Programmer and Other Digital Peoples Thread

[Guest GroundHOG-2010]

I am a self taught programmer, modeler and texturer (don\'t get me to do eather of the last 2. I don\'t know how to uv map on maya). I am currently learning assember code and C. I also code games in C#

(XNA and Unity). Currently I am creating a top down tank shooter and playing KSP.

Thanks for the great game!!!!

[Ivan Ivanovich]

15 years of C++, roughly 10 years of x86 assembler and 2 years of AVR assembler here. Most of it in security, not game development, though. Last time I brushed shoulders with coordinate transformation was during my university years.

Currently I\'m creating a ECG, but it\'s hardly topical.

[HarvesteR]

I\'ve been coding for about 5 years now (I think). Started off in college with Flash and ActionScript 2 -- I know, don\'t mock me--, then moved on to JS and AS3.0... Never coded seriously in C# until KSP got started (I must say, it\'s an awesome language).

Other languages I\'ve used in the past are C, Java, C++ and Python. (I hate Python now)

Before coding, I worked a lot with 3D modelling in 3Ds Max.

Cheers

[icefire]

Screwed around with Perl for a year or two. Made a few hilarious IRC bots with it. Been animating in 3d for about 7 years now, pretty good at it. Also mucked around with level design, texture art, and modeling.

[Moach]

my programming carreer started off pretty much exactly like HarvesteRs....

not because its some weird 'twins telepathy' thing - (urban myth, IMO) but because we did go to the same game development course in college.... :

started with *uurgh* AS2, then onto AS3 (a lot better less bad)... JS is rather self-explaining from that point... got some experience with C# too, but my favourite is C++

ah yes, nothing beats a language that unlike others, doesn\'t ever expect you to manage shooting yourself in the foot so often that you must be kept at a safe distance from the 'hard' stuff (pointers, OS stuff, etc...) - often at the cost of flexibilityy and performance....

no, in C++ you ALWAYS know what you\'re doing - \'cus well, if you don\'t, then you\'re kinda in for it..... but i really like the fact that it will absolutely not compile at the slightest sign of trouble....

newbies may find that aggravating, but after dealing with JavaScript and other 'it\'s ok to be wrong'-type languages that leave you doing CSI work to find that one line of code where you got a type-o as the compiler thinks 'it\'s ok, he\'s probably defining a new variable....', you\'ll find yourself thanking sweet heavens mercy for getting compiler errors

a lot became much simpler after i realized that C++ wasn\'t really hard - it only seems so at first because MSVC is so bloated and unclear interface-wise....

nowadays, i\'m working with HaXe... which although is not as awesome as C++, still beats the living crud out of AS3...

some months ago, i devised the general layout for a new language, more suited for Flash development, which i called AXIOM.... it was a mix of HaXe and C++, meant to exploit some low-level stuff that flash can do (if you have buckets of patience) in a most straightforward manner, built around syntax features, then converted to more verbose HaXe by a precompiler.....

i did get around to coding that precompiler.... and it was working... but since it was taking too long, i decided to return to my real-work project and finish that at a more civilized day (perhaps when i finish said project) - if i don\'t decide to have Flash thrown out the window altogether by then...

anyways... what was i doing... ah yes, i got a class to code here.... back to work now :cheers:

[nivvydaskrl]

In my final semester of a master\'s program in computer science, and a graduate certificate in artificial intelligence, with almost two years experience coding robot controllers for simulated robots in simulated (but realistic) environments.

Most of my coding experience is in C/C++, though I have a smidge of Java, a spatter of Python, and a grab-bag of various other languages.

I\'m interested in learning Unity, but gamebuilding is sort of hard for me to wrap my brain around, and my artistic skills are nearly zero. However, I have a lot of experience in building autonomous systems in GMod/Wiremod, with the associated coordinate transforms and Cartesian/polar swapping that entails. So really, it shouldn\'t be hard -- I just need to pin down the time and fiddle around a bit.

I would LOVE to see basic sensor and computer components -- complete with dinky scripting language -- crop up in KSP. Accelerometers and gyroscopes make inertial guidance systems possible, and inertial guidance systems make full autopilots possible. A basic range/bearing (radar) sensor atop that would permit automated rendevous, and fuel level sensing would let the rocket know when to abort operations and deorbit.

I see in my mind visions of a mothercraft, which deploys dozens of small little automated rocket-drones to seek out drifting space junk, rendevous with it, grapple to it, and automatically deorbit it. Or seek out Kermunist satellites and slam into them at high velocity. Or any of a number of other hilarious tasks.

[LukeTim]

In my final year of a Computer Systems Engineering course at Uni where I started out programming in my first year with JavaScript. Then we moved on to Java (This was the School of Computing Science which is terrible at my Uni), then later on my own Electronic Engineering School did some Programming with us in C and 68K Assembly (Ancient, I know... but Assembly is pretty similar wherever you go, right?)

