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Author Topic: Who Are You? (the obligatory interview thread)  (Read 27881 times)

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Ricky

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Who Are You? (the obligatory interview thread)
« Reply #15 on: September 02, 2011, 09:58:14 am »
Wow this thread is far more popular than I thought it was going to be. :o
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 :D 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 :o 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 :o
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 :D 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 :D 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 :o... 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!
Wilt thou yet say before him that slayeth thee, I am God? but thou shalt be a man, and no God, in the hand of him that slayeth thee.

Lo-X

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Who Are You? (the obligatory interview thread)
« Reply #16 on: September 02, 2011, 11:44:22 am »
Hello,

I'm Loïc, I'm 20 and I live in France, in a town not so far than Laurent's (I spy him but he don't know that, shh !) But I study computer science in another city, far, far away : Clermont-Ferrand. I'ts only my second year in that school.

I started programming with games websites, or an Harry Potter fansite ( :/ ). I was 12 ! As a game website is anoying I decided to learn other languages that's why I started to learn C/C++ and a little Java (but I don't like this one).
I was making some apps with QT but the codes were very very dirty... And I think my code still is, sometimes... I programmed an Audio Player, some Notepads, ...

I started making games with SDL, but in C and I prefer object oriented languages.
And I discovered SFML. Jackpot ! It was one year a half ago. I started making some simple games not completely terminated like a platform game, a 2Diso game.
I started my first "big" and advanced project 5 or 6 mounth ago : Galaxy. This project make me learn a lot of things, more than the 2 before. But the more I code, the more I see that the code is not strong in some parts and I'm discouraged when I see what I've to change. So I asking myself if I don't have to change my project or to finish it before.

Sorry for english mistakes :D

Hiura

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Who Are You? (the obligatory interview thread)
« Reply #17 on: September 02, 2011, 12:19:29 pm »
Quote from: "Ricky"
@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
My problem at that time was that I didn't know how to work because until high school I didn't really have worked – not that I'm smart but because teachers didn't ask us much to do so it was perfect for a lazy guy like me haha . And in fact, failing this first year happened to be a good thing : with a light schedule during my second first year I could have this job at EPFL and have time to learn a lot of different stuff! I now consider it as a good opportunity.

I don't have a lot of experience yet in Scala – I only read the author's book which is very good I think. I will really start learning this language during the next semester. In a few word Scala is a mixin of functional and object oriented idioms (that's its main strength), based on the JVM so it can be run anywhere, when you begin it turns your brain upside down but then you're able to write very few lines of code to do what you want.... There is much more to say. You can find more information here and if you want to discuss more about it you can send me an email. If you want, try to do some of the problems of the Euler project in Scala.   :wink:
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omeg

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Who Are You? (the obligatory interview thread)
« Reply #18 on: September 02, 2011, 03:04:59 pm »
Right, I guess it won't hurt to write something here. ;)

I'm 32 years old antisocial guy living in Poland. Currently working for a small consulting company specializing in information security. Previously worked for a few years for Symantec, but big corporations turned out to not be my thing. ;) Even before that, I was a contractor for the biggest Polish game distributor (and now developer), CD Projekt (you may have heard of The Witcher ;)). I did technical side of localizing games for them, that is extracting all localizable (translatable) resources and importing them after they have been translated. May sound easy, but I was working on games that did not have any SDKs most of the time, no documentation of game file format etc - needed to analyze them myself, write tools to unpack/repack game data, find all translatable stuff (not only text - also images containing text, voiceovers, fonts if they lack diacritic marks specific to Polish language etc). It was very fun, but unfortunately they didn't pay much, so I moved on. :P

I'm a sort of hybrid of a "logical thinking" person and a "creative" one. I love programming, math, modern physics and science-fiction, but I also love creative writing, classical literature and music. I was always fascinated in computers and how they work (or how all things work I guess ;)). Unfortunately Poland was a poor country back then so I didn't have access to such hardware.

My first contact with a computer was a friend's C-64. What a great machine! We played games of course, but I also started to dabble in BASIC. C-64 didn't have any "operating system" proper, all it has was a BASIC command prompt. So I learned it and wrote some simple programs, but soon it was not enough. BASIC was very limited and slow, and if you wanted to do something really cool, you needed to do it in assembly. So I learned 6502 assembly. :D Compared to todays CPUs it was a beautiful machine code in its simplicity. I coded some silly "demos" (more like intros), and also learned how to debug machine code to hack games. Those were my first steps in reverse engineering - it's this curiosity that drives you to take things (and code) apart to see how they work, and to change them.

