Elysian Shadows

A question suddenly popped in my head, and this might be fun...

What is your single greatest moment in programming?

For me, it was my senior year of college, in Computer Graphics (OpenGL) class. Our last project was to create a 3D scene with a bouncing ball...

So, I created a basketball court - complete with hoops, stadium seats, and Dallas Mavericks textures. Then I had a player on the free-throw line that could shoot the ball and have it bounce off the backboard / rim and onto the ground. You could control the camera with the mouse and see the lights reflect on the court.

However, the player model was horrible, and the animations sucked - but my professor took one look at it and said,

"Uh, Wow...there's no need for you to take the final...you just earned your 100 in the class."

I've been trying to think about this for a few hours now. It sounds like an easy question to answer, but for some reason it's not really for me. I have started and worked on many projects, but I have finished almost none of them. The only things that I did finish were little tech demos.

So in all seriousness, I'm going to have to say Adventures in Game Development Chapter 5. That's when I got serious, learned so much more than I ever knew, ported everything to OGL/SDL in a few weeks, and that's when we broke into the mainstream on Youtube. It just felt good to have people supporting us. We had like a whole 50 or so subscribers way back then!

I can't think of a single moment that stands out much... I haven't won any prizes or impressed a many people in a single go. Can't think of any project that I managed to finish that I was proud of; I had a couple years' worth of a MUD engine that went away with my hard drive.

Hm.

I don't think it necessarily has to be something that impresses others or consists of finishing a project.. Personal victories certainly count as well.

At my first programming job, I was tasked with programmatically generating Word documents. After days of pounding my head against the wall, in fear of my job, I finally got my little test app to open up word, print "omg plz work!", and save the document. That was a good day.

I printed it out and put that shit on the fridge!

I would have to say that in my year and a half of programming in blitz, that my proudest moment was about a week ago when my game I'm working on now finally resembled a game and I will soon be able to move on to something new... This isn't a serious post by the way I was just relieved that I am going to actually finish my first game...

I have my little moments every once in a while, but never had a significant one, that I could say: "This is it!".
Never really stood out.

Damn, this is an easy one for me: in 2004/05, I managed to get the words "Hello World" printed on screen!

I swear, I've never felt such exhilaration in my life! I got up and shouted "YES! FUCKING YES!" I finally "got it."

Before all you go out and call me a complete newb, I'll say this: It was on the SNES! Specifically, I got a rom image assembled for the ZSNES emulator, which is pretty awesome by the way.

So the story goes: I was dumbfounded when I realized how difficult outputting these two words to screen really was. Thats really when I learned assembler for the first time. 65816 assembler that is (Snes custom MOS CPU). The problem was that there was no graphics API, I had to mess with the registers and Snes chips at the metal, and as it turned out I was merely a C/Python programmer back then. The translation level, thus, was pretty high for me. For instance, Python would go: python code -> byte-code -> interpreter -> binary, so I had no experience with low-level programming in those days.

I had to write my own font for god's sake! With the Snes there is no encoding standard either, so no ASCII tables. I had to define bytes!

So for the letter "A," the binary representation would give, for instance:
"00011000"
"00100100"
"01111110"
"01111110"
"01000010"
"01000010"
"00000000"

Then for the above I would defined the bytes in hex as: db "18, 24, 7E, 7E, 42, 42, 00"

You see it? Its an A! Of course, it got more complicated if I configured the Snes color registers to handle, say 16 color mode, or 4-bit-planes (2^4 = 16), that would, in juxtaposition, yield an index into a 16 color palette!

Man, I remember those low-level days and I miss them dearly... Today, I deal mostly with abstract stuff (computer science degree, not computer engineering), but I guess its okay, since a computer engineering degree... TOTALLY SUCKS BALLZZZZZZzzzz hahahahaahah. Falco, I'm kidding, don't hang me please! I know you're a computer engineering major.

I'm a computer engineering major, because I enjoy the low level things. Our engine is written partially in straight, efficient C. I think lots of people get way too obsessed with OO practices, abstraction, and whorism. Lots of those things come at a price. My Dreamcast development days were good for me in the sense of appreciating efficient, minimulistic code.

I also like the hardware and the assembly. I can't just sit at a desk all day and program or learn more and more algorithms. I like designing the chips. I feel like I'm getting to see the entire picture fully as a computer engineer. It's the Red Mage between Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

But I will say that your SNES experience sounds completely and totally badass. That's the kind of super nerd things that I thoroughly enjoy.

That's pretty awesome!

Thanks guys, I appreciate your approval of the SNES programming stuff I hope you don't mind me modifying my previous post, as it had a shit-load of mistakes ( I wrote in a rush ). For instance, originally I wrote: " an index into a 16 color index! " when I meant: " an index into a 16 color palette! " What an imbecile. Ah, I should go back to grammar school

You and Arce can go together! lol XD

...Man, I'm mean this morning.

Ha, pretty good. Okay, I'll be a little mean as well: Marauder, when you chose your nickname, were you trying to rhyme with "My router!?" hahahahahahaha

Mkay...After a while of thinking, I came to realize that my greatest moment in programming was not one of the many silent battles we face as we figure ways to get our shit to work. It was not a 'breakthrough' or a level up of any kind...To be honest, I was kind of a shitty programmer when it occurred, as well. A 'nub'. Haha.

Okay, so I had just moved schools. This was 7th grade. I was given the option to compact out of a class and take a 'gifted' one, which amounted to an independent research project. I eventually found out that I could use the program I was making (a space-shooter in blitzplus) as my project and base my research on programming and game design.

Next thing I knew, the highly supportive teacher allowed me a way to put the Blitz+ IDE on a school computer, as well as the programs I'd been working on. I brought in a CD with everything I'd done to date, and put them all on one of the school's main drives that the administrators had allotted. This drive actually had "microtype pro" on it, software for a mandatory typing tutor that all students had to use at some point. Though the students couldn't change files on there (with the exception to me), they could all view all files.

A few months into the school year, after I'd been working on the said project for a while, we had some kind of meeting for all the students enrolled in independent study projects. Happy at being able to cut class, I headed to the class early, just to find a large number of people huddled around the computer. Playing my games.

What the hell? Those fucker's had better not be screwing it up! I thought immediately. Next thing I know, I'm circled by kids, all saying "Wow, you're Marcel! I've been playing "fighting pricks" all year in keyboarding!" and "Haha, that's awesome, you made this?"

So, yeah, warm fuzzy feeling. First time I'd ever truly thought of what I was making as 'games.' ;P

lmao, thats awesome. That reminds me of when I made Frogger in my Pascal class in high school. The teacher was pissed because everyone was playing my game instead of working on their program. Then he pulled me aside and said, "print out the source code for me, and we'll call it even."

Lol, little did he know that everything he had been programming was PUBLICALLY accessible. That'd be awesome if I walked in on a group of kids playing with something I've made and saying how cool it was.

@trufun - I wish my computer teachers were that cool. They would just say "okay it's time to put that stuff away and get busy with some REAL work."