Greatest Moments in Programming

[eatcomics]

just this weekend, and about 30 minutes ago,... well let me just tell the story... So I have been working on my game, as I have said, and I just got it to look like a game. Well I went to my friend's house this weekend and I showed him and my bestfriend the game I was all you'll hate it it sux"and to my utter shock the friend I am making it for goes " Dude this is sweet" and we played it for a good ten minutes then I said alright lets go do something else.... Just thirty minutes ago the same thing happened at my other friends house now he wants me to make him a game.... EEEEE!!!! I'm excited!!!

[Keebler]

Greatest Moments in Programming (I've got a few, but then that's not "greatest", oh well)

Realizing I had a Splay Tree programming assignment due the next morning and coding one up in a few hours while I was very, very tired. There was something magical about how it kept itself balanced...

My assembly teacher had given us code to make tones on the PC speaker. Our assignment was to do something creative with that code. He told us explicitly to not just code up a music program with hard-coded tones (of course half the class did exactly that). I wrote a program that played .wav files over the PC speaker. It was especially cool to me because it sounded pretty good and I loaded the data from files which we hadn't covered at that point.

Working with my mentor, Andre LaMothe on my first professional game, Rex Blade. We put in some crazy hours and at the end of it, he said that he was impressed with my work and that he hadn't met many people that could keep up with him. When you hear stuff like that from your mentor, that carries a lot of weight.

Rewriting malloc for a PS1 game to fix our memory fragmentation issues. I was still pretty junior when I did that so I was pretty happy when it worked.

I've got more, but my time is up.

[Falco Girgis]

I notice a trend. Lots of your "greatest" moments have been some pretty low-level programming. For some reason, making low level things like those make me happy too. Something about the feeling of achievement when you finish...

Everybody, welcome Keebler to the forums. He is in the industry working for EA in case you haven't noticed. He's a really cool, knowledgeable guy.

[ultimatedragoon69]

Welcome keebler very nice to meet you. mmmm memory allocation almost identical to stralloc, but doesn't use the stack. Oh sorry mind wandered for a second. Lets have fun here shall we.

[Tigernado]

I think some of my greatest moments were my first and fourth programming courses. Because by that time I had learned a lot about programming in and out of school but it didn't all 'click' together until then. Currently my greatest moments are just things I do with AI and of course making projects that actually look like games now.

I couldn't think of a single greatest moment. I think it will be when I actually finish a game.

[Diablo vt]

Well my greatest moment was my first project. A calculator!! It ran in the DOS/cmd prompt and I was made up. Sadly though, I lost the executable and code.

[Orgodemirk]

Any time something I make works, it's a great moment!

[cronjob00]

Any time something I make works, it's a great moment!

agreed which recently has been rare.

[Trask]

One of my favorite moments was in my first programming class in high school. It was the first time I had ever did anything with programming and we were programming on some really old Apples that predated the iMacs and I'm sure quite a few others. Well we were programming in True Basic and we had reached the mid-point of the class when the teacher left it open for us to create something that you could watch, albeit animations or something to that effect. I was big on the first Matrix at the time so I made the "phone number search program" that you see at the very end and after some time it would freeze, just like in the movie. It had the colors, columns, everything. That was my first independent program that I had ever done and I thought it was the bee's knees back then.

Speaking of low-level, another program that I loved was my first screen saver I made in class using x86 ASM. I was one of the few kids in the class that liked working with the low end languages, it was fun scaring the Visual Basic lovers with my syntax.

[M_D_K]

My greatest moment also was low-level. Some of you may frown on this but I used to do software cracking as a hobby(this was before game dev). It was when I made a program its own keygen. So when the window popped up asking for a serial number, a valid serial was already generated and in the textbox. And i actually learned something from it code injection is fun

[XianForce]

Lol, well my greatest moment in programming was also low-level(I'm still low level now, but I'm working xD). I had been working on a simple demo for the Nintendo DS, I was trying to get better with the Angle system, so I was trying to make a type of "BowMan DS" I had kept screwing practically everything up, until I got real focused for like 10 mins...and I finally got all that crap to work right...I was like whoa...holy crap, thats frickin sweet!

[Falco Girgis]

Lol, well my greatest moment in programming was also low-level(I'm still low level now, but I'm working xD). I had been working on a simple demo for the Nintendo DS, I was trying to get better with the Angle system, so I was trying to make a type of "BowMan DS" I had kept screwing practically everything up, until I got real focused for like 10 mins...and I finally got all that crap to work right...I was like whoa...holy crap, thats frickin sweet!

I bet you felt extra badass for doing that on a DS instead of a PC.

[XianForce]

Lol, well my greatest moment in programming was also low-level(I'm still low level now, but I'm working xD). I had been working on a simple demo for the Nintendo DS, I was trying to get better with the Angle system, so I was trying to make a type of "BowMan DS" I had kept screwing practically everything up, until I got real focused for like 10 mins...and I finally got all that crap to work right...I was like whoa...holy crap, thats frickin sweet!

I bet you felt extra badass for doing that on a DS instead of a PC.

lol, define "badass"

I haven't actually gotten into dev for PC at all, so I don't know if one's harder, or if they are pretty equal...not sure...I think after I pump up my C skills with DS dev, I'll try PC dev.

[Trask]

Now, I've only done some small games like Breakout and Tetris on the GBA and being that we don't have access to the official development tools and what not, I think console development can be harder as there's generally less help, not as much support except for the fellow nuts who also work with it, but if you can hold your own in low-level development, then you can certainly spread that around to the PC world. I would think that you're better off than those who start and only use XNA or Dark Basic as those mask the low level functions and skills in favor of rapid development.

I really enjoyed programming on the GBA, it offered a lot of challenges, but the first time I loaded up Pong and realized that I did that with some ASM and C, I felt like a badass like Gyro is talking about.

[MarauderIIC]

I haven't actually gotten into dev for PC at all, so I don't know if one's harder, or if they are pretty equal...not sure...I think after I pump up my C skills with DS dev, I'll try PC dev.

Consoles generally require lower-level coding and actually considering memory and processing constraints, while not having up-to-date prebuilt libraries for everything and its mother. Consoles would be harder.