What is your programming experience and future plans?

[bkaye]

Yeah....I got here 25 years too late, but that's pretty much the way the hand is dealt....youth wasted on the young and retirement wasted (or not as fully utilized) on the old.  I guess the saving grace is at least I got here healthy and secure.

I can remember setting up a development environment on my office PC  (before corporate IT got so intrusive) just so I could follow up on any programming brainstorms that hit me during the work day.  Never was one to do much browsing, though I can remember doing large (for the time) personal downloads before broadband at home was available and 600-200 bps dial-up was max...(100k downloads took forever...)

Am looking forward to getting into XNA/graphics once I get home later in the week...currently in Florida where all I have is an old, slow  Win2K PC...

Congratulations on the prospective family addition....hope all goes well..

Bob

[Nemo Krad]

Thanks 

As I am sure you know, it is never to late to learn something new.

Well I wish I was working in Florida, damp, wet England does not really compare 

[jdowling]

suppose i might as well post being new here :p

I'm 25, been programming on and off as a hobby since I was ~6ish in a number of languages.  Got my BS in philosophy (fear that doing programming as a living would kill it for me) and worked a number of crappy jobs.  Now I'm going to school again for my masters in CS and working in a software testing group for the time being.

No idea what my future plans are but I'm having great fun screwing around with game engine stuff & what not... too much fun probably seeing how much time i've been doing it vs. working on school stuff ;x

[Kafeen]

A little about me.

I started programming in the late 80's to early 90's I think it was on my Amstrad CPC464, mainly copying the basic programs from the manual or weekly magazines and editting them to see what else I could make them do.

In the mid 90's I started programming the Amiga using AMOS and a little Amiga Basic along with a few other systems such a my school's BBC Micro where I'd rewrite the only game we had for it (interpretted code that was easy to break in to).

In the late 90's I went to college mainly to study business studies and maths but took Computing aswell to give me something I enjoyed doing.  While I was at college where I was programming in Pascal I found my previous programming experiance was a much bigger help than I would have expected, especially since it was my first time working with Pascal.

After leaving college I went to university to study game's programming.  There I started off using C and a little ASM then later C++.

Now I work for a small games development studio called Atomic Planet as a game programmer on PC and a number of console platforms including my latest project on NDS and Wii.  We mainly use C but on my latest projects have pushed into C++. 

I use C# at home for a few things when I'm not experimenting with various different console homebrew projects.

[b-studio]

Given i'm only 17 this will be a short one 

Started programming when i liked the idea of being able to create my own games, this was around 1999. My dad had his share of programming so he said i had to learn far more then just some words, so i started looking into some stuff. I discovered basic, didn't like it and stopped with it for a few months. Then the web started to attract me, I picked up a book and just went on doing some HTML, after a while I knew HTML pretty good so I thought why not move it up a step. That automaticly led to javascript and after that php. After that i got back into the gaming scene again, bought 3dgamestudio and started programming with that (still doing that btw). Found out about C++, and didn't like it because of (mainly) the window handling, my dad pointed me at the .NET platform and i was immediatly hooked. A long line of short C# apps followed as well as a small Managed directX engine. Nowadays i'm a web programmer at a publishing company.

My future plans:
- get my degree in informatics
- try to get a job at the microsoft.net team
- if that fails, look for a nice job wich features both consulting and programming (tough one )

[CarlosFreitas]

Well..

Lemme bring some more reumatics to the list

I started programming a loooong time ago, when I bought a Zx Spectrum ( TK82-C - Made in Brazil >> http://www.smithedantas.com.br/texto/tk82c.jpg), . That was... hummm... 1976, if my math is correct. Yes, I?m now 38

Later I changed the first ZX for a TK90 ( A colour Sinclair Made in Brazil http://www.mci.org.br/micro/microdigital/tk90.html - I still have it working ) , a colour one.
I used to get some code from books and magazines and mess around to see the results, as everybody did at the time. How I didnt had the money to buy the tape recorder, the main reason I had to stop was that any stuff I was wanting to do I had to programm it again everyday 

Later I got a MSX, and was not too much excited about the thing, girls and a rock?n roll band were the most important things at that point of my life.

