Messages

91

General discussions / Who Are You? (the obligatory interview thread)

« on: October 14, 2011, 04:22:52 am »

I love these threads.

My name's Patrick.
I'm from Germany and have just recently went to the Technical University of Dortmund to study computer sciences. Before that, I had a 3 years training and may call myself a professional software developer. I have quite some things floating around the internet already.

I started hacking Goldeneye on the N64 in about 2004 using the Gameshark. I quickly lost track, but provided some tools that allowed you to edit game texts and multiplayer weapon sets.

I went on to hack Command & Conquer: Red Alert 2: Yuri's Revenge, which would result in the RockPatch. Later on, I worked on a tool called "Syringe" that can inject any DLL code into any unprotected 32-bit application. This tool is currently in use in the Ares project, which I left, but is still being developed. It's an advanced way to hack / mod C&C: Yuri's Revenge and makes some modders happy until this day.

From 2008 on, when my favorite UT2004 server moved, I volunteered to become a game administrator on the new server. I loved the job, started to build maps, and eventually took over development of the RPG mod that we were running. TitanRPG was born. I have stopped its development in June, but reserve the option to go back at it.

This year, I looked for a decent multimedia API for Java. There's lwjgl, but I hate the fact that you have access to the raw OpenGL / OpenAL / OpenCL methods only. There was no decent high-level Java library around, so I checked for them outside the Java world. I found SFML. It convinced me, and I started working on JSFML, which is in sleeping development (waiting for the new graphics API ).

I also established a Minecraft server at the place where "my" UT2004 server ran at and also started developing minor Minecraft server plugins.

As a developer, there are loads and loads of little projects that eventually got cancelled, including several game ideas. If anybody wonders how it all started, it was when my big sister left me a Commodore 64 when I was 9.

Apart from nerdy coding, I do non-professional electronic music production: http://soundcloud.com/pdinklag The style is hard to describe...

Hi there! I have been really busy but I still pop in and read the new posts.
Nice to meet you all!

I commented on this post because I am working on an injector too and I named the project syringe too. I don't know if I should change the name or not. Do you care pdinklag if I use the same name for my injector project?

92

General discussions / Who Are You? (the obligatory interview thread)

« on: September 02, 2011, 09:58:14 am »

Wow this thread is far more popular than I thought it was going to be.
I'm amazed to see how much I have in common with people that live miles away and come from all walks of life.

I wouldn't be able to reply to every comment in this thread because of the speed of you guys posting but I'll try my best to keep up
I'm currently working on something big but I'll try to check in on this thread once in a while to see what other friends we have out there.

@Hiura
Stay ontop of school friend and never lose sight of priorities.
My brother also learned this the hard way in college unfortunately..xD
Hope the same does not go for me. I would love to hear more about Scala
pm me if you have time Thanks for sharing

@Sui
Wow 38 and started since 9. You probably have lots of experience to share with us youngsters and I hope you do share it!
I downloaded GravityCore by the way, awesome game! Its very well presented and you can feel the professional detail that was put into
this small indie title, demo was short but enjoyed every second of it. If you put this amount of detail into this game I can't wait to see if you
try something bigger what that would look like Thanks for sharing friend.

@OniLink10
Started with GameMaker just like me xD
Autism seems to become more common everyday but the people I know that have it
I don't even notice it, only thing I notice is that they can concentrate like crazy
I don't know the brain is an amazing thing. You may have trouble with some things but for other things
you are a genius. Did you guys know that Beethoven, a musical genius of his time (or any) did not understand
how to multiply or divide? Like his brain could not grasp it. But I believe that even Beethoven could have learned
multiplication and division if he tried harder anything can be learned., thanks for sharing!
I'm probably among the few coders in this forum that never actually learned SDL xD
I came straight from the console and curses to SFML a little GL here and there but most of my knowledge
is console based (I am a huge Linux guy but thats the hackish me xD)

@eXpl0it3r
I agree, the books can't teach you how to code you learn by coding yourself.
Theory and Practice are two different things, you learn faster with practice than with theory,
but then again everyone learns differently for some they prefer theory than practice but I'm very hands-on
I too was inspired by the video games I grew up with. When I was young we owned a Sega Genesis and several games
I had Sonic and Sonic 2, Altered Beast, X-Men and a few more I don't remember but then a few years later we got a Nintendo
with Mario/Duck Hunt soon after we got a Sega Saturn then a PlayStation. Around this time is when I started to wonder how
these things were made. I was about 12 when we had that PlayStation, only games we had were Tekken 3(shouts to DevilWithin!)
and Crash Bandicoot. I think for most of us what inspired us to start this journey is the games and electronics that we had as children.
Thanks for sharing friend

