A History of Me - Part 1
For lack of anything else to write I will begin a series of autobiographical articles about me (ego bloating time ;-)). Before I start that, though, I'll give a quick rundown of the week. I rebuilt our shelves this week: painted them white and added some proper braces. Looks pretty good. I also, more or less, finished the docs module which is nice. Now I can start work on the various game stuff I want to do (hooray :-D!).
But now on to the main subject. This entry's subject is: A Walk with Computers: My Journey through Technology
My first experience with a computer would probably be the old TI Dad had. Every once in a great while Dad would crack it out and I'd knock myself out pressing random buttons. I thought it was pretty cool to just be pressing buttons.
I'm not sure when I first came into contact with PCs, but I'd be willing to bet my money that it was one of my relatives. My Uncle Darin had an 8088 and he'd sometimes let me play Concentration or Wheel of Fortune. My Uncle Kurt, rest his soul, had the Mother Goose game. I loved that little game. Not only did it look nice but, hey, it made noises aside from beeps! Of course, in retrospect it's still just beeps.
I always pined away for the day that we'd have a computer of our own. Whenever I'd go over to my grandparents house they'd have these boards that I'd pound nails into every time I came over. I claimed I was building a computer (lol). But, the years went by and it seemed the day would never come.
That day wouldn't come until the spring of 1997 when Dad took his old 486 home to do work at home. The first time he fired up MSPaint was magical. My favorite thing to draw was the Death Star blowing up Alderaan (we'd just seen the Special Edition of A New Hope). Then came the day that literally changed my life. All hip to learn about this new frontier I got some little kiddie books out of the library on computers. In the back of one of them was a couple of programs written in QBasic. Thinking about it now it was a good thing that computer had a Win95 upgrade because otherwise QBasic would not have been on there and I wouldn't be writing this now. But, anyways, I put in those programs and was just blown away by the fact that a normal human being like me could program the computer. So I started "reverse engineering" their code and taught myself how to use QBasic. It took a long time before I finally got to the level of making an actual game.
It was early 1999 and the game was Plane Attack, an ASCII based Battleship style game (though the enemy jumped around to random spots). If you were in line with the enemy you'd have the option to shoot it (which was a guess the number thing). My next game, and first time to dabble in graphics, was "Mario Mash". You'd move little Mario towards a turtle and jump on it. Exciting, eh?
By the time '99 came around the magic of the 486 was starting to wear off. Games were on the market that we couldn't play. For a while the problem was a lack of sound hardware but then it was 3D accel cards and Pentiums that became all the rage. Luckily I didn't have to suffer too long because in September of '99 we bought the first Dell. Around the same time, on the day my grandpa died IIRC, I also bought an old Mac Plus at a garage sale (and now that I think about it I think we still owe that lady $5 bucks...). That only lasted about half a year, though. A gift card of mine got shoved into the disk drive so I opened it up and got it out, but when I got every thing back together the drive didn't work. My guess now is that I had the cable in backwards but I knew of no such thing back then.
My next big step in programming would be the day I got VBasic for my birthday. I'd seen the thing sitting at our local Staples during the 486 era, but it certainly wasn't up to the task. Up until I got it, which was in 2000, I'd kind of forgotten about it. So that first night I was trying to write a game. I'd done some experimenting with VBA for Excel so I knew a little bit about what I was doing, but not much. Needless to say I didn't succeed. Eventually, over the years, I learned about WinAPI and DirectX and that's basically where I am today, though I did pick up some C++ along the way somewhere. That probably came in when I started:
Web development! Before the turn of the century the library had gotten computers with Internet acces. Of course this was another exciting realm for me. I could find sites about Final Fantasy 3 and listen to the music while away from the console! The site I liked in particular still exists today (and it hasn't changed a bit): Final Fantasy III, The Ultimate Page. The newness of the Internet wore off over time and I wanted to make my own presence on the web. Where the heck I learned about Geocities I don't know, but I did and the big debut was on June 1, 2000. We had just found out that Mom was pregnant with our first sister so that was the big headline. I used the WYSIWYG editor they had which served well for a time. It wasn't until Christmas of 2000 or 2001 when I used a gift card to buy a bargain book on VBScript. Hilariously I couldn't tell you anything about VBScript because for me that book was an HTML primer. So I made my first HTML website and loaded it up. For the time it looked pretty cool. Every so often I'd want to add new features and I'd rewrite the site from scratch. Then came the day where that static HTML just wasn't going to work anymore. I was trying to make a poll but couldn't figure out how to write the parameters file to the server.
