Cas

Cas
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Nationality:	Cosmopolitan
Location:	Córdoba, Argentina
Born:	14 September 1978
Team:	Rolling Stunts (2021-present) Slowdrive (2015-2020)
First race:	probably, Outrun (WSC)
Championship titles:	none
as of February 2015

Argentine-born racer. A veteran of the early days of Paleke's WSC, Cas is the developer of Bliss, a full-featured track editor with the explicit goal of supplanting Track Blaster. His first team having been Slowdrive, he is currently part of Rolling Stunts.

Early Stunts

Cas first met Stunts in 1993, when he had his first PC. A friend brought some games to share, including Stunts 1.0. Since then, Cas played Stunts with his friends and built tracks, more focusing on surviving the race than on winning it. Old tracks by Cas feature extremely long, hazardous paths, with confusing splits and cycles.

As an online Stunts racer

Around middle 2005, Cas was part of La Cueva de los Clásicos, a forum that belonged to an abandonware site. The forum was hosting a subforum dedicated to World Stunts Championship, run by Paleke. Cas joined the tournament in the middle of the season and participated actively until some point of 2007.

Cas was aware of other tournaments running at that same time, including ZakStunts and even registered in one or more, but was more comfortable with WSC. His registration in Stunts forum was on 21 November 2005, but did not join ZakStunts until March 2015, according to ZakStunts site, after a long hiatus from online Stunts.

While ZakStunts reports Cas' registration in the tournament as March 2015, when he started posting regularly, Cas remembers having tried an earlier race, but maybe did not post then. However, Paleke appears as to have registered in 2007, yet, in 2005, when Cas registered in the forum, Paleke asked Zak if Cas could join his team Poder Sudaka, suggesting he was already registered in ZakStunts. However, as of 15 March 2015, in his ZakStunts debut, according to the site, Cas raced as a member of the Slowdrive team, to which he was invited by Shoegazing Leo.

In 2016, he organised a one-race event, Race For Immortality, an OWOOT race from which the time estimations were taken for Bliss. The participants would remain forever in the list of famous racers of Bliss. After this race, he hosted his own tournament for a few months, called Race For Kicks.

At the end of the 2020 season, some racers were not very active; others had decided to switch teams or to race on their own for the next season and some new racers were without a team. Activity was low in Slowdrive and the number of racers had dropped to only one (Afullo) in Rolling Stunts. Cas moved to Rolling Stunts for season 2021 with KyLiE and Daniel3D.

As a programmer

Since he joined the Stunts online community, Cas has been interested in Stunts internals and wanted to participate somehow in developing for it and analysing the code. He tried to disassemble a part of the game, but other community members have made much better progress with other methods. In early 2010, Cas embarked in a project called Vizcacha, an attempt at verifying noRH replays. Despite some success on the computer he was testing the program on, he failed to make it universal and the project was abandoned later that year.

Cas' most significant software contribution to the Stunts community is Bliss Track Editor, which has become the most commonly used tool for track design in the community, surpassing Track Blaster Pro. Cas has said the project is designed especially for the community and that he has great respect for Track Blaster, whose author also created with the community in mind.

Following are some Stunts-related tools and pieces of software created by Cas:

• Bliss Track Editor
• Race For Kicks website
• CarWorks
• Simple Garage
• R5K engine
• EasyTour
• Vizcacha
• Stunts font editor
• Zakize
• RPL Keys
• Parse RPL

Views

On free software

Cas is a supporter of free software and is more aligned with the views of the FSF than with those of the open source initiative, that is, freedom is a priority over convenience. Still, he is not against non-free software when its purpose is good, like freeware made by independent programmers. Unlike the free software purists, who prefer source code always, Cas defends simplicity and the idea that you should have the 'option' of compiling the source code, but not the 'obligation', so the best form to share a program is binaries with zero dependencies, ready to work, accompanied by the source code, if it's free software.

On styles of software development

Again, simplicity is the key for Cas as regards programming. A program must be made in the simplest way possible, avoiding things that could bloat it or make it slower or dependent on things that are not necessary. Cas avoids object-oriented programming and does not make his software web-based unless the purpose requires so. Independence from Internet is important. He also avoids using third-party libraries for developing. While this can make the process of developing faster, it's only worth it when programming for money, because you need to finish as quickly as possible, but not when you seek reliability and independence.

On privacy

Today's social media push users to give up their privacy and apparently, most are fine with this. Cas refrains from using social networks and programs that violate people's privacy and recommends against their use.

Cosmopolitanism

Having been born in Argentina, Cas sees this fact as purely circumstancial, finding no more cultural connection with Argentines than with people from other countries. With a cosmopolitan view, Cas rejects nationalism as just another form of fanatic factionism, the choice of a position to defend regardless of reason.