Time for some warm-and-fuzzies! What happy memories do you have from your early days of getting into computers/programming, whenever those early days happened to be?
When I was in middle school, I read an article in Discover Magazine about “artificial life” — computer simulations of biological systems. This sent me off on the path of trying to make a simulation of bugs that ran around and ate each other. My tool of choice was PowerBASIC, which was like QBasic except that it could compile to .EXE files. I decided there would be animals that could move, and plants that could also move. To implement a rule like “when the animal is near the plant, it will chase the plant,” I needed to compute distances between points given their x- and y-coordinates. I knew the Pythagorean theorem, and I realized that the line between the plant and the animal is the hypotenuse of a right triangle. Tada: I had invented the distance formula!
Oh gosh I feel like my “early days of getting into computers” lasted for like 10 years and involved a bunch of false starts and setbacks so I have a bunch of memories haha. It’s almost a miracle (or a curse…) that I ended up as a professional programmer in the end.
Early on me and my friend accidentally made the windows “My Documents” folder disappear on the elementary school’s computer lab’s computer by messing with the desktop.ini files. Good times.
Another time I was in a computer summer camp and we were playing with Text To Speech in Visual Basic and I had the great idea to play the string “XXXXXXXX” at full volume. I learned then that this sounds exactly like a robot saying “sex sex sex sex sex…”
Anyway fast forward to middle school and I had stubbornly settled on C++ because I wanted to make Spyro The Dragon and vaguely knew that serious games were programmed in C++. I went to an after school computer club run by a volunteer parent who really really liked HP Calculators. Everyone got a demo disk with an HP graphing calculator emulator (programmed by the instructor himself), qbasic and a few other things (I wish I still had that). The final assignment involved guiding a mouse through a maze using HP graphing calculator assembly language. The prize for completing the assignment was a copy of Visual C++ 6.0, as the instructor had wrote to Microsoft and asked if they had any copies they could give away.
So there I am with the ominous task of trying to teach myself C++ with no guidance. I type in a simple “Hello World” program. The compiler segfaults because I had a typo. It took me from then all the way until my second attempt at university to actually learn C++ properly. But dang once it clicked it clicked, now I can do wild wild stuff with the language because I’ve brute forced my way through learning every possible stupid way you can mess up.
If I knew it would take so long, and more importantly if I knew I’d never get to program a Spyro The Dragon-esque game and that Silicon Valley was so soul-sucking, I never would have stuck with it.
oh no… it wasn’t just me doing this then
windows 9x computers were basically impossible to kiosk properly so finding one with the TTS feature installed was always a treat for my child self
same motivation for me, but I wanted to learn how to write half-life 1 mods! and I also didn’t really understand the language until much, much later
You just reminded me I actually did write a bouncy rocket mod for Jedi Knight 2 (which used a modified Quake 3 engine). Bouncy rockets are so much “fun”, easy to implement, and obvious to think of that I’m surprised more games haven’t had them.
My friend designed a few levels for Jedi Knight 2. One in particular had a hidden room with a button that would trigger a giant wall of death slowly lowering from the ceiling across the entire level K.O-ing everyone else. I was never really good at level design but I thought the process of building 3D worlds in an editor and then pressing a button to bake in the light and shadows was super beautiful.
that’s why mods were so magical, especially in multiplayer games! Rocket Crowbar was one of my favorites for half-life — it turned the crowbar impact hitscan into a rocket projectile, which usually killed whoever you hit, the players next to them, and (depending on the whims of the goldsrc engine) probably you too. then from that thoroughly goofy premise they just kept going — there was a shotgun that launched exploding scientists, the grenades opened black holes… here’s an old review of the mod on Planet Half-life of all things if you want a very specific type of nostalgia
nothing else has the manic energy of a modder just doing free jazz with a game engine!
the way that old Quake-based BSP engines pre-rendered their lighting and shadows was beautiful! I’m surprised more map makers didn’t play with customized versions of the renderer to get special effects, since I think it was effectively a texture map that shipped with the map file
I loved making maps for Q3. I made so many of them, some even got rotation on some servers. The simplicity was perfect for someone like me, just brushes and shaders. When UT2K4 came out I decided to try to make maps for that, but everything was intricate 3D models, which i couldn’t do, so I gave up and went back to Q3.
I even made some maps for Q1, but I think I spent most of my time trying to make mods. My favorite was an inferno gun from Battletech: Crescent Hawk’s Inception, which used the rocket launcher to shoot a fireball that would stick to the target and do big damage in ticks.