Your Biggest Programming Moments

Related to the First 3D:

I was wondering- During your times of programming- What were the biggest moments for you? The best acheivements?

For me, this ones long, and mostly un-needed!:

1990: Drawing a boat with Line commands in BBCBasic on the BBC.(Hahaha!)
1992: Den Bros platform game in BBCBasic on the BBC. Hahaha again!
1992: Den Bros 2, learnt how to side-scroll on the BBC. Wahey!
1995: Got a new bbc, Figured out how to use assembly! Wrote a sprite system that enabled me to make way better looking games. Wrote pro looking plastform games, Simpsons, Bomberman, (I was not original!) Leo Lemming.
1996: get the BBC to play real music using just two cables and some clamps, and some Assembler. This felt awesome! I followed it up by creating a hardware amp and popping it into the BBC internally and adding a MIC socket where the BBC's reset switch was supposed to be. (Anyone ever had a BBC with a reset switch actually installed?. It was great hearing my compuer go "OW! MY ASS!" when i landed on lava in Den Bros 2.

2001/2: Blitz3D! I actually did dream of making mario64 clones! Thanks Mark!
2002/3 (forgot when): Started using ODE in blitz thanks to Vorderman and got the Racing Engine up and running. thanks vorderman!


...Woah, life story!!!

I was just wondering what youre most important times were during your times of programming?

My greatest moment was figuring out how to program a game like Eye of the Beholder. I bought the game on it's release day and was blown away by it. I actually figured it out whilst sitting in a barber's chair - I made the connection that doing the levels in an array would work then you could write loops to do the view and slap each graphic on the screen based on whether it was seen or not. It was also the first time I had created a 3D game engine whereby you could explore a 3D world.

Years later, ie in the past couple of years - I realise that they way I figured it out was the way that other people did too - so I was quite pleased. However, the amazing thing about it was it is incredibly easy to do, once you worked out the method.

You see I only got the internet in 2003 - I was a completely self-taught programmer from right back in the days of the Spectrum - I didn't know anyone who programmed.

In fact, programming for such a huge length of time without any help from other people, books or the internet is an achievement.

My life story - woof.

for me... the first check i received for a TI-99/4A software program that i was selling back in the 80's mail order...

after that, everything has sorta been downhill since... funny, even though we've got so much more nowadays, it just doesn't seem as much fun as it used to be...

--Mike

That's because an experience adds an absolute amount of experience, not a relative amount.

If you have no experience then:

[exp]

is full experience-boost, 100%

If you have experience then:

[previous experience                                                 ][exp]

is just a minor relative addition. This relative minor addition is what we experience as 'absolute' tho.. that's the whole thing about it.

Sweet, Puki! I didn't get Internet access until 2003 either :)

I kind of agree, Red. I don't get such a buz out of programming a full on 3D platformer than I did figuring how to plot pixels in 6502 Assembler..! That changed a bit when I worked on the racer and felt It had a meaning- all these years HAVEN'T been wasted. :D

When you finish your Sub game, you'll most likely feel revived too!

hmmmm...when i managed to write a finalFantasy type battle system for my first program in Blitz3D! It was horribly written though, I'd hate to look at the code now ^^

Finishing pushy has been a big moment for me, finshing a project is just the best :)

..my biggest programming momet was in the moment when I saw for a first time in my life message "SYNTAX ERROR" on the blue TV screen, on my C64...I was so excited about 'interaction' with machine so i continue wity typing all possible nonsense in order to see more 'smart' messages from machine...soon I get tired and after that is born my first small database for local video store..huh...

Hello.

I'm like the other old farts who don't feel quite the same buzz anymore. When playing games on the c64 and then discovering that I could actually do that stuff myself...well, just wow!

Then spending almost an entire 3 month vacation in Hong Kong in a store that had a spectravideo 128 and manual that the staff were quite happy for the mad child gweilo to get working.

I used to love being a smartass in shops by writing 6502 assembly code from my head using c64 basic and data statements that would have interrupt driven sprites bouncing around the screen. Couldn't do that anymore :o)

These days, it's all kind of "yeah, I know it's possible, so where's the challenge?" I think the internet and the resources available make these things so much, not easier necessarily, but at least acheivable with less sweating.

Goodbye.

I cold make a whole list but I'm busy. Some highlights were learning binary to make sprites on an Acorn Electron and making a space invader game in 1984 or something. Also figuring out how to make a scrolling text message on a spectrum around the same time.

Aymes,

Thats always cool! and congrats again!



