Q. What Plugins have you developed and what do they do?
A. Spellwords, Bandit Sight/2, Bandit Chat, Bandit Trading Partner, and Bandit Monarch.

Spellwords - A tiny Plugin that translated magic spell words that are said by the caster into spell names. Probably the only use for the Plugin is for PK'ing. The source code for Spellwords later got incorporated into Combater by Zyrca.

Bandit Chat - A chat interface enhancing utility; beside the usual spam filtering, caps-shout lowering, quick button interface to common functions, it also does a few cool things like it can pause scrolling of chat, auto-complete names of people you're sending tells to, has a fully customizable aliasing capability like in AC2, keeps a history of last 100 people who you had conversations with, and finally keeps a list of the last 6 people who you talked to in a HUD. I developed Bandit Chat because I was constantly in tell hell when I played and it was very tough for me to keep up without some sort of a tool; as I often had conversations with dozens of people at a time.

Bandit Trading Partner - A very simple Plugin that tells you when was the last time you traded with a person, so that when you check trade bots you know when the last time you checked the bot's inventory.

Bandit Monarch - A Plugin that is capable of using /allegiance info command to run thru a full allegiance tree and build a database of characters in one's monarchy. Besides generating an XML file with a tree of everyone in the guild, one can use it to get information for players without the annoying 30 second timeout. It also has capability to "listen" to chat and watch surrounding area for guild mates and record pertinent info. Very useful to put it on a buffbot at a mansion to see who is active in a guild.

Bandit Sight/2 - I think everyone knows what does.

Q. What was/is the 1st Plugin/3rd party Application you programmed?
A. First real Plugin that I wrote was Spellwords. When I wrote Spellwords I was already an accomplished programmer with some six years of professional experience. I wanted to get into Plugin development because I was totally hooked on the game; someone on the forums threw out an idea that he wants to see real spell names instead of Spellwords during casting. I thought that such a Plugin would be pretty simple to write and in general I was right. It was very easy.

Q. What was the biggest obstacle you had/have to overcome in writing your Plugins/3rd party Applications?
A. Like Digero, I have to say that the total lack of of real documentation for Decal and its API was the biggest hurdle. Zyrca's decal info website at the time when I started to write plugins was very very simple and had almost no documentation on anything advanced. However, back in those days alot of Decal devs were very passionate about Decal and a lot of help came from the #acdev channel.

Q. What is your favorite language to program in?
A. Visual Basic. I've been working with Basic and its various versions ever since 1995 when I started programming in Access 2.0. Nowadays I code in VB.NET and C# but I still prefer VB's syntax.

Q. How long have you been programming in general/with Decal Applications?
A. I have about 10-11 years of professional programming experience under my belt and before that about 6-7 extra years of "amateur" programming. I've been doing Plugin development since about 3.5 years ago.

Q. Have you felt the overall contribution of the decal programming community has been positive on the game?
A. I think that the development of 3rd party utilities for any MMORPG in general is inevitable, regardless of it being good or bad. Players will always look for ways to leave an imprint of theirs on the game and others. It's our natural need to leave a mark on the history, our natural need to feel that we've done something more permanent than just leveled a character. I feel that gaming developers should embrace and legalize 3rd party developers and channel their energies in good directions. This will be a win win for both players and game developers.

As for AC1, Decal brought good and bad forward, generally because Turbine and Microsoft have shied away from it. I know many will disagree, but I feel that the good that Decal and its plugins have brought outweighs the bad, but such things are hard to calculate. I wish Turbine and Microsoft would have stepped in earlier on the blatant abuse of the game that was done via 3rd party apps and game's own "broken features"

Q. What Plugins/3rd party Application other than your own, do you use?
A. When I play, I can't play without the following:
Bandit Chat, Bandit Sight/2, Exception, Universal Salvaging Tool (UST), Dysfunctional, DHS (Decal Hotkey System), Oracle of Dereth, Deadeye Color System (DCS), Let There be Light.

I also love  Track It!, Infinity, dIRCal, Stoic, Bandit Trading Partner, and many others.

Q. What can we look forward to in upcoming versions of your Plugins/3rd party Applications?
A. Emergency bug fixes to my Plugins is all I plan on doing for the near future. Sorry.

Q. Do you still play AC and if so what Server/s do you frequent?
A. I do not play any games right now actually. I do have my AC account active for the purposes of maintenance of my plugins and my AC home is on Solclaim.

Q. What is your favorite Plugin/3rd party Application that you have written?
A. I don't have a favorite Plugin that I wrote, but in every Plugin that I wrote, there are a few features that I love or perhaps most proud of... For example, in Bandit Sight/2 I am most proud of the damage grading because I believe it has helped to standardize weapon trading on all the servers, in Bandit Chat I am most proud of the auto-completion feature of tell-to names and of the custom aliasing, in Bandit Monarch I love how the Plugin can be placed on a Bot and it'll sense guild mates and ID them to capture extra info.

Thanks for the opportunity to answer the questions, Sucamarto and thank you for your long, consistent and tireless effort on the ACHeaven website. It is truly an amazing feat you have been, often thanklessly, doing over the years.