My biggest achievement back then was a "code interpreter/debugger" that could take two C-64 binary programs and execute them "in parallel", taking one machine code instruction at a time alternately from both of them. That was an 8-bit CPU, there was no multithreading back then. ;) Of course it only worked for simple programs that didn't use conflicting registers and all that, but it was nice.

I've seen a PC for the first time somewhere at the end of elementary school. I've learned Pascal and Logo (Logo is awesome for one-liner fractals ;)). Later I learned basics of C and C++ (strings? pointers? what the hell?). I started to take interest in inner workings of Windows - gaining reverse engineering knowledge on that platform. I got my own PC only a year after I started a technical university, believe it or not. It was also the time of more prevalent Internet access and knowledge became easier to acquire. I've learned a great deal about software protections - how to break them and how to create them.

At Uni I started playing on a private server of Ultima Online. Maybe some of you remember the first popular graphical MMORPG. :) Later I became a developer and an admin of the server. Even later I became involved in another UO server project, this time based around RunUO - an emulator written in C#. That was my first contact with C# and the .Net platform.

This is a good moment for an interlude. As you can see I'm a guy with a pretty low-level background. I know assembly of several CPUs. I know how Windows works under the hood. I'm also kind of a performance freak - I like profiling code, analyzing compiler output and the like. And now I'll almost always choose C# for a new project if it doesn't require much low-level OS access. What gives? "C# is slow, bloated yadda yadda!!1one!" If you say that in front of me, I'll rip your head off. ;)

For me the biggest gain in using C# and .Net is productivity. Yes, it is a little slower than C/C++, although not much and mostly only in specific circumstances. Yes, it does have higher memory overhead - but again, not by much. So what do you get in return?
  • Much, MUCH simpler memory management. It's not gone completely, contrary to what many people believe. You still need to (well, should) know how garbage collector works and when to dispose some objects if they hold unmanaged resources. But it's easier.
  • You don't need to worry about proper support for strings, unicode, events, networking, data structures and other really basic things. Yes, C++ has STL and other libraries, but I personally loathe STL and would kill it with fire if I could.
  • No more access violations, heap corruptions and other nonsense. Of course you can still have null pointer dereferences. ;)
  • You can use pointers and direct memory access if you like. Another popular myth is that you can't.
  • It's faster to code, easier to debug, more compact, open standard and cross-platform (yes Mono can run any .Net binaries on Linux), base class library contains tons of useful things.
People argue that you can't write games in C#. Is that so? RunUO server team did a stress test once, the server could handle nearly ten thousand online clients at once. Take a look a Magicka, Terraria or Space Pirates and Zombies, some very popular and fun Indie games (at least I'd recommend playing them all if you didn't). Thay are all written in C# (well, SPAZ uses Unity, but its core scripts are in C#). OK, rant over. :P

What else can I say... Along the way I also learned a bit about electronics. I have a mini-lab with lots of stuff but lack time to do something bigger with it. :( I have an Arduino (AVR based microcontroller prototyping board) and like to do some fun stuff with it. If only a day had 50 hours or somrthing...

One of my biggest interests is in complexity, chaos theory and self-emergence. Artificial life, artificial intelligence, fractal geometry, cellular automata, all these things fascinate me. My master thesis was about artificial life and genetic algorithms - it was something similar to Avida.

So, why the hell I'm using SFML in the first place? :D Basically, I needed some .NET-compatible 2D gfx library for a game client for my project. I'm creating an isometric MMO engine similar to UO, mostly out of nostalgia and for the learning experience. A lot of the basic things are done and now is the time to actually create a graphical client instead of console one. :P Currently my focus is on porting Gwen to .NET - this will be my GUI library. Again, why the day is so short...

As for the games - I'm mostly a fan of good cRPGs - here, Planescape: Torment is the king. Baldur's Gate 2, Morrowind, The Witcher (2), Fallouts, and of course Deus Ex (need time for the new installment...) I also like to play a shooter every now and then (Bulletstorm was awesome). Mass Effect (2) was good for the "movie-like" experience. Maybe some arcade shooters like Beat Hazard or good old Crimsonland (man, that was insane). Used to play a lot of Heroes of Might&Magic 3 back in the days. Also spent a lot of time getting killed in various ways in ADoM - an awesome roguelike game. Managed to beat it a few times, felt good. :)