I\'ve done some C++ at work over the summer, and I thought it was okay, but I really love to code in C# in my spare time. Started out C# programming when trying to make games with XNA (still haven\'t managed to finish one. )

I really love programming Hardware, though. By which I mean programming PICs, Arduinos and things in C for fun DSP projects and other stuff like that.

[6677]

I\'m currently studying A2 computer science. As part of AS we had to learn python (python 3 specifically). When speed doesn\'t matter there doesn\'t seem to be a whole lot that it can\'t do. But speed does matter for game development and generally anything with 2D or 3D rendering. I quite liked it and managed to learn the few differences between 3 and 2 myself when I wanted to write some python on linux when I didn\'t have an internet connection to download python 3. I\'ve played around with py-game quite a bit. Had a shot at writing a module to automate the rendering of tile based games easier but as we did little in the way of object orientated programming at AS I never completed it.

For A2 we\'ve got a new teacher who seems to believe visual basic is better. True its compiled and as a result faster but otherwise I don\'t like it.

Before AS I used to model with google sketchup. I was truly awful at making things look good but I found a plug-in called sketchyphysics. Basically a ruby binding of the newton physics engine using sketchup as the renderer (and dealing with modelling at the same time). Definately not the most powerful tool but it did allow for scripting through a modified version of ruby. Does mean that some dedicated ruby programmers where able to make some pretty amazing sketchyphysics models. I didn\'t know ruby very well but could read keyboard and gamepad inputs with the SP bindings and knew how to play with the variables a bit. As a result I got by. I did however write a bad implementation of an acceleration script. With SP motors accel and damp settings being quite limited I decided to simulate a linear acceleration based on keyboard inputs, sounds alot more complex than it was. Quite a few users ultimately ended up using it in their projects aswell. Always nice to see something you wrote being used by others even if it was a very poor implementation. Its here: http://sketchup.google.com/3dwarehouse/details?mid=c7269b406a932bdded42efd47678a53. I\'ve retired from SP apart from when I very quickly want to visualise how something would work such was the case with the HOG wheel: http://sketchup.google.com/3dwarehouse/details?mid=7c48ef10f42df980809e72bf96e013e7

[Pazmivaniye]

Reasonably good with C++ and SDL, but most game design attempts fail because I get distracted with other stuff to do. Tried forcibly climbing the OpenGL learning curve (devolved into copying and pasting) but am waiting for an opportunity to look at it more when I have more time/desire to learn it. 3D experience was with SketchUp in my younger days, then a bit with Bryce, not so much now (more getting distracted).

[6677]

SketchUp in my younger days, then a bit with Bryce

Did it ever strike you as funny that the annoying bloke you got when you started a new file in SU6 was called bryce??? My dad used to have bryce 5. I never used it.

[Phoxtane]

I can code a simple obstacle avoidance program in NXT-G.

I\'m so awsum.

[LukeTim]

I\'m currently studying A2 computer science. As part of AS we had to learn python (python 3 specifically). When speed doesn\'t matter there doesn\'t seem to be a whole lot that it can\'t do. But speed does matter for game development and generally anything with 2D or 3D rendering. I quite liked it and managed to learn the few differences between 3 and 2 myself when I wanted to write some python on linux when I didn\'t have an internet connection to download python 3. I\'ve played around with py-game quite a bit. Had a shot at writing a module to automate the rendering of tile based games easier but as we did little in the way of object orientated programming at AS I never completed it.

For A2 we\'ve got a new teacher who seems to believe visual basic is better. True its compiled and as a result faster but otherwise I don\'t like it.

Before AS I used to model with google sketchup. I was truly awful at making things look good but I found a plug-in called sketchyphysics. Basically a ruby binding of the newton physics engine using sketchup as the renderer (and dealing with modelling at the same time). Definately not the most powerful tool but it did allow for scripting through a modified version of ruby. Does mean that some dedicated ruby programmers where able to make some pretty amazing sketchyphysics models. I didn\'t know ruby very well but could read keyboard and gamepad inputs with the SP bindings and knew how to play with the variables a bit. As a result I got by. I did however write a bad implementation of an acceleration script. With SP motors accel and damp settings being quite limited I decided to simulate a linear acceleration based on keyboard inputs, sounds alot more complex than it was. Quite a few users ultimately ended up using it in their projects aswell. Always nice to see something you wrote being used by others even if it was a very poor implementation. Its here: http://sketchup.google.com/3dwarehouse/details?mid=c7269b406a932bdded42efd47678a53. I\'ve retired from SP apart from when I very quickly want to visualise how something would work such was the case with the HOG wheel: http://sketchup.google.com/3dwarehouse/details?mid=7c48ef10f42df980809e72bf96e013e7

Oh man, I wish I could have gone to a sixth form that did Computer Science.