@DevilWithin
You aren't as new blood as you thing, friend!
I started back at the age of 12 with GameMaker but knowing full well that software was programmed in C and C++ but feeling it was too much for me to chew on
at my age I decided I would learn GameMaker now and then later on after I mastered it move on to C and C++, what a stupid idea no? XD so much time wasted
I didn't actually start coding C until the age of 13-14 and ever since I've been on and off but recently I've decided to stick to it and finally finish one of my many
projects xD... btw I did master GameMaker, only to never use it again after I learned C.. what a mistake! I don't think it matters at what age you start as long as
you have dedication and determination you will learn fast I also love tekken 3 and the tekken series (favorite character is Yoshimitsu  :twisted: )
and you guys are all welcome to add me on msn instant messenger if you'd like Azurekite.hack@gmx.com I'm online 24-7 most of the time since I also do some web dev on this computer and use it as a server. Thanks for sharing

@MorleyDev
Lots of 19 year olds like myself
Wow you have to be the most social nerd in the world I'm mostly a shut in but I do like to walk around like in parks and ride my bike
But I feel so awkward at a party ... One time I tried to get drunk as a learning experience (in the name of science!) couldn't do it so never tried
again.. Hmmm got to talk to DevilWithin and find out why humans are so self destructive xD
Thanks for sharing!

93

General discussions / Who Are You? (the obligatory interview thread)

« on: September 01, 2011, 07:05:32 pm »

Hi!

I go by three different names. Groogy, SirVogelius and my real name Henrik. I got hooked on computers when I was about 5-6 when my mom bought me a Amiga 600. But I'm very curious at nature and this weird plastic thing did these amazing stuff on the TV and I just had to know why. I kept asking my mother which only had basic knowledge in Visual Basic... Anyway it stood still until the time when we got a PC with Internet and I could google "how to make a game" and my search for knowledge begun. This was somewhere around when I was 10. Going from C++ to C, Java, PHP, Objective-C and finally to Ruby.

Now I am 20 years old and I attend the second year at a professional university called The Game Assembly in Malmö, Sweden. Already made a few games and I can say this is the one I am proudest of:

We were 2,5 programmers, 4 artists who worked together for 8 weeks along with our studies. So maybe 2-4 hours each day or something like that. The game is pretty short but our requirement was only 30min of gameplay for an average player. I recommend this school for others! What it does is build up teamwork and communication skills which are #1 skill needed when developing bigger games.

I speak Swedish, English and Danish. I'm half danish and my middle-name Vogelius is an old family name from nobility which only my family is allowed to wear in Denmark. There's a Swedish family with the same thing but don't know if there's any relation.

Interests: Games, Computers, Politics, Ideologies and Norse Mythology.

Groogy that is amazing :shock:
I'm also fascinated by politics and ideologies.
You could say when it comes to politics I'm a revolutionary but since I live in the US where people seem to just "take it"
I don't see anything happening soon xD and as for ideologies I am a firm believer in that all men *and women are created
equal and that anything you can do I can too. Because of this belief I don't believe that there is such a thing as a race or
different types of man. A technique often used to get soldiers to kill innocents is to make them believe that the people they
are killing are not human because they speak a language they don't understand or because their culture is "strange" and different.
I believe different culture does not make a different type of human, after all it is not genetic. Another ideology of mine I hold
on to firmly is that everything can be learned anything can be taught. What is a Swedish man? (for example )
a man who lives in Sweden, who speaks Swedish, who eats Swedish food and listens to Swedish music. What would happen
if we take the man as a child, same "Swedish" DNA and put him in I don't know lets say Canada. Now the "Swedish" boy is eating
Canadian food, Speaking French and doesn't have a drop of Swedish culture. I ask you Groogy and readers
What is the man now? Canadian or Swedish?
ahh this is an important question, anything can be learned, cultures especially and what makes a man.. what you know ofcourse!
I don't think I'm a philosopher or anything but its just some stuff I've thought of and I think it feels right you let me know friend. xD
It just feels right because I'm not much of a nationalist but then again I just don't see the point in a whole country taking credit
for what one man did.

Might as well, could be fun to hear what kind of people you other guys here are

I'm a 21 year old dude who also lives in Sweden, but unlike Groogy, I live up in the north. I share a 3-room apartment with my pregnant gf and a cat. Do a lot of webdevelopment as well as general C++-programming. Currently working on a game with 3 other people, it doesn't have a name yet but it will be a multiplayer sidescrolling RPG/adventure game. Not massively multiplayer, but like groups of 4 that explore an awesome world of quests and puzzles. Also working on my own data-library for packing files into archives, check file consistency etc.

Other than that, my keywords of interests would be; network, linux, pot, tv-series, gaming etc.

Games; CodMW2, BFBC2(preordered BF3), LoL, WC3 and C&C Zero Hour.
TV-Series; Chuck, Modern Family, The Middle, Falling Skies, Southpark, Family guy, American dad and used to like weeds(before it got all girly).

