks. People

thought it was great that Rockstar had used a tool created by the community.

The news was posted on several GTA modding sites, including gta3mods.com by

IllSpirit.

 

On 9/22/04. I received a message from IllSpirit. I'll just include the rele-

vant part:

 

****

 

Segment of letter from Illspirit to Icey

 

I was chatting with one of the tech directors over at R* about user tools a

while back, and he had this to say about MultiEdit, et al:

 

"Although we check out the mods that are around we don’t usually end up using

them. The header that appeared in carcols.dat is there because an artist

checked out MultiEdit. I believe we haven’t actually used it to edit the

colours, though.

 

"A lot of the mods are pretty impressive pieces of software. Especially since

the authors have to figure out the formats of data files etc. However, it’s a

lot easier for us to write tools ourselves since we know exactly what’s going

on. We also have to be able to change the tools when the data format changes

(which happens a lot between games).

 

"Because of these reasons we tend to use our own tools. As far as I know we

don’t use any mod tools at the moment."

 

Later on in some random discussion he mentioned that most user tools are a lot

easier to use than the official editors. Not really a particularly useful bit

of info, I just thought you might be curious.

 

****

 

GTW note

 

So maybe someone used MultiEdit but is unwilling to say so for legal reasons--

the warranty at the end of the booklet indicates Rockstar doesn't officially

support mods, probably so as not to have to take responsibilty for problems that

could come up with badly made or installed mods.

 

Using MultiEdit creates a "generated by" note at the top of files it creates.

Maybe someone didn't use MultiEdit, but how would just checking it out leave a

message, or lead someone to want to leave a note to themself about it, that

said, "generated by," at the start of the file?

 

The response from someone at Rockstar isn't clear and certain. The legalese

that shrouds the thing is more likely to create uncertainty than that it should

have been hard to check and make sure about otherwise. But it seems more likely

to me that someone used it, then were legally prevented from speaking suppor-

tively about a mod, than that it wasn't used but someone left a "generated by"

note on the file.

[jarjar]

Wow, I never noticed that before, I did some research and found you are right:

 

 

One question though, how did you manage to get those discussion transcripts?

 

I wonder what the real story is, it would be odd that they would just try it and save, or even that either way they would leave the "generated by" tag line in the file. Maybe it was used as a way to just thank the author maybe, hum, definatly something that would be interesting to find out.

[Demarest]

Very old info. But always a good story to tell.

 

@jarjar: Mind cropping the image so we can read the topic?

[glenster]

I added a section about Rockstar support of modding to the start of the

modding section, section X, of my SA walk-through. It's partway down the page

at:

http://www.freewebs.com/glenster1/glenstersglimpse4.htm

 

I got the idea to do it because I thought Ben "Cerbera" Millard came up with a

lot of interesting stuff, and recommended I contact a few others, including

Icey, who sent me the information about the letters and said I could include it.

I thought it would be interesting for people who don't know about modding or

just know about it because of the HC scandal and think it's bad, or at least

that PatrickW is.

 

I also got a letter from PatrickW, which included some information about how

he found the bit to change for HC, in the section about that, X.9.a, farther

down the page.

 

If anyone thinks of anything interesting to add to those things, please feel

welcome.