Montana Mofia

[Cat]

Sounds like (from an older post) that you are a student at MSU.  Tell us a bit more about yourself and your situation.  I only ask because I graduated (twice, actually) from MSU and am curious about Bozeman's developer environment. If you don't want to post info like that in your forums, please email because I'd love to chat!  I know of quite a few "displaced" Montanans working in Washington state, and we are known as the Montana Mofia where I work...

>^,,^<

[mikeschuld]

Well most of my development experience (actually all if I think really carefully) comes from just reading books and spending way too much time in my bedroom. I am in the CS department here at MSU, but the classes and the labs are some of the least challenging things I have ever done with code.

We have a new entrepreneurial center over here on College and 19th (assuming you still know where that is) that has a lot of small startup businesses in it, many of which are very application development based. I work for a company called SoUSay, Inc. in the TechRanch (that's what they call the entrepreneurial center) and have been writing a PHP/MySQL app with them since late October.

I got my coding start in HTML and JavaScript at about age 12, and have been doing all types of development ever since. Mostly working with web languages, but I have always wanted to do game development (like so many of the CS majors at any university, only I haven't met any here that have any 3D/2D/game coding experience at all.) Early in highschool, I decided to broaden out into more desktop application developmnt and got a student version of Visual C++, which happened to come with a game development kit that was utterly useless, but more deeply planted that seed in my brain.

After I got sick of all the bullshit C++ makes you deal with (and it is bullshit when you are only 15 believe me), I went and got a copy of Visual C# as I had heard it handles memory management and a few other things for you, and I already knew Java, so it would be easy to learn. The second i got C# up and running I started working on DirectX development.

I bought about 5 books dealing with general Game Engine Design, most of which were for C++, but some that were also done in C#. Playing with all of the engines in those books made me realize two things.

• People who write books write terrible code
• Game engine development is too detailed and in depth to get from a book

So, I decided to just get the Managed DirectX Graphics and Game Programming book which led me to get more into the general graphics programming theory instead of simply game engine development. While I taught myself all about graphics programming, I put together the first iteration of the Hazy Mind Game Engine, which at the time was labeled the VSTEngine, for Venus Software Technologies, the small company name I had picked out in case something ever got going. That was based on the fact that the gaming industry as a whole is centered around games for guys and I thought I should pay a bit of a tribute to the other half of the world that keeps this industry going.

After about 5 years of messing around with my 3D engine, and not having produced any games, I decided I'd at least get something productive out of the process I had just undergone and try to help other people learn some things that took me far too long to find.

So I deleted all the code and started over, this time documenting the whole process as I went. (O.K. I didn't delete all the code, because I still liked the way the old engine was put together, but I haven't reused anything yet.) I threw together about 10 tutorials in the first few months, and then got slowed down a lot with having to work to pay bills and all the general life stuff that seems to take so much time.

Hopefully soon, time will once again come my way and I will be able to get underway on some great new additions to the engine. Animations are coming first, but soon I will also add in a few more shader tutorials and a lot of additions to the Scene Editor as well. Maybe soon we will even be able to put together a fast prototype game with Hazy Mind as the base.

So that is basically the story so far. Anyone who wants to know specifics about what other things have happened during college can feel free to read through the many blog posts that I had made on here before it got converted to 90% development content. I'm not sure where everything will go from here. I have been told by many I should just write about book (which I might consider once XNA is fully released and that whole area settles a bit), but that too takes a lot of time that I simply don't have with school and  a job right now.

I want to someday licence the engine for commercial use if it gets to be good enough and easy enough for people to put together some real games/apps with. The picking code is already being used in one industrial application being produced by the guys at simcon.dk. It isn't much, but it's a start.

So that is all I've got for now. That topic has been sufficiently rambled on in my opinion. How about everyone else. What are your stories, and where would you like to write their next chapters to?