History for the bored:

My interest of general development started when I was around 6 or so, my father teached me how to create a website using HTML and CSS. From there on after I was blasting around the interwebs on our awesomely fast 28.8K modem, learning Javascript and such.

~2 years later(about 8yrs old), I got the knowledge that my brother was creating his very own game in an app called "The Games Factory". I was amazed and did VERY many unfinished games in it.

Fastforward to ~15 years of age; I had recently mastered PHP and I was really proud of my awesome skills, through the years I had also played around with stuff like Basic and other "programming languages". My interest of gamecreation got to my attention again and I decided it was time to give C++ a try. I had a hard time learning it since of its steep learningcurve, and my social life didn't really help either since(not been a fullblown geek all my life, comes in waves kinda). So it took some attempts and huge efforts, and a few years later I had grip of the basic concepts like classes, functions, hierchary etc.

Haikarainen how do you find time to program you have so much to keep you busy
You really are an inspiring person when I look at this, if I could ever learn to multitask like you I'd actually get something done for once
I'm also on the same path but started like this, since I wanted to make games and didn't care for the other stuff
I started with Gamemaker when I was 12 (weak I know) then I learned a bit of C and Assembler and how to use debuggers.. made a simple hack for an online game
then I stopped studying reverse engineering and focused mainly on C. From time to time I do some C++ but I don't know enough C++ to feel
comfortable enough to use it as my main language. I've taught myself HTML, CSS and I want to learn PHP and MySQL but I can never find time xD
you really have to give me some pointers friend

lol I wanted to make games and for some time I was studying cracking and hacking xD
so stopped that and went back to studying C

Ok, so... I'm not a girl :lol:

Nothing fancy about my private life : I'm french, I'm 27, I'm married, I own a ferret, and iPad and I'm planning to have a baby next year.

I discovered programming at 9 at school, but I truly started to write my own programs at 15, after I rediscovered Visual Basic on my father's computer. I have a master degree in computer science, but almost everything that I know about programing languages and software design, I learnt it myself from forums, blogs and tutorials.

After my master I went to Singapour to work for a small video game company. The company was a big mess but it was fun and I learnt a lot. Then I came back to France and got my current job, which is unfortunately not related to video games anymore (but I still have a lot of fun).

The story of SFML is simple (and fast!). After realizing that SDL 1.2 was so old (both in its design and its miplementation), and lacked so many "modern" features, I decided to give it a try and created my own graphics library, with the idea that it could be simpler and faster than SDL. At that time I was in France but still working remotely for the Singapourean company, so... it only took me a few weeks to complete a first version :lol:.
I showed the result on a french forum, and people said "hey, don't limit your library to graphics, make it a multimedia library by adding audio, network, etc.". I was less interested in these things than in graphics, but I never say no to learn new stuff. A few months later SFML was born...

I thought as much, not saying there aren't programmer girls out there but I did get the dude vibe from you xD
I'm really happy for you that you are going to be a father soon!
I was going to do computer science as my major but I'm too much of a nerd xD
I decided on engineering (I want to make the chips you guys program :twisted: ) I thought of it like this
the computer science stuff I want to learn I can already teach myself why not learn the bare metal
Congratulations Laurent on SFML its a huge success and I'm sure its popularity will grow into an industry standard someday.
Keep up the awesome work friend.

I wonder if anyone at all really reads this topic


So, I'm German, though I live in... no, not Shayol Ghul, but in Poland (not that there's much of a difference between Shayol Ghul and Poland), I'm 27, I'm married (my wife is French), I love playing soccer... yadda yadda yadda, this stuff is so effing boring, isn't it?

Contrary to what I might have made you think, I'm actually rather calm and quiet, I don't really like having arguments and stuff. Then again, I can't stand when I see somebody being wrong (as in "incorrect"), that's probably why I end up arguing anyway, at least on this forum :oops:

I dunno how old I was when I started programming. 17? 18 perhaps? Ditto for what made me get into it. Most of what I know I learnt either myself when reading code, documentation and help, or from friends of mine. I was never interested in writing games, I always liked being very close to the metal: in one of my previous jobs I was writing code for embedded devices. Lots of fun. I assure you.

I also think that the infamous quote "premature optimization is the root of all evil" is in vast majority of cases misinterpreted as "any performance gain is the root of all evil", so people use it as an excuse for writing sloppy code. And they also don't know, or don't want to know, that optimization, in majority of cases, is the same as YAGNI, KISS and DRY. Last time I checked, these were regarded as a Good Thing.

As for languages: I know English (of course), Polish, some German. I used to know German very well - well, I'm (I was?) a native speaker, after all - but I haven't used it for years, so I have forgotten much of it, mainly der Wortschatz, er, the vocabulary was affected. I'm also a conlanger, that is, a person who's creating her own languages.
Programming languages? Many of them.

