Seth Boyce

"Starbound: Vanta Race Mod"

Starbound is an extraterrestrial sandbox adventure game. Chucklefish Games, the developing company and publisher of Starbound, has made it possible for its players to build and take part in custom content for the game. Custom assets are created using JSON and Lua scripting, both of which are versatile and easy to use. JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) is a lightweight data-interchange format that is easy for people to read and write, as well as easy for machines to parse and generate. As its name implies, JSON is based on a subset of the JavaScript Programming Language. JSON itself is a text format that is completely language-independent, but it also uses conventions that are familiar to programmers of the C-family of languages, including C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, Perl, Python, and many others.^{[What is JSON?]}

On the other hand, Lua is a powerful, efficient, lightweight, embeddable scripting language that is used in many industrial applications, such as Adobe Photoshop Lightroom. It has an emphasis on embedded systems and popular games such as World of Warcraft, Final Fantasy XIV, and Angry Birds. For game developers, Lua is almost a requirement due to its fluidity. In the realm of interpreted scripting languages, Lua is not only the fastest in fine-tuned benchmark programs, but also in real-life applications. Its portability adds to its swiftness in processing, and makes it the ideal scripting language for just about anything!

About the mod

The Vanta Race is a continuation/port of a previously-leading race mod: The Nightars, which was created by Starbound Community user iMisterX. While this mod is technically a continuation of someone else's project (the previous author of the content had to drop it for real-life obligations), I was able to learn a lot about how JSON is structured, and continuously learning about Lua and how it can be used for practical purposes.

Thea RP Community

This is my primary project, the Thea RP Community website. While it was done mostly with pre-built packages that required little setup, I administrate all aspects of it. This website serves to network an entire RPG-type roleplaying community, and if you were to take a look at the website itself, you'll see that I've put a lot of effort into making it visually appealing. You can get a glimpse of the entire website by following the links below:

• Forums
• Wiki
• News and Updates
• Community Support Center

Omni Project: Meter Combat System

The Omni Project is part of an ongoing project that utilizes Second Life as its primary platform. The Omni Project: Meter Combat System ("OP:MCS") is exactly as it sounds; Second Life has a stock combat system called "Linden Damage System". LDS is great for the myriad virtual military communities in Second Life, but not so great for role-playing communities where combat isn't a focal point. OP:MCS is designed to be modular, in that it can be tailored to specific communities on a case-by-case basis. While Second Life's Linden Scripting Language (LSL) is versatile, it is limited in the amount of data it can process. OP:MCS is designed to work around this limitation by using an external database server for larger amounts of data handling, as well as resolving the issue of an in-world script suffering a catastrophic memory failure and losing all data after a reset.

The first, official project of OP:MCS is the Thea Combat System, or TCS for short. The TCS is a specialized variant of OP:MCS created for use by the Thea RP Community, and serves as the "proving grounds", in a manner of speaking, for developing other variants of the OP:MCS. Once testing proves the system feasable, OP:MCS can be marketed as a customizable system to parties who are interested in a combat solution if they so desire.