Elysian Shadows

I started programming in C when I was 9. After about 6 months I started using C++ on the side, but I mainly used C for the first few years. I picked up PHP at some point, which led to me writing some rudimentary DOS programs in machine code (writing binaries in hex and converting them using a PHP script I wrote). That introduced me to x86 assembly, which I started learning when I was 10. After I had the basics down I wrote a toy assembler and emulator for a small "architecture" I designed--that was a very useful experience. It really helped me get into the mindset of thinking like a computer and introduced some important concepts. After that it was all downhill. I'm almost 19 now, and I don't think I've gone a week without writing code since I started.

My advice would be to start thinking of a little project and try to finish it. Then you will always have something polished that you can show as a testimonial.

Working on that right now

I started programming in C when I was 9. After about 6 months I started using C++ on the side, but I mainly used C for the first few years. I picked up PHP at some point, which led to me writing some rudimentary DOS programs in machine code (writing binaries in hex and converting them using a PHP script I wrote). That introduced me to x86 assembly, which I started learning when I was 10. After I had the basics down I wrote a toy assembler and emulator for a small "architecture" I designed--that was a very useful experience. It really helped me get into the mindset of thinking like a computer and introduced some important concepts. After that it was all downhill. I'm almost 19 now, and I don't think I've gone a week without writing code since I started.

You sir, are a walking computer

Nokurn wrote:After that it was all downhill. I'm almost 19 now, and I don't think I've gone a week without writing code since I started.

Haha, I remember when I would first learn a new language I would print "Goodbye World!" instead for that very reason.

#include <stdio.h>

int main(int argc, char** argv)
{
    printf("Goodbye World!");

    //system("pause"); //Surely nobody is dumb enough to use this line..

    fflush(stdout);
    while (getchar() != '\n') { }
    return 0;
}

dandymcgee wrote:

Nokurn wrote:After that it was all downhill. I'm almost 19 now, and I don't think I've gone a week without writing code since I started.

Haha, I remember when I would first learn a new language I would print "Goodbye World!" instead for that very reason.

#include <stdio.h>

int main(int argc, char** argv)
{
    printf("Goodbye World!");

    //system("pause"); //Surely nobody is dumb enough to use this line..

    fflush(stdout);
    while (getchar() != '\n') { }
    return 0;
}

Oh yeah. Programming totally gutted my social life. I've only started to find balance this year. I spend maybe a third to a half of the time I used to spend coding, now. In middle school and high school (being home schooled), I spent about two hours a week doing school work and around eighty to a hundred programming. It was a bit out of hand, haha. If only I could've been paid for all of that time!

Damn, someone necro-ed this bitch!

Well, first my biological father used to force me to code QBasic at around the age of 6. I wrote a few extremely simple programs, but I was not able to grasp very much of programming. My dad used to get pissy and basically make me feel like shit about it, so I completely dropped it.

Then when I was about 12-13, I decided to get into HTML and web development to create websites dedicated to video games. That's where the original http://thechaosrift.com came from. I wanted to make a one-stop site for all of my favorite franchises at the time... Mario, Sonic, Crash Bandicoot, Donkey Kong, Kirby, Megaman, etc.

At the same time, Marcel and I had been playing the shit out of a free online game called "Furcadia." The game shipped with a simple level editor and a simple custom scripting language that allowed you to essentially create your own worlds in the game. We spent hours and hours pouring our hearts and souls into creating kickass levels. I was the level designer, and Marcel was the scripter.

Towards the end of this web design/Furcadia period, I got my first Dreamcast (which was actually a year after it had already died). I had already owned a PS2, and somebody offered to give it to me for mowing their lawn. I didn't really think much of it, because I had assumed the Dreamcast sucked, but it was a free console... After I mowed the lawn and got it, I was fucking blown away. All of the games that I had on DC and PS2 looked better on DC. The motherfucker had a screen built into the memory cards... The games were amazing... Everything about it was epic.