Oh, and for whoever was wondering: my signature means "may your future be happy" in Japanese.

Did I forgot something?

I agree!
I am one of those people that optimize everything, and if I learn a new way to do something
I go into all my old projects and implement it to keep things clean and simple.
My mother and her sisters made languages and codes to communicate with each other when they were little
so I don't know if this is the same but I'd love to know more
thanks for sharing friend

Hey I know there are more of us out there lurking the forums, post about yourself here

This thread makes me feel like the world is big but small at the same time, strange right?

94

General discussions / Who Are You? (the obligatory interview thread)

« on: September 01, 2011, 07:50:03 am »

I've just been curious lately and I often find myself off daydreaming while I'm supposed to be programming or studying..
but I wonder who all of you really are. This has to be the most diverse forum I've ever had the pleasure of being a part of
and I want to know the background of the many skilled programmers we have here, like how did you learn programming
and what made you get into it? Did you go to school to learn or are you an autodidact?
What country are you from and what languages do you speak?

I'm a 19 year old hispanic highschool drop out :? (left school but got diploma and going to college, no worries :wink:)
I program as a hobby and have been studying all programming languages on and off for about 6 years now.
I myself am an autodidact, I've taught myself C and "enough" C++ but am always learning new things.
I regret not knowing more languages since there are people from all over the world here.. everyone in my
house speaks at least 3 languages (English, Spanish and French) with the exception of my uncle and I. He speaks Latin, Greek, Spanish
and French and only knows how to say "Hello" and "My Friend" in English. I know English and Spanish
and a few* words in Dutch but I'm still studying

I want to know.. Who is Laurent Gomila?
Why did he decide to make SFML?
What is his preferred compiler?
What got him into programming in the first place?
Why do I keep saying "he" what if Laurent is a woman? :shock:
How long have you been programming Laurent?
Who taught you? (who ever it was think he can give me some tips?:wink:)

I'd love a detailed "story" reply from you Laurent, the curiosity has been killing me for some time now and I really want to know your background more <3.

And I want to get to know about all of you too
A bit of an awkward place to be doing a social activity but if you don't mind tell me a bit about yourselves.

95

Window / LNK2019 : unresolved external symbol

« on: September 01, 2011, 07:49:27 am »

no hay mas errores?
do you have more errors?
I suspect it could be a linking problem and its not finding the lib in which the
sf::Clock class is

could you give me your linker information like what libs are you linking too (if any)
did you install SFML 1.6 before building?
did you put SFML libs into directories and give paths to them into VS?
this could be the problem

instale sfml y trate de nuevo

96

General discussions / Regarding directx

« on: September 01, 2011, 06:59:56 am »

why would you want to use DirectX anyway?
OpenGL is cross platform, free; has been an industry standard for years(still is) and can do everything DirectX can but most importantly you have to code a lot more(DX is ugly) to do the same thing as you would in OpenGL.

97

General discussions / how to make clipping of images/text?

« on: August 23, 2011, 08:37:44 pm »

yes, like there. but several images are shown at once not one.

Code: [Select]


#include <SFML/Graphics.hpp>

int main(void)
{
sf::RenderWindow game(sf::VideoMode(256, 224, 32), "Game");
sf::Event event;

sf::Texture texture;
texture.LoadFromFile("myimage.png");

sf::Sprite sprite;
sprite.SetTexture(texture, false);
sprite.SetSubRect(sf::IntRect(0, 0, 16, 16));

while(game.IsOpened())
{
while(game.PollEvent(event)
{
if(event.Type==sf::Event::Closed)
game.Close();
}

game.Clear();
game.Draw(sprite);
game.Display();
}

return 0;
}

sf::Sprite::SetSubRect(sf::IntRect(Left, Top, Width, Height))
Remember this, this is the key
you can later make functions to automatically do the subrect adjustments for you and viola you have yourself animation

also I just wrote the code above from scratch if it even compiles let me know and if it helps, glad I could be useful to someone xD

edit: forgot to set the sprites texture

98

General discussions / A new logo for SFML

« on: June 08, 2011, 11:19:40 am »

Hi.



If you guys haven't noticed I also like the original one so that's what
I based mine off of

99

Feature requests / Non-deprecated OpenGL

« on: April 29, 2011, 10:15:06 am »

If you did switch to non-depreciated OGL hen please keep 2 versions so that people that dont need the new features can still use OGL 2 and keep backwards compatibility

There's no "new feature", it would just be a replacement of the OpenGL functions used internally in SFML.

It would have absolutely no impact on user code, except that people would be able to create 3.x+ contexts without being forced to use the compatibility flag.

Sounds like a whole lot of trouble for that little tiny gain