I would have been all over that shit. Didn\'t even know it was available at A-Level at all.

Also, Visual Basic is teh lose. You poor thing.

[6677]

Oh man, I wish I could have gone to a sixth form that did Computer Science.

I would have been all over that shit. Didn\'t even know it was available at A-Level at all.

Also, Visual Basic is teh lose. You poor thing.

AQA have computer science available. Don\'t know about OCR or edexcel.

I hate visual studio with its damn auto predict. Handy but friggin annoying that theres no keyboard shortcut to finish the word for you so you either add a '.' and delete it again or go to the mouse. And automatically adding close tags to html when using asp.net, don\'t get me started on that.

I prefered gEdit on linux for my IDE. no word completion.

[Johnman]

About 15 years with C/C++ (self-taught, that is equal to what... 1 year as a professional? xD), 5 years of web development (PHP, AS, Javascript, MySQL, etc) and struggling as an unpublished game developer. I also have some experience with Unity and like to tinker with stuff like Forth.

Damn great game!

[empiresco]

I taught myself to code pretty well in flash, and am currently teaching myself c++. I\'ve also made a few (not very popular) flash games .

[GroundHOG2010]

All those that are having trouble with other languages, Try assembler. You will be running and learning the prevous code just to get away from it.

[LukeTim]

All those that are having trouble with other languages, Try assembler. You will be running and learning the prevous code just to get away from it.

Yeah, I hate that crap.

[Ivan Ivanovich]

All those that are having trouble with other languages, Try assembler. You will be running and learning the prevous code just to get away from it.

Assembler is a great language, very powerful and very easy to grasp. Just like chess, there\'s only so many moves you need to know, but it takes a lifetime to master the game.

The trouble most people seem to have with it is that you have to be certain you know what you want, because the computer will execute whatever you tell it to, there\'s very little going on in the sense of sanity checks.

[6677]

Assembler is a great language

But theres hundreds of assembly languages. Not just the one.

X86 is one, AMD64 is another

[Johnman]

Yeah, I hate that crap.

Try Forth and you will find assembler lovely.

[nivvydaskrl]

Better yet, try Multi User Forth.

[thorfinn]

Try Forth and you will find assembler lovely.

I actually did, during high school

Our computer science professor was a punched-card-era old chap. After the two years of curricular classes we had, he started an afterschool CS club for those interested. It amounted to us few members meeting on Fridays 4:30 PM, sitting around a fire the CS lab control console and saying 'OK, professor, what neat trick are you going to teach us this time'?

It was the only computers club I ever heard of that had only hot girls amongst its members. I still can\'t understand how it could fail in the end. :-\

Someday he brought an old DOS Forth compiler that he had used when he wrote some embedded code with a friend, and did some classes with that. I wouldn\'t really like to work with such a language, but it was so alien that wrapping my mind around reverse-polish notation and all its other quirks was really fun.

I even posted a Forth entry in a 'write this program in every possible language' thread one time...

[6677]

I even posted a Forth entry in a 'write this program in every possible language' thread one time...

I think we need one of those threads.

[Monger]

About six years programming experience for industry software (to be more exact: mainly UI automation and tooling for quality assurance). Currently mostly VB.NET and a little C#.

When studying we worked mostly with C++ (which I loathed) and Java (which I loved).

.NET is not the cleanest language platform, but its IDE is amazing. It is really mindblowing what you can do within short time once your mind isn\'t weighed down by reference counting and memory allocation. In the last year I toyed around a little with XAML (i.e. WPF, Silverlight). I think it\'s a pity that its 3D framework is still so weak, and it doesn\'t seem like there will be any relevant managed 3D framework soon. XNA looks great, but seems quite limited.

I think it\'s amazing that indie projects like KSP are possible today. I doubt they would have been possible five years ago, without cheap engines like Unity.

[Johnman]

I actually did, during high school

Our computer science professor was a punched-card-era old chap. After the two years of curricular classes we had, he started an afterschool CS club for those interested. It amounted to us few members meeting on Fridays 4:30 PM, sitting around a fire the CS lab control console and saying 'OK, professor, what neat trick are you going to teach us this time'?

It was the only computers club I ever heard of that had only hot girls amongst its members. I still can\'t understand how it could fail in the end. :-\

Someday he brought an old DOS Forth compiler that he had used when he wrote some embedded code with a friend, and did some classes with that. I wouldn\'t really like to work with such a language, but it was so alien that wrapping my mind around reverse-polish notation and all its other quirks was really fun.

I even posted a Forth entry in a 'write this program in every possible language' thread one time...

Now I\'m jealous. >