Then I stumbled upon http://dcemulation.org which honestly changed my life. I discovered that there was this group of crazy ass motherfuckers who managed to hack the DC and write their own development library for it. The community was developing their own games and emulators for the Dreamcast... After burning a few CDs and playing these, I remember very vividly walking around my front yard and deciding right then and there that I wanted to become a game developer and that I would learn to develop on the Dreamcast... Given the amount of time I was spending making sites and creating worlds for other peoples' games, I figured I could better myself by creating my own games.

It was an intense, bloody, uphill battle for a 13-14 year-old with no C or C++ background to learn to develop for the Dreamcast... This is where I met Anton Norgren (Tvspelsfreak) who served as my mentor during these times. I spent hours and hours writing code for the bitch (that I literally could barely understand) and would walk to the library just to rent Sam's Teach Yourself C and C++ in 21 days... Despite what you may think of me, programming absolutely did not come naturally to me. I sucked at math, and I sucked at coding. I firmly believe that most other people could probably have picked it up quicker than I did, but I was absolutely fucking determined to become a developer...

It wasn't until about 2 years later that I feel like I could even start to stand on my own with C and C++. I had been involved in several personal projects at this point, and I was becoming "okay" at C. Most of the things I developed during this time could be seen in our "Previous Projects" videos on Youtube.

Not too long after that, I decided to embark on the most ambitious project I had ever conceived yet... a 2D Dreamcast RPG that would eventually become Elysian Shadows. I convinced my buddy Peter (who was also a Dreamcast fanatic) to pick up Perl to help create tools for the game, and I convinced Marcel (who had been dabbling in BlitzPlus while I was learning C/++) to write our level editor.

Shortly after this, we recorded a few really cheesy development videos, inspired by God of War 1. We had no intention of becoming famous on Youtube. We just figured they could be unlockables at the end of ES... Then suddenly the "Adventures in Game Development" took off, and before we knew it, we had a fanbase expecting videos from us. It was a complete accident. While everyone on Youtube seemed to think I knew exactly what I was doing, I knew all too well that I didn't. But I did know that I had the drive and the capacity to learn and do whatever it took to finish ES.

Somewhere around this time I began attending college for my Computer Engineering degree. Since I had taught myself so much during my highschool days, I learned almost absolutely nothing regarding software in college, but I did learn a shitload of hardware. While in college, I continued to work on ES and continued to make Youtube videos.

Around this time something happened... coding became more than just a means to an end for me. I wanted more out of it than just to create a product. I wanted to understand it all. I wanted to learn it all. I wanted to be the best. Fueled by a newfound Youtube-induced sense of narcissism (lulz) and a desire to not only create a beautiful RPG but also a powerful engine, programming began to consume me. I lived to code. It was how I felt good about myself. It was my friend, my antidepressant, my self-confidence boost, and my passion.

A few years later, I wound up graduating with a computer engineering degree and went on to work in a telecommunications company writing embedded drivers for fiber optic "modems." ES had not been realized yet, but this never really bothered me. I didn't know enough to make the game that I wanted to make from the beginning. It was a long journey of learning, complete with many rewrites. I still stand tall knowing that I'm developing what I had originally set out to develop, not something sub-par that I shipped early with my limited skillset...

Today is my first day of graduate school... I'm going back for my masters in computer engineering. While these boards probably seem dead to you guys, pay attention to how many purple motherfuckers are browsing. ES is in the best state that it has been in since its inception. For the first time, I feel like we are a complete team making the best game we can possibly make. I feel like we have motherfuckers whose passion, drive, and obsession in the fields of graphics and audio match my own in programming...

There might be a period of extended silence, but mark my words, an epic Youtube return is in the works for us. Adventures in Game Development Chapter 21 will be a complete reboot for the series and will begin showcasing serious work on an actual product... the kind of video that I had always wanted to make but could not realize...

Urgh. Where to even begin?

