[img|right]http://img181.imageshack.us/img181/8206/nekkf.jpg[/img]Since the start of "adi's corner" I've been busy interviewing a lot of people to provide a really nice coverage for Crossfire and it's users.

In this article, let us hope the first of many, we will be starting with a brand new interview with the croatian chaplja.

Coming from literally nowhere, Tomislav has managed to turn everybody's heads in the Enemy Territory scene with his adventures throughout Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory's history.

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Hi chaplja, could you introduce yourself and explain how you started and progressed through competitive gaming?

Hi, my name is Tomislav and I'm a 21 years old gamer/programmer from Croatia. Most people know me by nickname chaplja which I'm using since 2003.

I've started online gaming somewhere on the end of 2002, mostly playing Vietcong multiplayer demo. Although it was hard to play due to a 56K connection, it was fun. In 2003, I was a regular subscriber of one of the local PC magazines and they distributed the ET demo on the CD that comes with the magazine, so I gave it a try. Needless to say, I liked it from the very first moment. Soon I joined a Croatian clan called Love&Peace and upgraded my connection to ISDN in order to be able to play clan wars. As the time went on, I was getting slightly better, got an ADSL connection, a better PC and have been in a couple of clans, all Croatian, though, as I never found it fun to play in an international clan. However, as the Croatian scene was starting to die (what made it good is that it was different - in a positive way - from other countries), I was getting bored of it, which resulted in me doing not so nice things after I joined *nixCoders in the early 2006 if I remember correctly. :)

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"chaplja", why exactly did you choose this quite unusual nick?

When I installed the game, I had to type a name so I randomly picked Charlie Chaplin. It sounded stupid, so a guy from my first clan shortened it to chaplja when we used Roger Wilco for ingame comms, I liked it and so I instantly changed my nick to chaplja, and never considered changing it as it's a unique nickname and I don't see people online using it. In Croatian language, it's the name of a bird, but it is in no way related to it.

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What are the most important elements in ET that make you like the game more than other shooters?

Unfortunately, I can't say that I like it these days more than other games because I don't play ET - I connect to a server a couple of times in half a year and that's pretty much it. The death of the Croatian scene, which I mentioned above, is one of the two reasons why I was getting bored of ET. Second, more important reason, is that ET was slowly being changed into another game, resulting in the game that I code an anticheat for today, not being the same game which I played 5 years ago. Also, I don't think think it's reasonable to try to find elements of the game that made me play it instead of some other game in the first place. It was the first non-demo game I ever played and I got addicted to it. As the time went on, I got used to its style, so the only game(s) that got my attention where the Quake ones due to the moving being almost the same. If I tried ET after first playing Counter Strike for a couple of years, I'm pretty sure I'd quit it quickly and continue with CS.

I'd just say that what makes it good is that it's cool and it's fun to play. What makes me a little bit sad is that I don't think we'll see any game similar to ET in the future. If I ever decide to play some game more actively, I believe it'll be a game from the Call of Duty series. Tried CoD4 on publics and played a few wars with Killerboy, it's fun.

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Talking about coding, before you've started with SLAC you coded tons of cheating applications for games such as ET & QL. What made you start coding these hacks?

I didn't code the cheats so I can use them to gain advantage against other players - it was a fun challenge to make something undetected. After joining *nixCoders and working for some time on the linux hack, I decided to port the linux hack to Windows and keep it undetected while still being open source. Although it was not morally nice, that was a very fun and challenging task from the programmer's point of view (though I must admit it was less of a challenge than I expected it to be :)).

As for the cheating itself, I was never doing it in such a way that I'd try to hide it (perhaps testing human aimbot a few times on publics). I'd mostly have some fun on publics in the style of the ph33r movie, which I believe most have seen, but that's where it ends. I got accused a couple of times that I did use some cheats in clan wars, however that is not true, I would never use anything in any type of a match (be it an official match, a prac or just a mix, it's not something I do).

Another thing people have often brought up in certain discussions about me is my involment with ETACE/AntiPro and later the project abandonment. Quite a lot of people believe I made cheats for AntiPro after quitting the project. I'd like to use this opportunity to one more time say that I did not do it. Although I've, unfortunately, switched sides a couple of times, I've always tried to at least be honest about what I do and what I will, or will not do. After letting foxdie continue the project, I gave my word not to ever make a cheat for AntiPro, and so I did not.

Also, there are people who doubt my honesty with SLAC. I can't blame them for that - other than a few people who are exceptions (and who do nothing but post lies), I understand everyone who is still questionable about me. I had fun with cheat development and I used that opportunity to get some programming skills and knowledge from a few areas of IT and programming. I'm 21 years old and it's time to move on in life, it's time to do things I want to do in life. Since I want to work as a programmer in 10 years, developing cheats certainly is not something I can waste time on and use as a reference to previous works when applying for a job, so you do have my word that I will never again develop cheats.