As Evak will know- I get bored when i'm not in a challenge, (but i also get bored when computers dont do what you tell 'em!) I perform better when theres a nice challenge with decent results- New stuff, not things people can do all over the place left right and centre, Like my Driving AI, although people seem to be catching up now and bigger/better AI code is around- My code isnt all that good now!

Interrupt driven bouncy sprites while still typing code in on the BBC was quite spectacular :D

man, yeah. I spent weeks hacking that to find the pattern. Without the internet I was on my own. I did it in the end :D

vdu 23?

yup. You ever do VDU23,7¦? Thats how you scroll the screen left :)

With VDU23- I knew to use that, but i didnt know about binary itself so i spent my time hacking the values out of it! ^.^

used to make my own squared paper for sprite planning. Later squared paper was vital for mapping Bards Tale II on Amiga then later still Dungeon Master!

I tought my sister about squared paper and how to create enemies. She drew the graphics for Den Bros 2 :)

Cygnus: you only got a BBC in 1990!? Wasn't it already an antique by then, along with all the other 8-bits? :P

I got it in 1988- when I was 4.

You got a beeb when you were 4!? Wow. I always wanted one but they were just too expensive. I always considered them as a posh kids computer. :P

Playing music under interrupt on an Oric-1.

Flashing the border on a C64 in basic then learning machine code and being amazed at how much faster that border flashed! lol

Hardware scrolling on C64 mmm smoooth.

Playing games like captive and turrican then trying to emulate them with AMOS on the amiga.

Then got a PC and it's been downhill ever since =/

Getting a character to move & jump-around with so-so collision physics that were half-broken in BB2d, but still, it worked!
(too bad I didn't know about tilemaps back then, had so many 640x480rez .BMPs in that folder...)

Shambler: "captive and turrican" two all time classics!

One of mine was figuring out how to do totally smooth, any speed, multi-directional scrolling on the Amiga.

C000: INC $D020
      JMP $C000

Oh Yes! Playing with C64 assembly language was good fun. I think I used to use an Action Replay cartridge with assember built in.
Any road, I managed to display a custom sprite and have it inverted too. The fact that the C64 never went up in smoke with *my* machine code proved to be a big gaming moment for me.

I made a basic language on the C64 that "compiled" to assembly. It only had really basic graphics commands but was way faster than basic. My friend wrote a compression program too so when you saved you basic files to tape they took about 5 seconds instead of 5 minutes, it was bloody brilliant! Had an Action Reply too, they rocked.

BBC basic was fast for its age. you could get some impressive speed out of it. I once wrote a language using Basic that compiled to Assembler. When run, it would play back a sequence of lights on a peice of hardware i made :)

I think CS_TBL is onto something. I definately remember my greatest moment as being:

10 Print "Mikkel er gud!"
20 Goto 10

Getting the computer to do what you tell it to do is so awesome. It was also probably the last completely bugfree program I developed. It definately went down-hill from there.

My first programming moment was when I programmed a Dice game on PC using QBasic. I was about 8 and had no idea about the language. It seemed to work, cept' the dice value was the same each time :(

probably when I sold my first commercial program at 16 for the C64. Woulda been 1985 or '86... can't remember.

FlameDuck, you're right you know-
Back on the BBC, my software was bug-free. Got onto PC and either I would insert new bugs or windows would do it for me!

I got 100% for my GCSE Technology because I made a new robotic control interface board for the BBC. You plugged it into the back and it had 8 ports that could be input OR output, noone had ever made a dual purpose one at this point. It was cool. Did it with tracing paper and black masks for the PCB design and then ultraviolet to burn it onto PCB which was then etched in acid. Then the components were soldered on. I haven't a clue how it works now! :-)

Look on ye mere mortals and weep...



gnash your teeth in envy at the tightness of my code. Marvel at the sumptuous animation as hordes of alien invaders fill your screen. Be astonished that the screen doesn't crash due to using up all the video memory on your 1Kb ZX81 by the 5th row of creatures...



download the emulator here... http://freestuff.grok.co.uk/vb81/index.html

and load my mighty code here http://www.blackjumper.com/selling/invade.p

... I can't believe I just did that !

It took about 2 minutes to sort out the syntax...

... and 20 minutes to actually type it using that ridiculous keyboard layout !

lol, cool. those keyboards were worse than the 48k rubber key jobbie.

One fine day in the early 90's I discovered this.....



This was actually already ANCIENT by the time I uncovered it from my parent's deep closet of hidden mystery. Nonetheless, it was my first computer and unto it I type the code :

10 Print "Hello, World!"
20 End
Run

And thus I knew that 15 years from then I would be getting paid to do that........(its not all that exciting...)