From an early age, I was introduced to technology. I lived with my Dad, didn't know my mother up until very recently.Dad used to enjoy playing the gamez, my earliest memory was of me in a crib, and Dad and his friends sat around a console playing Final Fantasy. I remember wanting to play too, eventually I got let loose and was allowed to play, I didn't have a clue what I was doing of course.

I remember having almost every console that got released, I even remember having a second hand Amstrad CPC 464. I was too young to do anything with it, but I loved to pretend I was a goddess of the hackers.

The first console I can remember clearly is the Sega Megadrive. Then the N64, I had dreamcast, and PS1, I never went for the PS2 or three. however.

I always wanted to have a desktop or laptop however, I would tell my Dad that I wished to learn how they worked, and learn to make things (I had no idea what). Dad had a computer, but mine and his relationship was very bad so I never touched it. On one birthday when asked what I wanted, and I replied I wanted a computer, I got this: http://images-01.delcampe-static.net/im ... 68_007.jpg I must have been about 12-13 or so.
As you can imagine, I was slightly disappointed, though I never expressed it, and happily started playing with my new toy.

At about 15 or so, I ended up obtaining an electronic typewriter from someone, again, not what I really wanted, but this thing was pretty cool. I remember writing up guitar tabs with it, as it had some fancy graph features, it made a ton of noise though.

It wasn't until I got my first job and payed for my own laptop that I actually got what I wanted. About 2006/7. By this time, Windows had hidden away anything hackable (Windows Vista..) and I had completely forgotten my desire to learn what made machines tick. As you can imagine, I used it for the only thing a 16-17 year old would use if for, gaimz and internet - I did have a passion for writing too, so I did whip up some stories I had in mind.

A short while after having this, Dad started playing WoW, this was back when WoW was a thing. He got me playing it too. I didn't play it after the free trial period, but instead hunted down some private server, and started playing there. The place is long dead now, WowTopia was the server. I played there for maybe a year. There was a nice little community of people, I ended up GM, and then admin on there.

Eventually I wanted to throw up my own little server, Dad kept taking away the 'net when (for the sake of this story I will say step brother and step mother, though they where not married at this time, but we did live with them) brother did anything he should not have. To ensure this did not impact me so much in my addiction, I went in search of how to get a WoW private server going. I happened across a simple repack server (An already compiled and packaged server, complete with database and extra's). I got this online, and had a few friends playing too.

After a few month, there was quite a few players, and I could not handle them all on my network. So I rented out a dedi box, it was fairly expensive too. I then realized I had no idea how to even use this thing. This is when I stumbled on http://www.arcemu.org I wrote a nooby post, requesting for some help, explained that I had gone out and got myself a dedi box without knowing what to even do.

A couple hours later, I had a reply back. Some guy had offered to help. He told me he lived in Hungary, his timezone was only one hour ahead of me, and we planned a time for him to come and remote assist. He shouted at me (not nastily) for using a repack, said I should compile the source properly. Hell if I knew what he meant. But he was great, he compiled the server, grabbed the database project of that time, by the end of the night, we had a fully operating server.

Now, he needed to extract the user data out of the old database and import them to the new one, along with hacking the website out of the repack onto the server, this required setting up an apache server, and changing a lot of the existing code as it depended so much on the repacked stuff.

And SaraCraft was born.

I sat and watched in awe. He had installed cygwin, and everything was done in a terminal, I realized at this moment, that within reason, there is nothing you cannot accomplish with a computer.

I learned a lot, as I was asking a ton of questions while he was helping me. He found potential in me, and set out to learn me to program. We started in C, though we compiled it with C++. I had a lot of fun with this, I learned by hacking up the ArcEmu codebase, I learned a lot about networking, databases, and languages. We soon moved onto C++, this was better for hacking around the ArcEmu code, as it was mainly C++ anyhow. This continued for a couple month. I would lay in bed with laptop coding until around 5-6am, get up for work at about 8am, and arrive back home to code again. I was addicted. Many times, I would walk around the shop floor asleep, I would walk into the back, and wake up, check back out on the store to find I had done my work whilst asleep. That was a weird feeling. I had once heard someone say "She's on drugs." to the person he was with, because my eyes just would not stay open.