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Looking at hacking and it's history through out Enemy Territory's history we've seen coders such as pale, Pansemuckl and so on. Have you ever worked with some of them? And if you should pick one of them as the best and most experienced coder who would that be?

No, I did not, and you will never see me associated with either of those two. I've worked with a group of coders in *nixCoders on the linux hack and with another group of coders who joined ETH32, a project which I started to bring the open source team-based development to the cheat coders on Windows. The people I worked with are in fact nice and differ in personality a lot from the two you asked about. I'm not going to list names here as there's many of them and most are not interested in cheat development anymore. As for who is the best, it's hard to tell because I got to know some really skilled people. A couple of them are still developing cheats from what I know, though, so I'll try to answer it on a different way in order not to make advertisements for those who decide to play with SLAC: thanks to my previous work, I can say I am still in contact with some skilled coders who, just like me, decided it's time to move on from cheat development, which resulted in making some plans which may make us work and do business together in the future.

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Looking at Speedlink Anticheat, how did this all start? ET has used Punkbuster since it's launch. Do you personally think that you've created a much better anticheat than PB?

ET had an anticheat since its start, however the lack of support lately resulted in people not even using it. Obviously, a game such as this one cannot be played without an anticheat. I was given an offer by SPEEDLINK to do it and after some discussion with a few people from the ET scene, I agreed to it and the project development started.

Detection-wise, SLAC is not yet finished, but I can say it already detects some cheats which use methods previously used anticheat didn't detect. Although this may surprise some people, I wouldn't say EvenBalance are doing a bad job (although it can be done much better) mainly because I look at PB as a public-servers oriented anticheat. They support many games where majority of players are people who join public servers and have some fun there. I'd say they're doing a good job in that area on other, more popular games (decreased ET support probably happened for a reason). However, SLAC is built with competition in mind and so it works slightly different.

Because my opinion is that these anticheats have different purposes, I don't want to judge who is doing its job better. An anticheat designed to primarily keep public servers clean is performing well if its authors quickly detect publicly released cheats. On the other hand, a competition-oriented anticheat has to deal much more with private cheats, which is harder work and I'd say that as long as you can't google a private undetected cheat which can actually stay undetected for a longer period of time, the anticheat is good.

There are many cheaters in ET, it's a fact, but there was so much hype about it that people think there's more than there really is. Then people made more hype than needed about SLAC, which resulted in people getting an impression that SLAC is going to stop all the cheats out there. Simply said, it can't happen. No anticheat on PC will ever succeed in doing it. Cheating is not much of a problem on consoles as those are pretty much closed platforms compared to PC where a user can run any piece of code they want and nothing is controlled by hardware. However, I will give my best to lower the amount of cheaters as much as I can.

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Talking about Speedlink, I know a lot of people have thought about this question. The amount of money SL gave you to create SLAC, is it something you would like to share with us?

I don't think that is relevant to anyone in the community, so I'd rather not answer that.

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What is the most memorable moment in your coding but also gaming career?

Well, I don't have any big gaming achievements since I never played on the very high level, so it's hard to say, especially because I haven't played the game seriously for the past 4 years. But if I have to choose something, I'd say the time when I mostly played 3v3 wars with gmx and acozz were fun and thus memorable for me. There were some really nice leagues (such as SM-Ligan) and clans we were friends with. Grenades were my primary weapon in ET since always, which worked better than expected for a 3v3 layout, so I'd say it's something I remember the most out of my gaming career as it was fun to play slightly different from the others.

As for the coding, both cheat and anti-cheat development often bring many challenges so there's many things to remember for me, so I'm looking at my progress and self education that I want to remember myself of, rather than some specific moments. I didn't first learn how to code in lower-level languages, and then started writing cheats - I learned programming by making cheats, so today I can't say whether I regret or I'm happy about it. Morally looking, it was not a good approach to programming education, but it certainly made me learn things faster because it was somewhat fun to do it, so I will always remember these days and moments as something that was good for me.

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As earlier mentioned you've played some games with Killerboy in CoD4. We all know that Killerboy has done a lot for this community but what do you personally think about him?

I appreciate his work just like many others as he's doing a good job and has put more time into anti-cheat efforts than majority of people, so there's absolutely nothing to complain for that matter. But he has a problem for which I also got a bit mad about, and that is that he likes to talk a lot and sometimes doesn't even think about what he's going to say, instead he instantly reacts to certain things. Sometimes it looks worse than it really is, so people get a wrong impression of him. I have to admit that prior to starting SLAC, I had a different opinion about him, but now he seems like a normal and cool guy.