Later in the finishing 80?s I started working with computer parts sales, got one to my home, looked at it and asked myself " Does this thing run Basic ? " .. Opened the box and after Basic, Qbasic, VB, .Asp , C++ ( just a little ) and so much others , I ended developing in house solutions for small companies in Brazil.

Besides this, I raced professional karts in Brazil at the S?o Paulo state, making some wins, some second places and lots lots lots of fun girls crashes and spent all the money pc market booooom gave me to burn lol.

Since I stoped racing, I played lots of racing games and developed some projects using various engines, including lame ( but ready to go... )  ones. But never finished a project, I have only a 3dgamestudio project almost ready that has racing car physics script embedded, with a specific behaviour I want to translate to something more professional.

After study all tutorials, and barely understand all them, I still dont understand how so many things are achieved after so small code, my main problem by now is with C# and the perceptions of what runs in what order and things like this , XNA is a charm.

So I decided polish my C# understanding before try to pass all tutorials again, to have a better understand of it.

My plans are tunned with racing simulations games.

[unterhunde]

Heya! Im kind of new here. But after performing/reading some of these tutorials Im sticking here lol.

Im 25.

My programming experience is limited. I've never done it as a profession, just hobby. Ive been dabbling in almost every language out there for about 7 years.
I started to go to college for some "Computer Science: Emphasis - Programming" degree and dropped out after 3 months. It seemed more like they wanted my wallet instead of to help me learn. So its back to just me and the internet.

I started in playing with Pascal when I started middle school.  I have bought some old junker of an Apple (not sure what it was. Was like a monitor in a box that had a keyboard plugged into it. It all boxed up neatly together and was black and white). Even then I had almost no clue what was going on but I played with the fractal demos that came with it and I got hooked.

Gets a bit cloudy after that. I think I played with QBasic a bit and then by the time I hit highschool I had actual internet access and found the VB Macros in the Office products which led me to trying VB. I made my own MUD client in VB after that.  "Insert more fuzzy memories"

I joined the army got sent to korea and bought my first personal computer and moved from VB to try C++. Got lost in it after about a week. So I did what I've seen a lot of un-accomplished application developers do. I threw myself into web developement/authoring. Played around setting up my own webservers/mailservers/etc. Got familiar with JavaScript, PHP/MySQL combo. Had some fun once all that ajax hype hit the boards.  Got bored because I was trying to make cool websites that had no purpose so everything i did stagnated and withered away.

Moved back to the US then got sent to Iraq. Couldnt do much but read things on the internet. So I read up on various other languages. By the time I got back from Iraq and out of the army I had tried Ruby, Java, and some other randoms things for certain nefarious purposes like AutoIT. Did some LUA scripting for my WoW Client.

Got back into C++(fourth attempt) made it as far as initializing directX device at which time I had forgotten why I even started the program. It occured to me that 1. Lack of a trash collector and poor memory management  is what had probably ruined many of my favorite games that I had played over the years (Especially Neocron).
Also I thought to myself that a lot of the stuff done in C++ was something we could have developed into a new language to be a little less "clutterly" and "long winded".

So I heard about XNA while rummaging through the MS site looking for more VC++ help and noticed is used C#. I hade never tried it so I decided to give it a shot.
I was extremely happy with it. It reminded me of Visual Basic in its ease of use. I didnt spend hours wondering what functions/etc i used where REALLY part of the language or just some hidden and obscure thing I had unknowingly implimented in the process of a tutorial.  I finished the gioing beyond tuts with ease. it all made since. everything had a place and there was an obvious "program flow".

Now Im here. Found this place mainly trying to learn how to properly do thrid person cameras. Stumbled upon the SceneGraph and realized how useful of not "necessary" it is.