I ended up getting fired from this place, feel free to guess why. Before I lost the job, I also quit college. I was following a path that Dad wanted me to take (as always) and I did not want this.
Dad got very angry, he did whenever he did not get his own way, a bunch of crap happened, but it resulted in me being kicked out at 18.

I went and stayed with some guy I had known for some years, he had a flat, and was the only person I knew that would help me out at this time. I believe I was there for about two month. It lead to a lot drug use, which I had not done at all before I moved there. I however escaped to an old friend I had at school, his mother was nice enough to give me a room.

Nice. I could set up my machine (I had a desktop by this time), and start coding again. And so I did, but this time, I started writing my own software, primarily games. I signed back up to college, and decided I would aim to go to uni to study computer science in software engineering. I got a new job whilst I was at college, and the college was good to me, and allowed me to go work fulltime and simply hand in my work over their online portal, which I did. (Having written software for some time before attending college, I was ahead anyway).

I finished college, and then found that the course I was on did not qualify me to attend uni. This sucked. But I called uni, and told them my situation, what I had done, etc.. They had me send in a portfolio. Great, I had a small 3D engine, and I had my own small graphics library to show off. I pulled some work together, and threw it their way.

I got accepted into uni based on this. I ended up moving into my own house, and I'm still writing software to this day, My main language is C, Who forgets their first language right? But I am competent in pretty much anything you throw at me by now at the age of 23.
--

Sorry to hijack the thread, Falco made me come here and write one. :/

Cheers for the epic walls of text.

Falco Girgis wrote:While these boards probably seem dead to you guys,

What!? This is the best forum on the internet! It recently got blocked at work (damn you, Trend Micro!) and made me learn how to route traffic through my personal server just to access it.

Falco Girgis wrote:Cheers for the epic walls of text.

Ohhhh you love it!!

I've never been very active on the forums, but I just had inspiration to reply to this topic....


For me, it all started when I was in elementary school. My older brother, who was in middle school at the time, had started learning HTML and was trying to make webpages. I always tried to learn what he was doing, and one day he showed me that he was learning how to program computers, using a language called C++, and he was trying to make a text-based game. I was enthralled with what he was doing, but at the time I simply couldn't understand how to write code. For my brother, it was just a passing phase, and he never pursued anything with computers.

I retained my interest in computers, and in middle school I learned my first language, JavaScript. My friend and I wrote JavaScript that allowed the user to control the little help characters in Windows XP (Merlin the wizard, etc). This is what finally resparked my interest in programming. It also happened that around this time I stumbled across this awesome youtube series called The Adventures in Game Development. Being both entertaining and enlightening, it served as a huge source of inspiration. It was then in early high school that I started learning C++ again, this time for real. Alongside this I first learned how to use the Allegro API to make simple games. I ought several books, from C++ to SDL to Lua, and tried to learn as much as I could. However, as I got into my later years of high school, school work and extracurrics took most of my time, and I didn't program nearly as much, putting my time into bringing my GPA up so I could go to a good college.

And speaking of college, we find ourselves back at the present. I sit here typing this, taking a break from my EE circuits homework, listening to Julien-K, starting my second year studying computer engineering at Penn State. It wasn't until I looked back a bit that I realized how HUGE of an influence AiGD and Elysian Shadows have had on my life. I owe a lot to you guys, I watched from the beginning. Just remember that even though you may not hear from some of your viewers on youtube, you can still leave a lasting impression.

DeltaFolee wrote:...

And speaking of college, we find ourselves back at the present. I sit here typing this, taking a break from my EE circuits homework, listening to Julien-K, starting my second year studying computer engineering at Penn State. It wasn't until I looked back a bit that I realized how HUGE of an influence AiGD and Elysian Shadows have had on my life. I owe a lot to you guys, I watched from the beginning. Just remember that even though you may not hear from some of your viewers on youtube, you can still leave a lasting impression.