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How does a perfect night out look like to you, hitting the clubs with friends or rather pick up a movie with a girl and dinner afterwards or perhaps just sitting in front of the Computer chilling with your mates?

Being a programmer, most people I talked to assumed I don't go out, especially on weekends, however I'm a completely different person from that. I without doubt do spend most of the day time working on the computer, but I always leave time for friends and social life on evenings and nights. I'm currently in Bratislava on student exchange for one semester and people I met here don't go out too much, but it was fun a couple of times we went out to clubs here. But the lack of fun I have when I'm home makes me very homesick and I can't wait to move back to Croatia permanently.

When I'm home, I'm pretty addicted to going out, both during evenings on week days and long nights weekends. As for Saturdays, I don't remember missing a night out more than a few times in last 5 years when I'm home unless I was sick - we have a completely different habits here than people do in very large cities. The fact I don't live in a very large city made me make much more friendships than people do in the larger places where you can't help it, but lose track of people after finishing first elementary and then high school, and later going to university. When we have birthday parties here, it's a perfectly normal thing to invite 20-30 people who you've known for a very long time and are very close friends with.

I mostly go to electro house places, but also visit places with turbo folk music, a very popular genre on Balkan. It's a genre which some people dislike, but the fun times are guaranteed. :) All in all, I'd say I'm pretty satisfied with my habits as I get to do really a lot of things I enjoy without one interfering with another, so I don't feel the need to change something in my life regarding this point.

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Mentioning Turbo Folk which is a really beloved genre by myself as-well, who is your favorite artist?

I don't have a favorite one as I don't listen to it alone as much as I do house. It's the atmosphere on the places it's played on that makes me like it, so I enjoy listening mostly to all the artists.

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What about your social life, do you have a girlfriend? And how would you rate yourself? Being a romantic or aren't you into all that "mushy" stuff and rather straightforward?

I had a girlfriend prior to moving to Bratislava, but relationships on long distance don't work very well, so we had to break up as not seeing each other for almost half a year would be hard. I'm not really a romantic guy, I'm type of a person that talks and does funny things all the time, so I just try to be myself, which is what people seem to like about me.

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You've serviced a lot of players through out time, I don't know if you still obey the client confidentiality you've offered when selling your hacking applications. But have you ever had one big name among the many that bought your applications?[/b]

No. If I wanted to sell private cheats to big names, those cheats would have been different from what people are used to and it would be very unlikely anyone would get caught, but I never did it. One of the reasons is that I didn't feel much like doing it as I always had some respect for the competition scene sine I was part of it. The other reason is that if I decided to do it, it would have been done for another game and it seemed a bit boring to me. Probably 99% of my dedication went to development of publicly available programs and information. But I must say I had some GREAT offers for different games from both users and other cheat developers (to do some work for them) while I was thinking about and advertising private cheat business, offers which, from what was requested, seemed to be coming from much more serious cheaters than what ET community is used to, but the truth is I was never really doing anything special private-wise.

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Do you think that you have missed out on certain things because of your ET/coding career?

Perhaps a couple of things, nothing too important. If the only thing I was doing was playing a game, I'd probably regret something, but considering I've educated myself on programming, I don't regret putting time into both gaming and coding.

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Enemy Territory has a long history and has always had a very loyal following. Do you understand why many tournaments don't include the game or offer very low cash prizes for it?

The problem is why it wasn't done before, not now - I'm pretty sure it's too late now to make them interested into this game as much as they are interested in other titles. As for why, I don't think I'm the right person to answer this correctly, but I'll give my opinion. Although it was 7 years ago, my guess is that other than the lack of marketing from the publisher, more should have been done by the community in the start of ET (e.g. discussions with LAN organizers), but this is just a guess and I wouldn't like to go too much into it.

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I have a question from the big boss here at Crossfire, Tosspot: "what made him change his ways"?

Around the time I was given the offer to work on SLAC, as I already mentioned, I realized cheat development is not something I should be doing and that it was becoming a waste of time, so I was actually about to quit cheat development and do something real - it was supposed to be a security/programming oriented project which I still have plans for, so I'd say SLAC came in the best possible moment as it's also a type of a security application.

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If you were sent into exile on an island full of savages, what kind of weapon from this game would you take along to defend yourself?

A box full of grenades image: small-smiley-027%5B1%5D

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With this question our interview comes to an end, thanks a lot for your time and answers and good luck not being too homesick. Any shout-outs? Or anything you want to say to the readers?

You're welcome, thank you, too. As for the shoutouts, I could make many and don't want to end up forgetting people, so I'd rather skip this part. :) For the readers, I guess I could use this opportunity to apologize for the bad things I've done before, things which I'm trying to fix now with SLAC. See you around!