 :shock: Didn't think this will be such a wall of text. :lol: I've also recently created a blog, so if you are curious, you can have a look at that. ;)

eXpl0it3r

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Who Are You? (the obligatory interview thread)
« Reply #19 on: September 02, 2011, 03:27:17 pm »
Phew... That text just fit my screen, one line more and...  :lol:

I wish, I had a low-level background or even some knowledge about it, it probably would be a big help for my CS study and understanding of applications.  :(
Interessting interlude! I'd probably also be a headless guy around you, didn't consider C# as a 'proper' language, but I think you started to change my mind, although I won't switch to it (yet?)...  :?
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Haikarainen

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Who Are You? (the obligatory interview thread)
« Reply #20 on: September 02, 2011, 04:58:12 pm »
Quote from: "Ricky"

Haikarainen how do you find time to program you have so much to keep you busy :D
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


Hehe, priorities my friend, priorities. Also; Never forget the act of daydreaming! Visualize what you want to achieve by the age of 40, and attempt at all costs to achieve it in 1 year! Something i've learned recently that i value hugely. I think about how i can optimize code and create the coolest thing of my imagination when im;
    taking a shit
    about to sleep
    wake up
    taking a shower
    space out and overanalyze stuff


Really visualise it, see the final result in front of you, literally on your retina, and use the willpower you grow by doing so on achieving it. Set up goals/steppingstones and on every goal achieved; reward yourself!
Embrace all good, never even focus on negative thoughts like "I could never achieve this; Microsoft worked on a similiar result for 5 years!". Well microsoft sucks and they work for money, not spirit ;)

Now I'm starting to sound like some selfhelpcoach or something ,so ill just skip to the technical; If you wanna feel comfortable with C++, get a grip on;
    Classes & Structs
    Class inheritance
    Enums
    Pointers
Objectoriented programming[/list]

Also, experiment with other libraries! Create your own personal helperlibrary![/list][/b]

Groogy

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Who Are You? (the obligatory interview thread)
« Reply #21 on: September 02, 2011, 05:30:35 pm »
Ah the old "managed languages are not as good blabla".  I've gotten a few of those as well because I use Ruby. That's why I'm working on a project to prove it's worth once for all. My teacher(Old lead programmer for Ground Control and World in Conflict.)  said that Ruby is only good for small fun or playing around. Got to show him :P

Also Haikarainen, I recommend that you apply for studies at my university. The teachers come from the industry and it have a strong connection and cooperation with the local companies. Our students have gotten jobs over the whole world.
Developer and Maker of rbSFML and Programmer at Paradox Development Studio

Grimshaw

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Who Are You? (the obligatory interview thread)
« Reply #22 on: September 02, 2011, 06:36:15 pm »
Quote from: Haikarainen
Quote from: "Ricky"


Hehe, priorities my friend, priorities. Also; Never forget the act of daydreaming! Visualize what you want to achieve by the age of 40, and attempt at all costs to achieve it in 1 year! Something i've learned recently that i value hugely. I think about how i can optimize code and create the coolest thing of my imagination when im;
    taking a shit
    about to sleep
    wake up
    taking a shower
    space out and overanalyze stuff


Really visualise it, see the final result in front of you, literally on your retina, and use the willpower you grow by doing so on achieving it. Set up goals/steppingstones and on every goal achieved; reward yourself!
Embrace all good, never even focus on negative thoughts like "I could never achieve this; Microsoft worked on a similiar result for 5 years!". Well microsoft sucks and they work for money, not spirit ;)



You are the man, cannot tell how much i identified with your point of view!

I work all day, and i always try to find willpower to work everyday at night in my stuff! All the time i cannot be coding, i try to visualize what i want, so im pretty focused when i start to work on the things i planned all day! I am 19 and i expect to be a known developer in the next 5 years, but i do just my best to become that as soon as possible, who knows i will be able to publish something good in less than one year and become sucessfull!

Something i've concluded from indie teams/individuals way of working, its not about quantity, its about quality.
You may NOT have the resources to invest in big time code, but you learn to do it in a clever and beautiful way in a small time and a low budget. Indies tend to achieve things that people with the corporate experience would never do alone.

Thats the key, WILLPOWER!

Haikarainen

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Who Are You? (the obligatory interview thread)
« Reply #23 on: September 02, 2011, 06:43:18 pm »
Quote from: "DevilWithin"
Thats the key, WILLPOWER!


+1, Kudos man!