This right here. Even if Elysian Shadows was never finished, you guys inspired a lot of people to take up coding arms. I probably wouldn't have gotten very far in my coding career had you never uploaded those videos Gyro. You inspired a generation of coders and that is more than a lot of people will do in their life time.

Although I know your passion is what made it great, and seeing as the toolkit is being used for production, I have no doubts ES will be a smash

For a long time I always wondered about how games was made, and if it would be possible for me to make something really simple on my own.
It was back when Game Maker was young, and I got my hands on the free version (and cracked it + got virus), and I used hours just to understand the most basic things.
When I was able to actually press the arrow-keys and my character moved... It felt like I actually created something real.
It was my own little child that I could control and move around. I sat there over 30 minutes just moving a picture of a smiley 'round the screen.

After a while, I read that Game Maker was for pussies and C++ was the shit. I really didn't know why, but someone on the internet told me it was. It had to be legit.
For months it was hell. I finally got the hang of the language, but it took me a year just to understand how to use libraries so I finally could use graphics in an actual window, and not the black boring console.

Saw this thread and immediately began digging throughout the Internet for old ramblings of my younger self, as apparently 7-8 years is far too long ago for me to remember with any detail. (After finding some old forum posts of mine, I think I might have been slightly schizophrenic in middle school... or maybe just obnoxious.)

----------------

It all started way back when I was 3 or 4 and my dad set up an old IBM for me to play educational video games on. In fact, I think it was set up in my older sister's room, but I was the one using it the majority of the time. Fast forward a few years to more bits of my childhood I can remember, and that computer is now in my room. I remember wanting to tinker with it, so for whatever reason my innocent self thought it would be a good idea to stick a staple into both the microphone jack and headphone jack on the front of the machine at the same time. I remember hearing a pop and then it went dark. I was pretty terrified of what my dad would do, but I don't recall him getting very upset over it. He went on to fix that machine and gave it to my older sister once more. Then he came home with a new IBM from work. I went from a Pentium to a Pentium II in a very short span of time, and all I had to do was to stick a staple where it didn't belong.

That IBM was my buddy for quite a few years after that. (I was done prodding my machines with conductive materials.) Around the later years of elementary school I started messing around with hosted forums. I recall sitting in computer class in 3rd or 4th grade, I told the teacher about a forum I had set up on some 3rd-party forum host, and she had my classmates check it out in small groups, one after another. Following this, I got really interested in web design and started messing around with HTML. My parents took notice and I ended up getting a Web Design for Dummies book one year as a gift.

Some more time passed. We had moved into a new house and that Christmas I believe was also when I received a Compaq. An Athlon 64 -- I once again had the most powerful computer in the family and I hadn't even hit puberty yet. My memory is still sketchy, so this is probably around 5th grade or early middle school, but some stuff happened that led to my dad and I looking up computer parts on Pricewatch. We ordered the parts from TigerDirect, and put together my first custom computer together. Then my dad showed up with a SUSE Professional 9.2 box set (I didn't realize until now, but he probably paid the premium for it even though there were probably about a thousand free distros he could've given me). I installed it myself, worked my way around KDE, and had my own web server running. Eventually my dad and I bought a domain on GoDaddy and I officially had my own website, operated entirely by my prepubescent self.

Now things were finally getting interesting. I eventually stumbled upon QBASIC and messed around in that for awhile. It didn't take long before I discovered Visual Basic, and I think I played with it in MS's IDE for all of 30 minutes before I found it's more handsome brother, Visual C++. I proceeded to begin teaching myself C and C++ (though I wish I had only known about C to begin with). I received a "C++ for Dummies" book from my parents around the same time, and slowly did more and more with it. I went a long time just messing around with using the Windows API's Beep() call to make my computer emit annoying sounds (sometimes short bits of music, but more often than not just annoying loops). I think, simultaneously, I was also experimenting with DarkBASIC and GameMaker (more the former than the latter), which helped pique my interest in game programming.