Now before I can finish _that_ story I have to start another. One day when I was at Lucky's VB Gaming site and I figured I'd actually look at his links page. There was a link for a so called "Young Programmers Network" and I was instantly intrigued. Not too much before I had tried to start this kind of a group on Yahoo! to see if there was anybody else out there with my kind of talent (I was so naive) so to see that somebody else had actually done such a feat blew me away. So I signed up and made my debut: A VB game contest. So thus I was indoctrinated into the YPN, the next big thing in my life. I do need to explain that this is where my infamous nickname of dxprog started. At the time I had begun writing games utilizing DirectX and I figured that was fitting: DirectX PROGrammer.
Also, something else I should mention. Somewhere in 2001, I believe, I started yearning to have my own PC. We had just hit the eBay scene and computer parts were abundant and cheap (if you got ones that were old enough :-P). So I figured I'd build myself and old 486. Well that was stupid. As far as I got was the processor. I believe at my Dad's 40th birthday party I told my Uncle Darin about that dream and I was hitting him up for spare parts (I also bugged my Uncle Dan. These poor guys :-P). Anyhoo, my birthday rolled around and I got a package from UPS. Back then that was a rarity. It was from Darin and inside was his old P133. I was eccstatic to say the least. I holed myself up in my room and took the thing apart and put it back together and installed Windows and made out with it... okay, not really ;-). But it wasn't too long after (or maybe at the exact same time) that my Uncle Dan came up from Pheonix. And he brought several box loads of stuff. Talk about guy heaven! Of course, over the years I've upgraded (gone through 2 monitors with bad cables) and now I'm pretty much happy with my system (though I kind of want an 80GB HDD, or anything bigger than what I've got :-P). There was one point where computer hardware was more fascinating than writing software. I ate, breathed, and slept the stuff. But I guess it wore off at some point because I'm not like that nearly as much anymore.
Okay, now that all that's out if the way I can continue with the web site quest story. I was trying to figure out how to do that so I asked my pals at YPN. I can't tell you how I figured out how to get ASP going or any of that, but I did and began my journey on web programming. It was around the same time that I saw some pictures of XP in a magazine. I couldn't believe that that was Windows. So I named my first completely ASP driven site: Matt's Page XP. When that proved inadequate I rewrote it from scratch and I still have the code for that one. But I didn't like _that_ either so I rewrote it again this time I actually named the engine, Fishion I (notice the beginning of the fish names), and I called it The M Zone.
So things were working out quite well for me. I was writing games and making web sites. The only thing I wanted was to be a moderator of YPN (yeah, I wanted it). The opportunity showed up when KaGez put out a "help wanted" for the new YPN engine: partyfish. I said I'd help and he signed me on. My first job was to write the search engine. And, surprisingly, I did it. It was bloody slow, but it worked. But after that things went downhill: whenever I'd add a feature something would break down. This kept happening until I said "SCREW IT!" and started over from scratch. That engine I called YPNgine and it was pretty good for my level at that time (I'd been working with PHP for about 4-6 months). That actually made it to release and served YPN for a while, until it too started to break down under the stress. That's when I sat and said "HEY! I need to make something that is going to work in any situation and can be easily patched or upgraded." I had been reading a book on game programming that utilized object oriented programming and the light clicked: Tetra was born.
The first things I did on Tetra was make some homemade cache and templating modules. Tetra became something so powerful and simple to work with that every site I've created since that February day in 2004 has had Tetra at its core. And I hate to ring my bell here but I believe that it's probably my finest work.
With all this web development, though, I didn't have much time for game programming. I mean, I was running YPN, I was running the site for the parish and somebody from Arkansas wanted me to make a wbe site for them too. So I'd been swimming in a buttload of web work with little room for anything else. Until one day just a couple months ago. I was prowling around Gamedev.net and there was an article about a VisualBasic game contest. I figured, "Hey! Here's my chance to finally make a game and maybe get something out of it too." Oh I got something out of it (and I'm not just talking about the prize ;-)). I decided to make a clone of my favorite puzzle game: Tetris Attack. I'd tried to do this before but horribly failed. But my resolve to make it this time around had never been stronger. I wanted a game to enter that contest and I wanted a legal version of my favorite game, so I began. Things were going great. I had things figured out and working. But I have this real problem of when I hand my program to somebody else the bugs pop up. So I decided to turn the game over to the pros at tetrisattack.net. This was probably the smarted choice I made. The first couple of weeks killed me. "This doesn't work right" "The real game wouldn't allow this" "Your physics are really borked!". It made me want to cry, but I got the problems worked out and it turned out to be a winner (literally). I learned a lot and the completely scriptable sidekick guy formed the basis for a game I currently have planned (but to tell you about it now would be a crime ;-)).