[Chr0n1x]

Since you asked so nicely...
My programming experience started at age 10 when I delved into HTML, this was about 2 years after purchasing my first (family) computer and somehow installing Leisure Suit Larry and Personal Web Server. (Somehow...) Anyway, after learning HTML and the small bits of Javascript and CSS that the book contained, I looked into Java, but being on 28k at the time () I did not continue because of the daunting 17mb JDE. Plus the pace of the book was too slow and I was very impatient. Anyway, about 3 years later I got into real programming after a bit of HTML competition with a friend. I decided to start programming where I was most comfortable and started to learn PHP. The competiton continued and my friend started as well. (Although he quit when it got too hard)
After I got into PHP I thought to myself, "Hey, if I can do this so well, how hard can a 'real' programming language be". (I use real in the sense that real is a compiled language, well thats what I thought at the time, no use telling history and then editing it.
So I bought my first C++ book, an went from there. Got scared along the way by pointers and then finally understood them. Then one day I was reading through the STL chapter of the book on the bus when a programmer sat down next to me and looked at my book. We got into a conversation and he started preaching C#. A month later I deicded to look into it and started with some very basic tutorials. This was when I realised that C# is teh pwnage.( As gamers so elequently put it) And started programming a lot in the language. (WinForms is a blessing, when compared to Win32)
After really getting into the language I looked into reinvigorating my C++ skills to learn directX and get scared by the init code I saw on some websites. When I found Coding4Fun just before the release of VS2005 I eventually learned that DirectX could be written in C#, this is when I started my quest to learn it and write an engine. After finding your tutorials I was able to successfully complete my Chronos engine, vaguely based off your style. After I finished your tutorials I expanded it from many other sources and picked up Kickstart Managed DirectX by Tom Miller. From him I learned some new ideas and also worked off other tutorials. Eventually extending my Engine to the GUI stage.
Then I hit delete...
A rewrite was the best thing I had done, I rewrote my engine under the name Tracer and even started a project with friends for a game. Which failed when they failed to get off their fat butts and gimme some content. Anyway, after follwing your RSS feed I noticed you put up the forums and here I am.
Oh and recently, maybe for the past 2 months or so, I have been learning DirectX in C++ and so far it is going well.

Thats my programming life, the good parts anyway. Probably could add more, about what I have learned etc, but I have a maths test to study for (Locus urrgh) and need to wrap this up.

Nice to see your programming history Mike, good read, and hopefully others will post theirs soon.
eg. The XNA guy. hehe no pressure.

[Cat]

When I was in fourth grade, my mom enrolled me in two college summer classes at the U of M where I learned LOGO and BASIC. Not too long after that we got our first computer, an Apple IIe. I took my limited basic skills and hacked the many wonderful games that were available for the IIe. Eventually I made it to college at MSU where I received first a bachelors and then a masters in Computer Science. My commitee head was Dr. Binhai Zhu, whom I'm sure is still teaching there. I was one of Binhai's first graduate students. I mostly programmed in C++, but picked up C# as soon as it was released and even did my final distributed programming project in C#. Since starting work here in Washington, I've since earned another MS in Systems Engineering, and help administer a department that does virtual training and learning. Much of our content is in flash though, so I don't get to flex my programming muscles too often anymore. I've been trying to do more of it at home to make sure I don't lose the skill completely. I've written [primitive] game engines in OpenGL (for my first graphics class), DirectX7 (for my second graphics class), but my current attempt will be my first in C# and its been awhile since I really coded something large. Last year I even got to attend SIGGRAPH (where I ran into Ray Babcock, another of my professors) which something I aways wanted to do.

Nowadays, I pretty much program exclusively in C#, because, why not? I'm trying to learn the IDE better and to keep my meager programming knowledge from wasting away. I am trying to make a remake of StarCon II (if anyone remembers that game) since it's relatively simple and 2D, but still very fun. I wish to eventually expand this to a ship building and design game, as well as melee. I also hope to find some like-minded people to work on a project with, since like many others here, my real job gets in the way of my hobbies quite frequently. I'd love to get some feedback on my code and design, and would really like to see what other are doing too.

Anyways, I guess that's my programming history in a nutshell... 

>^,,^<

[mikeschuld]

I know both Binhai Zhu and Ray Babcock. I talked about doing a project with 3D music generation with Ray actually, which was a presentation he had seen at that same SIGGRAPH, but I am not sure where that project has gone as he has slowly been showing signs of parkinsons and has chosen to retire:

After 26 years with the department Ray Babcock retired at the end of Spring Semester. Ray joined the department when it was still part of a joint Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, and was with the department longer than any of our current faculty. The department thanks him for everything that he has done for us, and wishes him a long and happy retirement.

Binhai is teaching the CS350 course and still many at the graduate level though.