Then, around 2006 (I was 11), I found the game Uplink and subsequently discovered its modding community. I eventually joined the forum of the biggest mod to the game, Onlink. Onlink was pretty special because they were directly modifying the game source via the Dev CD Introversion released, as opposed to just modifying values in the game's data values. I was eager to see how a game like Uplink worked so I ordered the aforementioned Dev CD for myself and dug around. It was pretty overwhelming; I was nowhere near as proficient in C++ as I thought I would be, but that only encouraged me to learn further. I did so, but Uplink is still one monster of a codebase, so I didn't get very far in my modding ambitions there. (I still have plans in this area though, see this thread.)

It was around that point that I took a detour and learned PHP. A friend whom I met on the Onlink forums mentored me, and we even started designing our own IRC bot. I took my newfound PHP skills and started messing with WordPress theme development. That led me to getting acquainted with Chris Pirillo -- I ended up maintaining his public WordPress theme and added all sorts of neat stuff to it. A year or two with that, including a patch or two submitted to WordPress for bugs I found, and I was getting pretty bored. The connection with Chris was worth it, of course; he's a good guy to know on the Internet. (The WordPress theme now sits among my GitHub repositories, collecting dust.)

Meanwhile, I was still messing around with C/C++ on the side, also getting more and more into game development. I learned SDL and very simple OpenGL and made a Pong clone, which for some reason the video of which has garnered 14,000 views on YouTube. I remember showing that game off in my IDS class in 9th grade, I believe around the same time we were being taught QBASIC in that class (my teacher allowed me to skip her instruction and do my own thing during that time). I was getting pretty good at C & C++, and schedule permitting (high school is a time sink) I knew I wanted to get into game development more.

Around May of 2009, my parents had bought me my first smartphone, the T-Mobile G1. Only about a month later, I downloaded the Android SDK, taught myself Java (it was similar enough to C++, and I had done a little bit with it prior to that point), and set out to write apps for my phone (because using apps other people wrote just wasn't good enough for me). I ended up writing a GitHub client over the summer, called it Hubroid, and unleashed it upon the world (and for only $25, too -- Google makes it cheap to put stuff on the Play Store). Hubroid evolved very quickly from that point. I eventually learned how to make a UI that didn't suck, and after a few releases I even started using threads to perform my network requests so that the app didn't hang every five seconds. I got involved in various Android IRC channels, made some friends, and stumbled across CyanogenMod. I eventually contributed a few patches to them (still a member of their GitHub organization) but slowly stopped my involvement there. A patch of mine did make it into AOSP last year, but other than that my system-level Android hacking has been minimal as of late. (Side bar: Cyanogen Inc. is now a thing, and they're looking to hire people to hack on Android apps. I'm considering sending my resume in.)

Jumping back to 2009, sophomore year began and, what do you know, we were going to be taught Java that year. Luckily my involvement with Android meant I was all prepared for that. I quickly became the kid everyone went to for Java homework help, with the side effect that no one dared asked to copy my source as I went about completing assignments in a totally different manner than was taught. Said homework help also earned me various bags of chocolate and other sugary treats on a few occasions, so that was yummy. One of the girls who repaid me in such a manner (and the only one who actually called me up every once in awhile to ask me to explain the solutions rather than just handing them out) is now one of my roommates (without said roommates I wouldn't have an apartment at all, and would still be living with my parents, so I'm grateful for that).

Junior year brought more Java classes at school. I was continuing to expand my Android knowledge. About halfway through the school year I ran into a guy on IRC who was looking for a developer. He had an idea for an Android game and I figured I'd give it a shot. He provided the design and the art and I fumbled around AndEngine to make it come to life. Eventually, the summer of 2011 it was ready: viewtopic.php?f=13&t=6082&p=72800

So at that point I even had a completed game under my belt. I was feeling pretty good. Senior year came and flew right past me. I don't know what happened. I turned 18 in May of 2012, graduated in June of 2012, and then, that July, something wonderful happened: I didn't go to college. Instead, once again the gods of IRC provided me with a gift: I was on #android-dev one night and someone piped up about having some contract work. I was quick to respond and the same night I already had a contract being prepped for me to sign. A few weeks later, we released the White House app. Just recently, we wrapped up version 1.0 of the apps for the U.S. Navy.

