Merri aka Vesa Piittinen

In the day job I'm a specialized Front End Developer. I do all sorts of stuff around the page shown in a web browser, caring about all the details ranging from technical correctness to user experience to performance to search engine optimization to accessibility to tracking. I have extensive understanding of HTML and CSS since 1998 when I made my first site, adding in JavaScript later on as it became a thing of it's own. I kept up with the trends even though I landed my first professional front end developer position as late as 2013.

I've programmed from an early age so I've tried all sorts of tech stuff such as Commodore 64 Basic, Visual Basic, PHP, MySQL, C/C++, and tons of other things I'm unable to list. One of my key talents is the ability to read code quickly: I can pick up the most important even from a messy code. I can also understand complex and hard to explain relations. Broadly speaking I'm the kind of person who becomes an expert in whatever they do that catches their interest. But my weakness is that I'm not good at teaching others on-the-fly.

You can find slightly more about what I do professionally via my LinkedIn.

I have a love for the Finnish language. It has eventually led me to translate as a hobby. One of the earlier works I did was to localize MegaTokyo webcomic. I did that occasionally in 2002 and then on a daily basis roughly from late 2003 to early 2004. Since then my interest has moved towards games.

So far I've localized or am localizing:

• Civilization V
  2010, Civilopedia & leader dialog missing from completion
  
  
• Civilization VI
  2016, in progress, Steam Workshop
  
  
• Heroes of Might and Magic III
  March 2020, in progress
  
  
• The Settlers II
  2009, completed
  
  
• Transport Tycoon Deluxe
  2004, completed
  
  

My localization work often involves needing to figure out how to modify the game on my own. Localization of games is not a popular hobby and is often far harder than people realise. You don't swap words. Instead you pick the meaning and tone and then make it understandable in the target language. Then you have the technical issues, often having (brutal) limitations in text lengths and/or inability to use grammatical cases.

Games I'd love to translate some day: Final Fantasy IX, Hollow Knight, and Command & Conquer: Red Alert.

Tinkering with computers is something I've done since the Commodore 64. The PC had very interesting times going on in the late 90s as processors kept doubling their speeds in short periods of time, and prices kept getting down so doing things like CPU and memory upgrades were a possibility.

The truth is I have too many computers and too little time to use them all. I have stuff from various "eras" and can setup DOS, Windows 98, Windows XP, and Windows 7, each for their appropriate hardware. Most of these computers are not ready to run so I'd have to rebuild most of them to relive the experiences.

I'm also looking forward to the future and am following the development of CPUs and GPUs. AMD has recently brought interesting times back with their Zen architecture while Intel has been having a hard time with their failed 10nm process node, being stuck with 14nm+++++ while AMD is using TSMC's 7nm and heading to 5nm. Nvidia is still the king of graphics as I'm writing this, but it looks like AMD will be taking the performance crown in gaming GPUs for the first time in a long time by the end of 2020. We'll see how this goes!

Currently my main computer contains:

And frankly this is far more than I need as I rarely game demanding titles.

There is something about taking a game and making it change to your will. There are all kinds of possibilities: figuring out custom file formats, modifying graphics, swapping music and sound, localization, adjusting balance, or going all out and making an entirely new game experience with existing game's engine.

I've done my most notable original work with The Settlers II, mostly probably due to liking the game's appearance a lot. As a game to play I don't enjoy it as much as it does have major downfalls such as limited resources (sometimes preventing completion of a game), AI playing itself out, or transportation of goods getting totally stuck. Modding it and making an online map generator for it has been far more fun! I've even done some pixel art:

Another game that I modded a lot back in the day was the original Red Alert. Some of my work has even ended up getting into longer term usage as I did some work on Desert Theater that was completed by Allen262 in 2013. I also wrote an Ingame Strings Editor that is a handy tool for editing conquer.eng, and it also supports The Settlers II language files. There were also some units and buildings that I drew, but those didn't have a great quality as they were some of my earliest works on modding.

Most recently in 2020 I've finally picked up Heroes III! As it is typical to me in recent times I decided to localize it to Finnish. This has resulted into doing more than just text work, such as creation of a new condensed font to fit more text in limited spaces.

In the image "Laajempi lohikäärmeen kallio" would not fit in any of the previously available fonts for the game.