Nyles – User
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Nyles | |
My Sandbox
User:Nyles/Sandbox |
My Contributions
Special:Contributions/Nyles |
About Me
My name is Dennis Schwarz. I go by the nickname of Nyles in the BI community. I was born in Germany in 1981 and recently finished studying Game Design at the Games Academy in Berlin.
My OFP History
I started with Operation Flashpoint, when the demo was released in spring 2001, while I was serving in the German Federal Armed Forces (Bundeswehr). It got me hooked immediately and restlessly I awaited the release of Operation Flashpoint in the summer. Playing singleplayer and fooling around with the in-game editor kept me occupied the first months after release, but from early 2002 on I started to play multiplayer games once in a while, as the netcode improved with each patch. Following the astonishing progress of the community to create their own tools and first addons, I continued to play around offline with OFP mainly, until I was introduced to the guys from the Clan -[uTw]- united Teamwork gaming squad, which I joined shortly after the expansion OFP: Resistance. was released in summer 2002. I quickly assumed a leadership position within the clan and helped to build it up again after a small internal crisis at the end of 2002. Together with some new faces, we participated in a number of leagues for Operation Flashpoint, most importantly the ESL and had a lot of success.
During the time of adversarial multiplayer gaming in leagues, I had to learn a lot about some unfortunate flaws in OFP that were regularily abused by many players, like OFP's ability to lock-on and engage targets that were far outside the viewing distance, by abusing the game's external view to observe objectives without the risk of being spotted from the other side of hills or houses or by ambushing other players from bushes they hid behind, firing through them with external view without needing to give away their positions. The entire Operation Flashpoint ladder in the ESL league started to focus on this type of gameplay, having tanks and helicopters dominate games by engaging enemies from great distances, and playing as infantry with heavy use of external view and FOV settings to see other players without being seen themselves, so that retalliation was almost impossible. It was part-time the fault of the game and part time the reluctance of those responsible in the ESL to adjust missions and server settings. At a later time, cheating became another problem seeding further distrust and frustration among the clans.
Slowly turning away from adversarial multiplayer in leagues because of this, I started to look for alternatives within the Flashpoint community in the following time. The Finnish Defence Forces Mod modification, first released in summer 2003, was a very promising project as it modified the original OFP so it was more realistic in many aspects like ballistics, and furthermore increased atmosphere and immersion with its great cooperative missions. I became more and more involved in the FDF sub-community, even though I had absolutely no connection to Finland before, and started to suggest changes and making adversarial missions for the mod, converted over from proven mission concepts of the ESL and others. I always tried to combine the game rules for score based missions with some sort of atmospheric and believable background and enhance the gaming experience that way. While these missions were not well received by the coop-focused FDF community, they helped convert a large number of players from the leagues to start playing FDFmod and to generally play without external view and crosshairs off.
With the OFP Patch 1.91, large parts of the community started to suffer from constant connection problems in multiplayer games, loosing connection to the server for unknown reasons. After a number of beta patches at the end of 2003, which were tested on a couple of community servers (including our -[uTw]- clanserver) and a lot of correspondence with BI's programming department with log files being exchanged regularily, version 1.96b was released in early 2004 and finally stopped the problem, allowing us to continue playing OFP and the myriad of addons and mods, even bringing old friends back that had given up already, because of the connection problems.
Eventually, I joined the FDFmod as consultant and game designer for the planned WW2 expansion, which was released with Beta 4 of the total conversion in late 2005. After commencing my studies at the Games Academy, Berlin in late 2005, I had to put my job as FDFmod developer a bit in the background. I will be working as a Game Designer for future FDFmod releases and am currently one of two clan leaders for our united Teamwork gaming squad.