Darn!!! I was gonna do the Hello World thing... I did that the first time on a DEC 10 running Dartmouth BASIC at NASA when I was 7. (1968) Mine used 20line to goto 10line though... I ran it and wasted reams of paper and tied up Apollo11 Capsule Simulations for 20 minutes.

See to get in to the control console you turned the Honeywell Dumbterm on and off rapidly a few times and if you did it fast enough you would see the main menu. No password needed.

So I suppose it is my first h@ck onsite (at 7 nonetheless) without trying.

How did I know that about the Honeywell dumbterm??? I didn't. I was frustrated at not knowing a password so I got mad at the unit and turned it on and off rapidly... viola!!! 7 year old SUPER GENIUS discovers security hole in protected server system.

Heh, that'd be awesome :)

oh man... does that bring back memories... the ole TImex Sinclair 1000 :)

i had one of those... why did i ever let it go...


thx for the journey back in time Neuro...

--Mike

I got to toy with a ZX81 too, but after I got my BBC. I wasn't impressed by the time I got to tinker!

Yah, I also found the 16k memory expansion pack (not that my parents knew what it was) that allowed me to write more complicated programs that always ended up crashing cause the memory pack was universally flawed! Ahh yess the memories.....

In my atttic ...




I've also got a C64 with lots of cassettes.

All machines are working. ^ Nostaglia is a but a stepladder away ^

ooh Jim, I had that exact 48K box. Only thing thats left it is the Spec and that doesn;t work. The manual was cool. The free software was Horrace goes skiing amongst others right? Plus some kind of evolution program I think. Spore looks a bit better.

Ah, the infamous 'RAM-pack wobble'. :P

I still got my speccy box, manuals and keyboard somewhere. The PCB itself lives in a lo-profile keyboard, though. Unfortunately, it no longer works. :( It had a hard life - wouldn't like to hazzard a guess at how many hours I spent playing with it.

Funny though, one whiff of the packaging and all the memories come flooding back.

Grrr. Reminds me of when my brother and I was half-way through typing a 16K frogger game from a magazine when all of a sudden, a Butterfly decided to flap its wings somewhere on the planet causing the RAMPack to wobble. Then, *doink* the whole lot was lost in a nanosecond.
Especially more painfull because of all that SHIFT/FUNCTION business for entering code.

MY greatest programing moment?

When I saw this thread, at first, I didn't think I'd have anything to post. There was nothing I have coded that I could think of that was a particularly amazing accomplishment. Oh sure, I've coded a lot of things that I've been proud of. But none stood out to me at being particularly special.

But then it hit me. There was ONE thing.

...

My greatest programming moment:

In my final year of high school, 1994 to be precise, when I had learned enough Pascal to "kill a horse" (according to my future coworkers) and had started learning C, I came across an ad on a BBS for a "game programmer" for a local hardware company that made 3D game controllers.

I applied for a C programming position there, and coded a simple 3D game with flat-shaded untextured polygons in C for the job interview. This was the year of the 486, when Doom had just come out, and the original Wolf 3D was still fresh in people's minds... When "raycasting" was king, and the idea of rendering textured polygons a pipe dream, unless one could afford a $10,000 SGI machine.

Being young and impetuous, I thought I could do anything those College educated guys with years of C programming experience could do. I was annoyed at being looked down upon by Aaron, the lead programmer.

One day, as part of Aaron's work on making "games" to demonstrate the power of the SpaceOrb controller, he developed a Wolfenstein-like raycasting engine. I was impressed by this. I had in the past failed in my own attempts to replicate such an engine.

Aaron's success however turned out to be the bane of my existence. When I would question him on why he was doing something a certain way, he would ask me "Oh yeah? Have YOU coded a Wolf 3D engine?"

I had to admit I hadn't, and it ate at me.

One day I decided enough was enough, and I decided that I would code such an engine, so that the next time Aaron said that to me, I would have one at the ready to dangle in front of his face.

I enlisted the help of the resident genius, a 60 year old russian chain-smoking math professor with a thick accent (and whom I could barely understand) which company had hired to write their 3D engine. I asked him questions about how to make use of Sine and Cosine to render a 2D scene as 3D from the point of view of a player. Once I scanned across the scene, one vertical line at a time, and determined the distance at which each ray struck a wall in the map, (which was a bitmap, not a collection of line segments) I was able to scale slices of my texture. Of course, I had failed to account for the fisheye effect, but it didn't matter. I had a working Wolf 3D engine. It ran slow as hell, and was limited to 90 degree walls, but it worked. :-)

I showed it to Jake, another programmer there, and he approved, so then I waited for Aarom to use his catchphrase on me again, and later that day, sure enough, he did.