Haikarainen

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Who Are You? (the obligatory interview thread)
« Reply #24 on: September 03, 2011, 07:17:10 am »
Quote from: "Groogy"
Also Haikarainen, I recommend that you apply for studies at my university. The teachers come from the industry and it have a strong connection and cooperation with the local companies. Our students have gotten jobs over the whole world.


Oh really? If i'd do that i'd had to do it on distance though.. not in the position to move right now :P

Groogy

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Who Are You? (the obligatory interview thread)
« Reply #25 on: September 03, 2011, 04:35:18 pm »
Quote from: "Haikarainen"
Oh really? If i'd do that i'd had to do it on distance though.. not in the position to move right now :P


Actually trough the course of the school's life(4 years or something) there has been 3 people with the same situation as you. Wife/fiancee/gf and a baby. Doing that education on distance is impossible. The programmer education is worse than a special forces training. :P They have to force in years of knowledge into you under only 2 years. Because of how the school regulations they can't extend the education longer than that. But it's actually what defines the programmers here. We naturally get an insane will power because we are pressed so much. Every student that has gotten out to the industry that comes back to hold a lecture tells us how much softer it is to work in the companies than the school.

Also this school has stolen a few students from BTH(Blekinge Tekniska Högskola) so I got a programmer and a few artists from there that felt this one was better. Also Skövde have a live stream of games they've developed two times a year and we always laugh hard when we see that and is puzzled how that can be called an education. The projects there wouldn't even pass at The Game Assembly. Of course it's not the students fault but there has even been investigations as of why game developers from schools don't cut it(from where The Game Assembly was born) and they still do nothing about it.
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Haikarainen

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Who Are You? (the obligatory interview thread)
« Reply #26 on: September 03, 2011, 05:32:23 pm »
Quote from: "Groogy"
Quote from: "Haikarainen"
Oh really? If i'd do that i'd had to do it on distance though.. not in the position to move right now :P



It would be hellafun, but i live in Umeå, you know like 1000-2000km away from there.

Edit; Btw id have to study up my grades as well since the shitty schools here forgot to send me my grades, and they dont have them stored either = 3 years wasted.

asdatapel

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my turn
« Reply #27 on: September 08, 2011, 04:35:34 am »
yay! my turn.
Before I start, though, I wanna ask: why are their so many indie game programmers? Mojang, you guys, alot of people on the internet..

Anyway, about me: I'm 15 years old in high school. The reason I started programming is because of a calculator. Seriously. Theres this brand of calculators called TI-84s(I dont know if u guys have them where ure from), and a nice feature in them is the ability to code. They have their own language called TI-Basic, and its pretty cool, Anyway, I had to do a project for school and I had to take a bunch of numbers and do things to them, like multiply and subtract and add and stuff. It wouldve taken forever, but my partner put a code on my calulator and made it so that i only had to type the number, and it would output the result. Afterwards, I tried to find out how it worked, so I looked online and there was a nice little website for that. I made a few of my own programs. This was my first programming, ever.

It's been about ten months since that. After ti-basic, I went to liberty basic, mostly because it had a really nice set of tutorials. When I finished the tutorials, I tried c++, for about 10 minutes, and then java. I couldnt do that either, so then I tried VB. Thats about the best programming language ever.Seriously, its really nice. Just a little slow. I used that for a while, and it really clicked for me. I tried making my own browser, and got pretty far, but then there was this one bug that i just couldn't fix. That made me stop programming for a few months. After that i learned the basics of java, and  then c++.That was about 3 weeks ago. I looked for a graphics lib, found sfml. C++ has rellay good for me, because ive been learning it practically using sfml. Ive probably learned more in the last three weeks than in the past year.

So, thats it. :lol:

OniLinkPlus

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Re: my turn
« Reply #28 on: September 08, 2011, 05:25:51 am »
Quote from: "asdatapel"
so then I tried VB. Thats about the best programming language ever.Seriously, its really nice. Just a little slow.
Oh god that's depressing. Virtually every programmer despises VB with a passion. With most languages, if you learn one, it becomes easier to learn every other language. With VB, it makes every other language seem far harder. Djikstra, one of the programming gods, has said "...the teaching of BASIC should be rated as a criminal offence: it mutilates the mind beyond recovery." VB is a "modern" version of BASIC. So yea, ditch VB and avoid it at all costs.
I use the latest build of SFML2

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Who Are You? (the obligatory interview thread)
« Reply #29 on: September 08, 2011, 09:28:35 am »
If he thinks that language is nice... we are too late to save him :(
Save yourselves! The Basic Zombies are back! They want our brainz!
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