Last month I was flown out to Facebook to interview there for an Android position. That didn't pan out (surprise surprise, I wasn't stellar on my first ever series of technical interviews). However, I did learn that they have a sweets shop on campus where everything is free for employees, so that's pretty awesome--and tasty! While I did the Facebook interview (and the very long, indirect, red-eye flights) and am also entertaining other opportunities, I just don't feel like a full-time employee scenario is the right fit for me. I'd much rather do my own thing so as to not ever feel "stuck". So, now that I'm freelancing I've got quite a bit of additional free time that I didn't have when I was in high school, so I'm attempting to get back into game development (I did a short sprint back in January/February that I posted about on these forums as well, related to an OUYA competition that was being ran at the time). I've got lots of ideas and just need to get focused enough to sit down and make them happen.

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TL;DR - I just recollected the better part of my entire life. That was some good exercise for my hippocampus.

Sorry for the monolith of text.

C#. 2011, 19 years old. Shit was like crack. Been hittin' the board like a crazed lion ever since, yo. I'd always been saavy with computers though - I remember playing Doom on Windows 95 when I was 5.

To elaborate, I took a class at the local CC I'm attending for my transfer. I remember dinking around for a few months in C# and writing a text-based adventure game. A month or so after, I started getting into the AiGD series and became inspired to go balls to the wall with C++. After 3 years of programming, I've written nearly nothing but C++ for 2.5 of those years, with the exception being languages I had to pick up for jobs or internships.

I've realized as I get older that I'm interested in more C.E.-esque stuff, but my lights tend to shine really fucking bright when it comes to 3D simulation and other topics involving graphics. To me, that's the goods.

I sometimes find myself scrolling through the Doom 3 engine code, just to soak in the awesomeness. People like Carmack have also been a strong inspiration...in addition to those interesting stories in game development history, such as the Quake 3 engine's inverse sqrt function (what the fuck?).

But, yeah, that's the gist.

My interest in programming is actually pretty similar to falcos. Back when I was in middle school there was pretty much only a handfull of online multiplayer games that were free, one of my friends pointed me to furcadia. I think I spent about 2-3 years using furcadia for what it was for (socializing) and spent about 10-12 years making scripts for that game, never actually playing the game but to test my scripts.

It's unfortunate that game has such a negative reputation for being 'furry' its scripting language is really powerful now. One day I might dig up some old stuff and make a couple videos. I've made some really amazing shit, from checkers to GUIs. One of the last things I made was a dynamic npc system you could control on the fly with strings. Had all kinds of functionality, it had different actions for bumping into it(that you could change on the fly by entering a new string of commands), walking in its field of view. It had pixel perfect animation for walking/whatever else, which is kind of funny because the actual game avatars didn't even have that(had like 2-3 frames for moving squares, I think the npc i made had like 6+)

You could seriously make a really nice RPG, and even an MMO with that game. Its a shame they ended dragonspires(wasnt furry related, and had action elements to it) to make furcadia, I think it would have been hugely popular if they kept updating it as dragonspires.

Around same time as I found furcadia I learned enough qbasic to make a shitty pong game, but kinda quit after that. For about the last 10 years I would occasionally get the urge to learn a bit more about programming and would read/watch videos for a few months out of the year. I know a lot of in general programming theory, but not specific enough to do anything worth while.

I think my biggest programming achievement would be creating gui stuff controlled entirely by doing math on numbers in strings. Anytime I use a menu in any software(or even tv stuff) that doesn't let the cursor wrap around the field (like when entering your name or something) I laugh that I could do that with the scripting language and the pros didn't even take the time to add it in to their stuff.