Aaron: "Have YOU coded a Wolf 3D engine?"
Me: "Actually, yes, I have."
Aaron: "..." (shocked look)
Me: (Yelling over adjacent cubicle wall) "Hey Jake!"
Jake: "Yeah?"
Me: "Tell Aaron I coded a Wolf 3D engine."
Jake: "Yeah, I saw it it was pretty cool."

So Aaron had me show it to him, and he said it was cool, and he never used that catch phrase again.

And that was my greatest programming moment.


My second greatest programming moment on the other hand might have to be the time that I learned how to use XOR to swap two values, and Aaron, acting smart as always, asked me the next day, if I knew what this code he wrote on his whiteboard did. I answered immediately of course, which once again left him in shock. Yay me! :-)

Heh. I remember spending forever to type a listing from a magazine in GW-BASIC, then typing: SAVE "filename.bas" and while my hand was on its way to the return key to commit, there was a half-second power-blip and my computer reset itself.

*Sigh*. Save often.

lol at swift!

One of my favorites was probably when I created a function that would save a 256 color image to disk in PCX format, with compressing... Using PowerBasic for DOS, which doesn't natively support a 256 color mode in the first place.

...Especially when being able to succesfully open the resulting image in a 3rd party paint program without errors.

Like Puki, I too am self-taught from the old speccy days, and never got use of the internet till around 2000/2002 I think. Even then I didnt do any programming again until I discovered Blitz3d!

I think some of my great moments were:
Realising how chess AI works. A technique that can be applied to so many other AI uses.

Writing my first actual complete and finished game on the speccy back in about 1989. It was a fun little single-screen platformer, that I still intend to remake on PC

'Cracking' the code for Rebelstar Raiders, simply converting the bytes into ASCII and the spectrums' UDG graphhics which lead me to create a pretty good 'Editor' for the game!

Since the Halcyon days of zx Basic, my greatest moments have been more trivial:

Realising you need to use BackBuffer() and Flip

Learning how to use functions

Learning how to use Types

:D

Oh wait, I forgot professional moments: Getting the order for House of Lords for my £30000 stock control system, that felt pretty good. Then to repeat it for the House of Commons :-)

1983 Offered first job as a commercial games developer after telephone interview following a sample tape, declined and informed Ocean I was 8 years old.
1986-88 First 3 commercial games published by minor publisher, who sold a handful of copies and then went under.
1990 Started working in I.T. industry
1992 Took job working for major software house
1993 Developed B quality game at home in free time, released it via BBS scene and got fired for pirating company property.
2000~First magazine article published.
2001~First magazine coverdisk.
2002~1 millionth unique IP visitor to webpage
2004 Dozenth coverdisk appearance, sustained over 10gb/day from web page. Reduced activity of releases to focus on other interests.
2005 Steadily worked away in the background improving skills.
2006 Released Fellowship of the Bling, married rich hunk, got wisked away to fantasy land, lost the plot and section 10'd, got done for tax evasion.

Why did you send them a tape in the first place, then?

I sent a game submission, they rejected it but offered me a job.

So which of these are true? I presume none yet. So which are going to be true?

The section 10 bit will almost certainly happen, the rest ... I dont know :)

lol, yeah me too ... burble.

For those of us outside of the UK -- what's a section 10?

A compulsory entrance ticket to the funny farm (where they bread jokes).

@ Jim Brown...
that pic instantly brought back the smells of what it was like opening shrinkwrap on that new Timex Sinclair...

like a new car, new computers back then had a unique new computer smell to em... the plastic shell, manuals...

the new computers seem to be missing that 'new car smeel'... maybe that's part of the reason that the 'old days' seemed so much better...

:)

--Mike

That's what years of smoking have done to your nostrils...

That and the absense of manuals anyway...

Greatest achievement, at the time, was writing a game called worms on the C64, before the game Worms game out. In fact, my game was a kind of copy of that game, where you ran about a maze, being chased by worms, and you had to collect all the coins. There was also keys and other such things you could collect, to open doors, and disable electric fences.

It was written mostly in machine code, mixed with some basic. I had to write an machine code assembler in blitz. It only had about half the instructions the C64 could use, but it was enough for me. Come to think of it, writing that little app, was a big achievement too.

Moving onto blitz seemed like you were cheating in alot of ways hehehe. Draw your sprites in paint or whatever. Just didn't seem the same and seemed like a less sence of achievement. But, such is progress :o)

war diaries of Becky Rose... (lol) cute... you should work that one, it has marketing potential...


--Mike

Red: I remember the way my new 48K smelled too, it was cool.