Ello, the A5 / A6 Special Effects contest winner, kindly took the time to answer the questions for this interview.

Q: When and why did you decide to choose the Acknex engine for your projects?
A: I once buyed the A5 standard at a local store, put my fingers at it and was shocked about the results. Only white lights and so on, so i put it away deep down. Later on (I didnt even remember my a5standard) I got the idea of making games again, went into the internet, and found 3dgamestudio. This time I purchased a5 commercial. So i came back to it. I was just thinking about a handbook and wow there was a A5 Hardcovered Handbook on my desk:-) It didnt took long and i purchased A5 pro (I wanted those mirrors) and then A6 (sadly I missed the free upgrade offer by only one day, now thats life). Of course I was also impressed by the community where I always found help when needed.

Q: How did you learn C-Script?
A: I had some basic knowledge about programming (C16 basic, C64 assembler, later on lingo, actionscript, java, javascript and html) so it wasnt that hard to get familiar with C-script. However much is brute force coding with lots of tries, errors and trying again (especially with the latest technologies: shaders)

Q: What else do you do besides coding?
A: Besides coding I am generally acting with arts: I make music, using my e-guitar, synthesizers. I play in a band. Sometimes I do paintings... I have a daugther and a nice wife (much fun with the family and seeing a human grow up and learn to master life).

Q: The guys at Conitec state that you have sent them not less than 7 demos for the special effect contest. Could you name them for us?
A: Ultimate camera fx (a wrapped view which allows to make underwater views or totaly weird view distortions):

http://www.earthcontrol.de/downloads/ucfx.zip

There were two versions of volumetric lights:

http://www.earthcontrol.de/water/volumlig2.zip

http://www.earthcontrol.de/water/water.zip

A_room where a skull rotated and various material changes was made:

http://www.earthcontrol.de/a_room/a_room.zip

An endless looped flythru level using pixel commands:

http://www.earthcontrol.de/downloads/camorph1.zip

And a few more others (I hope it was them):

http://www.earthcontrol.de/downloads/meshfx.zip

http://www.earthcontrol.de/downloads/codesnippets.zip

http://www.earthcontrol.de/downloads/effektsII.zip (which was my first 'refresh'-effect)

My favourite (also it didn't win) was this:

http://www.earthcontrol.de/downloads/themachine.zip

Q: How would you create a great looking underwater effect?
A: I would use the technique I used in the ucfx-demo. I placed a sphere model (normals to inside) and rendered the view to the texture; the camera must be kept inside the sphere all the time. Now when doing some sin / cos function onto the mesh you get a great underwater effect (of course at the cost of performance). Using transparent and bright flag will do some more. However today I think there will be other ways to get this, using shaders...

Q: Can you tell us a few things about Gemwars?
A: Gemwars is a project I joined about a year ago (initiator was Lonewolf). It was planned to be a multiplayer online game where the players fight each other and collect gems to open the door to the next stage. However due to other projects it is on ice now. Maybe we will reject it or maybe we will put our fingers back on it, as we have now A6 and because of those great new graphical features we would have to overwork it... we'll see

Q: Can you recommend some good quality freeware tools?
A: http://www.mgshareware.com/frmmain.html offers this interesting proggie (if you dont have one). Ogg is a very nice format

Q: What new features would you like to see implemented in the engine in the near future?
A: For making it easier with non-game applications I'd like to have textfields where the user can edit fre like in notepad for example. Some cool flags should be added, like not only having bright but multiply, add, sub, difference and all this things, known from other multimedia tools, like videosoftware or anark and of course (I know it is planned) dynamic shadows reacting to every lightsource, self-shadowing and better level design tools (curved surfaces - automatically splitted into proper bsp - parts), instant objects, for example making a roundstair by giving number of copies, movement and angles for the instances.

Q: Please give us a few tips for beginners.
A: Never give up, thats the only general tip I have :-)

P.S. If you dont mind, my latest releases are here:

http://www.earthcontrol.de/vas/vas_fireglow.zip

http://www.earthcontrol.de/vas/vas_lumi.zip

http://www.earthcontrol.de/vas/vas_shine.zip

http://www.earthcontrol.de/npr_shaders/1.zip

http://www.earthcontrol.de/vas/vas_fireglow.zip

Thank you a lot, Ello.