Transcript of the interview with Valerio Bigiani a.k.a. The Bigg

Q: How long have you been involved with IE modding? How did you start?

A: I started downloading my first mods around early 2003, but I haven't registered on an IE forum since early 2004. In June 2004 I released my first personal mod (Mazzy the Paladin) as well as got involved in the Refinements team. Since then, I got involved in almost a dozen of mods (both alone, under alias and with/in a team), of which only a couple is not released, as well as contributing random code to another half a dozen of mods and becoming a maintainer of WeiDU.

While I don't recall much about when I started downloading mods (it probably was some uneventful "Hm, you can do XYZ to BGII - let's try it" situation), I still recall about when I got involved with mod making. I had split with my friends over half an year ago after a terrible quarrel, and still didn't recover emotionally from that. I was suffering from depression, and I recall about thinking about suicide. Then, one day, the 14th February 2004, at school, one of my buddies, in tears, informed the class that one of our schoolmates had committed suicide.

That day, I decided I should stop think about doing that, ever. The only thing Luca (that was the name of my fried) had accomplished was giving great sorrow to his parents, his relatives, and all the people he knew, without gaining anything from that. I needed something to concentrate on, but I didn't know what. I got home, and glanced at the BGII discs that were laying on my desk. I thought I'd pick up modding for that game. I recalled that, when I first got the game, I was expecting a quest for Mazzy to get paladin status, and was disappointed to see that there was no such thing in the game. I decided I'd try to make that. Four months later, the mod got released. The rest, as they say, is history.

Q: A two-part question: How did you take over the reins of WeiDU from Westley Weimer? Is he finished with modding for the Infinity Engine?

A: That's a question that I got asked some times already, although much less than I anticipated - when I started off, I believed that I was to face a long uphill battle to gain the influence and trust level to be able to take Weimer's role itself.

Anyway, it all began some time ago (early November 2005, I believe). I was playing around with doing a WeiDU conversion of Arnel's Nalia Romance mod (which I later dropped for lack of interest, although Sir Billy Bob had done one himself), when I noticed the lack of a small feature in the BCS decompiler. "Cruel destiny", I thought, "I can't finish resurrecting this mod without a lot of manual editing due to this missing thing in WeiDU...".

And then it dawned on me that I could actually learn Ocaml [read: O camel] (the language WeiDU is written in) myself - as a CS student, learning a new language and maintaining an existing project is invaluable experience. The next few days were spent getting everything in place to be able to compile WeiDU, reading bits and excerpts of the OCaml tutorial, and trying to edit the source code. On the 5th of November I posted my first diff on the WeiDU boards, and it all went downhill from there.

The next two months were spent coding and testing WeiDU with a number of randomly chosen testers, while I was sharpening my teeth and nails with OCaml and WeiDU internals, and I finally hit the first public release of WeiDU/BiggDU on Christmas day. And that, as they say, is it.

You may notice that Weimer's name is missing in the above summary: when I got more seriously into hacking WeiDU, I contacted Weimer via e-mail to ask for his blessing in maintaining WeiDU in his place, but he didn't reply. In fact, he has currently left the IE modding scene to get involved more seriously into Plane Walker Games and The Broken Hourglass, the game that he and JCompton are funding and writing. With Weimer having written the whole engine of TBH by himself in his spare time (while preparing his doctorate and later starting a daytime work as a teacher), I can see why he isn't active on the IE modding scene anymore, and I'm not sure if he's coming back any time soon.

Looking back, would I do it all over again? Well, yeah, without a doubt. Going from "that idiot who made a lot of crapmods" to "the guy whom you should ask about adding that feature" in the community's reputation-meter sure is very nice, as does being the first person whose requests are satisfied. Also, as I said previously, I think that the experience I got from both learning OCaml and from working on an existing middle scale project is a very good starting point for a junior programmer, which I hope that will be more useful to me long-term than reputation on the IE forums - as much as that is nice to have.

Q: What exactly did you contribute to ToB Refinements other than editing some creature scripts?

A: The first I did with Refinements was editing some creature' script, yes. The original reason why I joined the team was to work on the AI of the Revised Five component, and I started off with writing the AI of various summoned creatures (such as celestials or demons summoned by the new HLA abilities in the mod). Unfortunately, the Revised Five component was progressively delayed, until it got in the vaporware zone, where it still stands.