PHEW A LOT OF RANDOM STUFF THERE

Future: I want to develop an MMO. (yes yes ive been told to make a tetris game or something like that first. but to be honest I may not be able to sit down and write a tetris game off the top of my head, BUT sprites, coordinates, layers, and increments arent really that hard to grasp. Mix em all together with some logic and bam youve got a basic game)

I have minor 3d modeling experience as well, but I have a friend that is "supposed" to be learning maya to do some modeling (if he will ever quit messing around with Second Life's crippled "sculpties")

Ive forgotten why i was typing here so i guess im done lol.

[Trebor Slater]

Hey Nemo,

Wow reading your entry was like real scary, I am you !!! I couldn't have written it any better, everything you say is me at the moment.

Just hope your not as good looking as me. 

[Nemo Krad]

Probably more so,I am very pretty 

[dopplex]

With the recent forum issues, it's hard to tell whether this topic is still active or not - but may as well chime in anyway.

I grew up always having access to a computer.  From a very early point, I knew that what I wanted to do was make games - granted, at that point I had a very unrealistic view of the task that actually was!  I didn't actually start any "real" programming until High School, though.  (I'd done things like play around with Basic and LogoWriter - which were the closest things I had to programming languages available to me)  I was introduced to programming through my AP CompSci course - and had the unfortunate distinction of being the last class to take the AP test in Pascal.  (I seriously think that my life would have been far easier if I had just learned a C based language initially, rather than starting with a language that I have never used since that class)

Went on to university - majored in comp sci, and totally burned myself out.  It was a combination of a CS department that taught the subject in a way that really wasn't compatible with my way of thinking - it really seemed to be far more focused on the "Science" aspect of "Computer Science" and not so much about the Engineering.  At times, I felt like the program had an outright antipathy to teaching us *any* practical aspects of programming.  (I understand that things like Makefiles, IDEs, and debuggers aren't particularly interesting from the perspective of theoretical CompSci, but not giving us a thorough introduction to things with the potential to make our lives *much* easier was a major problem)

In any case, by the time I got out, I not only hadn't done very well academically (I actually learned most of the concepts pretty well.  I just hated doing homework/problem sets, and often simply didn't.), I also had been sapped of much of my desire to use programming to make things.  I got out, learned some finance, started working for a business consulting company... and gradually started getting my desire to program back.

Fast forward to a month or so ago.  I've been doing a lot of work in VBA for my job, and have also been looking for a way to get back into games.  I first looked at Raph Koster's Metaplace - but eventually gave up on that, simply because the private Alpha seemed to go on forever and I wanted to get started already!  Having actually started putting together a real game concept at that point, I looked back at XNA (which I had initially looked at around a year or so ago), and decided to start following an engine tutorial.  (This one, actually..)  I'd actually tried before, but usually I hit a wall somewhere and then work or something else would come up, and I wouldn't stick with it.  I'm not entirely sure why, but this time I got past the wall I'd hit previously, and got to a point where I realized that I actually could muddle through enough - even at my current knowledge level - to put together something playable.  And I actually had a good concept/design document started to work from.

Of course, I'm not particularly good at doing something halfways.  Having decided that I was going to go ahead with it and *actually get it done* this time, I've spent the last several weeks semi-obsessed with learning all of the things I'd need to finish the job.

I've managed so far... My shader code has gone from doing nothing but getting me blank black screens to actually yielding some relatively unique visual styles.  I'm now semi-functional in C#, even though I hadn't coded in either it or C++ before.  I still have quite a ways to go when it comes to building usable models/animations - but I'm learning (That's the really hard one - learning to code something is a much easier task just because I'm used to the workflow and idioms involved - and therefore a tutorial can get me pretty far)

My future plans...  Well, I have a game design document.  And I'm intent on making it happen :-)
Immediate stuff:
- New version of cel shading shader - now that I have a decent handle on the sorts of operations needed in order to implement cel shading, I want to redesign the whole thing starting with a clearer idea of the artistic goals of the shader.  My existing one does what it was intended to do - but I've realized that in some cases, I was aiming for the wrong thing.
- Make several placeholder models with multiple animations which can be blended together.
- Start building basic game logic - especially timing aspects related to gameTime (and especially how those timing aspects are going to interact with model animation).