This weekend CS-Source.ru managed to catch Mani, author of one of the most popular plugins for administering Source-based servers, during his well-deserved vacation. And surely we couldn't miss this chance to interview him.

CS-Source.ru: Hello Mani, can you please intoduce yourself - your name, occupation, age and whatever you feel you'd like to tell about yourself?

Mani: My name is Giles Millward aged 32. My full time job is based as a software engineer contractor in the UK, mostly working with Pro-C and Oracle databases. I've been doing this professionaly for about 8 years now. I studied Computer Science at Leeds metropolitan university before my professional career but before this I used to code assembler back in the Amiga and C64 days.

CS-Source.ru: Well, now when we have an idea who you are we can get down to real questions Why did you decide to make an admin plugin for CSS?

Mani: I've been playing CS for about 3-4 years now (I started on CS1.3) and it was a natural progression to take up CSS.
At the time that CSS was released commercially there was no real easy way to perform admin commands on our clan server. In early December 2004 Valve released the SDK to the source engine so I started having a play with it to see if I could make our lives as admins a bit easier.
It didn't take long to come up with something that could do basic kick/banning control via an amx style menu system and as we used friendly fire I implemented a basic form of the TK punishment system seen in CS1.6.
After playing on the server we started having quite a few requests from other clans who wanted a similar system (Beetlesmod and SAP were already available publically at this time) so early January I setup some forums on our clan website and released the plugin publically for linux.
Within a few hours the windows version had been released too.

CS-Source.ru: When you started work on Mani plugin, could you imagine the scale of popularity it will gain over time?

Mani: I really had no idea it would be so popular. Within maybe a week or two it completely swamped our clan forums so I moved them to the www.mani-admin-plugin.com funding the website myself.
After that the bandwidth was becoming expensive so it moved again to a sponsored host who could provide unlimited bandwidth.
We are currently using around 100 Gigs a month.
In truth I did not expect the plugin to still be around, it was supposed to be a stop gap for when Source Mod arrives. As a result, parts of the plugin have been redesigned to cope with the new bits and pieces of functionality that are coming along.

CS-Source.ru: Do you keep in touch with other authors of admin plugins? Do you share ideas or may be some tricks?

Mani: I have spoken to Beetlefart a few times but not recently.
I talk to Mattie from 'Matties Event Scripts' quite a bit in his forums, most of the latest releases were focused on giving Event Scripts users more control over what they could do.
I also talk to Bailopan from Sourcemod every now and then for some advice on problems I have. Bailopan is a very talented guy and has contributed greatly to the CS scene over the past years with AMX for CS.

CS-Source.ru: What about Valve, did you talk to them about the plugin? What do they think of it?

Mani: I've been in contact with Valve via email and occasionally I post on the hlcoders email list.
I did have a nice email from Alfred from Valve saying that they liked what I was doing.

CS-Source.ru: The infamous story with radio menus in CSS... Valve said then they'll work with plugin authors on bringing normal in-game menus to Source. Do you know anything about it?

Mani: Yep I know something about it The existing 'amx-style' menu is basically old code left over from the HL1 SDK. The menus broke when Valve removed the code and released one of their updates.
There were comments saying that we had been given warning that this was going to happen but I don't recall ever seeing any warnings.
To be fair to Valve they have every right to remove the code as it is legacy code from HL1 but I don't think they expected the backlash that happened after the update.
In practice everyone could have used the 'Escape' style menus there and then but the fact is that no-one really likes them in the CSS community. Other mod users have no choice but to use the Escape style menus.
I did talk to Alfred for a while about coming up with an alternative solution for in-game menus that would work across any mod but it's all gone a bit quiet on that front. I did ask a while back but Valve are extremely busy at the moment presumably with Lost-Coast and DoD to spare resource for a new menu system.

CS-Source.ru: Your plugin supports most of playable Source mods to date. Do you plan to keep adding support for future Valve and community games?

Mani: Hopefully yes, I did some changes a while ago that introduced the gametypes.txt file that allows a specific configuration for a specific game. It's not perfect by any means as the plugin is focused on CSS so using it on another Source derived game you lose a few of the features.

CS-Source.ru: Are you planning to create something other than Mani admin plugin? Or may be release some of it's functionality as separate addons?

Mani: Not at the moment, though I have considered releasing just the in game advert system as a completely seperate module for server operators.

CS-Source.ru: And the last one: can you give us insight on those juicy features you plan to bring in version 1.2?

Mani: Well development mostly pause at the moment whilst I'm on holiday for two weeks but V1.2 should focus back on making the setup of admins a bits easier using MySQL, better multilingual support and just generally an evolution of the V1.1.0 series.

CS-Source.ru: Thanks for your answers!

Mani: Anytime :D

© www.cs-source.ru
By Newbie