Another big job I did with Refinements was coding all the tp2 for the Revised Armor and Shields component. It was a good example of the cooperation the Refinements team used to have: T.G.Maestro brainstormed the idea and decided the tables, I coded ~1000 lines of tp2 junk to make it work, and Littiz checked manually over 200 item descriptions *AHEM*. After that goal was reached, the team, which was still strapped for free time to spend on modding, got dissolved by real life, and I now stand as a simple maintainer - all willingness of creating lots of contents for what was my biggest pride in IE modding having been swallowed by inertia and -later- WeiDU itself.

Unfortunately, this is life. While I'd love to code the Revised Five for Refinements, and make proper versions of my other unfinished mods, I simply cannot bring me to sit down and think on making a credible AI for Abazigal or writing a set of realistic banters for a seagull-hating halfling.

Q: Another two-part question: What's the deal with Squaremod? I realize it is entertaining, but seriously, it takes either a really messed up person or a really good writer to come up with such content. Which of the two are you? :)

A: There isn't really a reason to it, it basically boils down to a "wouldn't it be cool if...?" thought, coupled with a vodka bottle (which helps a lot of unrealistic ideas come true). The original excuse with Square was reading a comment by NiGHTMARE in a thread about Circle, and then the next banters were inspired by other people's post (as detailed in the readme).

I'd actually like to write a more serious slash romance between Nalia and Imoen (after writing Square, I also brainstormed some basic ideas), but unfortunately good dialogue is not my forte (and it's not quite like I don't have mods missing dialogue work, in any event).

And, if you're curious as to what kind of person might enjoy writing Square, well, I just had lots of laughs while writing the first chat, as I have a penchant for tastelessness, and I had lots of fun reading the indignated replies to the announcement thread, thus deciding to write further episodes. And yes, I should probably watch less porn to be able to have a fullfilling, normal life. Not that I have any intention to, of course.

Q: Just to prove that IE modders have lives outside of modding, tell me, how happy are you that Italy won the World Cup? Who is your favorite player on the Italian squad?

A: I'll be honest: when the WC started, I was actually hoping for Italy to exit the WC as soon as possible. I didn't feel that players like Totti or Del Piero (who basically are just money whores with all their sponsors and spend their time getting money from sponsors, rather than actually playing soccer and running on the field) deserved any satisfaction from good placement in the WC - they'd just make up for that by signing up with a cigarette multinational or whatever, and I was feeling like that until the game against Germany. After that (and during it), it became clear that the big money whores were just buffoons on the field, while players like Gattuso, Materazzi or Cannavaro were the ones who were winning the games, with lots of running and playing, as a soccer player should do.

So, the thing I'm more happy about the current WC is that it was the lesser players' taking vengeance against the celebrities, who care more about money than the actual game.

As for my favorite player, I haven't followed the games enough closely to give a very good reply, but if I had to pick one it'd be probably Gattuso, just because he's the "worker player" in the team of VIPs. Of course, the fact that he played well helped in this regard, but not by much. It's more a prize to the attitude, rather than to the actual game.

Q: Are there any updates you can share on the projects you are working on, or on new projects to come?

A: While I still sometimes daydream about doing properly my crap projects (Mazzy and Stivan), I simply lack the skills to be able to undertake said projects - mainly writing, but also area making, voicing, etc. In the case of my other released projects, as I detailed in a previous question, I consider them to be in stable phase - I can publish a few bugfixes and/or improvements, but that's it - I don't plan any major additions, at least in the foreseeable future.

Moving on to WeiDU, I have a big things planned: apart from continuing to fix bugs and/or add functionality, I'm planning one major thing: the WeiGUI/WeiDB combo, which I foresee to be a major addition to our community. The concept is quite simple: WeiDB is a revamped version of the Infinity Engine Mod List (modlist.pocketplane.net), improved to allow comments, reviews, and notes on compatibility. WeiGUI, on the other side, is the Infinity Engine equivalent of Synaptics on Ubuntu: a GUI which allows the user to select mods from the database, sort out any possible incompatibility, download the various mods, and installs them in the optimal order. It'll also allow for reading (or submitting) reviews (or numerical votes) of the various mods, as well as choosing from a serie of premade lists. Finally, it could also check for the patch being applied and similar 'dumb' problems, and probably also handle cloning installs as well as installing (Easy)Tutu, which is not a WeiDU mod.

All in all, this should enable normal people to install the mod combination of their dreams without having to spend a week studying threads and posting a lot of support requests.

Moving on to other projects, I may consider contributing to Near Infinity, since I'll have to study Java anyway next year in University (BTW, I'm currently finishing my freshman year in Computer Science, after having given up last year on having Mathematics as a major - I found it too abstract). And finally, I should probably start working on The Broken Hourglass myself soon enough.