People reading this blog probably know about PM. He was one of the original SourceMod authors, and forked off his work as the amazing SourceHook, which became the backend to Metamod:Source.
I finally got a chance to meet PM today. He was going from Slovakia to Germany, and stopped in Budapest, Hungary for a few hours. We did a little touring around the Castle District (Várnegyed). There are some great panoramic views of the city, since it is high up on the hills of the Pest side. It’s also a very touristy area, people were speaking English (and according to PM, German).
It’s rare I get a chance to meet people from the AlliedModders community, and it’s great to put a real person to the handle/avatar on the forums. I can only recall a few other times to do this, I got to meet Freecode, OneEyed, and teame06 at various LAN events.
I first heard from PM in 2003 or so. I was writing a Counter-Strike mod and it was exposing a very bad bug: if you removed a weapon on the ground, Counter-Strike would crash, either immediately or much later. I couldn’t figure out what was going wrong and was at my wits’ end, until I got a random message from PM with a mysterious but working fix.
In early 2004 he and I both ended up being the core developers of AMX Mod X. Back when I was still trying to figure out what pointers were, or what malloc() really did, or what the difference between the stack and heap were (you know, all these beginner things), PM was hacking away at the Small virtual machine and doing big rewrites of some of the most terrible AMX Mod code. (I eventually figured this stuff out, and looking back I wonder why PM let me do anything.)
So, meeting one of the most awesome Half-Life/AlliedModders community developers after six years was really cool. I hope I get more chances like this in the future. And thanks to PM for putting up with our boring traipsing around the city!