So there it is. Basically my entire history involving computers. I look back now and realize I forgot about some of my early VB game ventures (Space Shoot II, Space Invaders and Eat), but you get the gist of it ;-). Stay tuned for part II: My First Love: Nintendo!
But now on to the main subject. This entry's subject is: A Walk with Computers: My Journey through Technology
My first experience with a computer would probably be the old TI Dad had. Every once in a great while Dad would crack it out and I'd knock myself out pressing random buttons. I thought it was pretty cool to just be pressing buttons.
I'm not sure when I first came into contact with PCs, but I'd be willing to bet my money that it was one of my relatives. My Uncle Darin had an 8088 and he'd sometimes let me play Concentration or Wheel of Fortune. My Uncle Kurt, rest his soul, had the Mother Goose game. I loved that little game. Not only did it look nice but, hey, it made noises aside from beeps! Of course, in retrospect it's still just beeps.
I always pined away for the day that we'd have a computer of our own. Whenever I'd go over to my grandparents house they'd have these boards that I'd pound nails into every time I came over. I claimed I was building a computer (lol). But, the years went by and it seemed the day would never come.
That day wouldn't come until the spring of 1997 when Dad took his old 486 home to do work at home. The first time he fired up MSPaint was magical. My favorite thing to draw was the Death Star blowing up Alderaan (we'd just seen the Special Edition of A New Hope). Then came the day that literally changed my life. All hip to learn about this new frontier I got some little kiddie books out of the library on computers. In the back of one of them was a couple of programs written in QBasic. Thinking about it now it was a good thing that computer had a Win95 upgrade because otherwise QBasic would not have been on there and I wouldn't be writing this now. But, anyways, I put in those programs and was just blown away by the fact that a normal human being like me could program the computer. So I started "reverse engineering" their code and taught myself how to use QBasic. It took a long time before I finally got to the level of making an actual game.
It was early 1999 and the game was Plane Attack, an ASCII based Battleship style game (though the enemy jumped around to random spots). If you were in line with the enemy you'd have the option to shoot it (which was a guess the number thing). My next game, and first time to dabble in graphics, was "Mario Mash". You'd move little Mario towards a turtle and jump on it. Exciting, eh?
By the time '99 came around the magic of the 486 was starting to wear off. Games were on the market that we couldn't play. For a while the problem was a lack of sound hardware but then it was 3D accel cards and Pentiums that became all the rage. Luckily I didn't have to suffer too long because in September of '99 we bought the first Dell. Around the same time, on the day my grandpa died IIRC, I also bought an old Mac Plus at a garage sale (and now that I think about it I think we still owe that lady $5 bucks...). That only lasted about half a year, though. A gift card of mine got shoved into the disk drive so I opened it up and got it out, but when I got every thing back together the drive didn't work. My guess now is that I had the cable in backwards but I knew of no such thing back then.
My next big step in programming would be the day I got VBasic for my birthday. I'd seen the thing sitting at our local Staples during the 486 era, but it certainly wasn't up to the task. Up until I got it, which was in 2000, I'd kind of forgotten about it. So that first night I was trying to write a game. I'd done some experimenting with VBA for Excel so I knew a little bit about what I was doing, but not much. Needless to say I didn't succeed. Eventually, over the years, I learned about WinAPI and DirectX and that's basically where I am today, though I did pick up some C++ along the way somewhere. That probably came in when I started:
Web development! Before the turn of the century the library had gotten computers with Internet acces. Of course this was another exciting realm for me. I could find sites about Final Fantasy 3 and listen to the music while away from the console! The site I liked in particular still exists today (and it hasn't changed a bit): Final Fantasy III, The Ultimate Page. The newness of the Internet wore off over time and I wanted to make my own presence on the web. Where the heck I learned about Geocities I don't know, but I did and the big debut was on June 1, 2000. We had just found out that Mom was pregnant with our first sister so that was the big headline. I used the WYSIWYG editor they had which served well for a time. It wasn't until Christmas of 2000 or 2001 when I used a gift card to buy a bargain book on VBScript. Hilariously I couldn't tell you anything about VBScript because for me that book was an HTML primer. So I made my first HTML website and loaded it up. For the time it looked pretty cool. Every so often I'd want to add new features and I'd rewrite the site from scratch. Then came the day where that static HTML just wasn't going to work anymore. I was trying to make a poll but couldn't figure out how to write the parameters file to the server.
Now before I can finish _that_ story I have to start another. One day when I was at Lucky's VB Gaming site and I figured I'd actually look at his links page. There was a link for a so called "Young Programmers Network" and I was instantly intrigued. Not too much before I had tried to start this kind of a group on Yahoo! to see if there was anybody else out there with my kind of talent (I was so naive) so to see that somebody else had actually done such a feat blew me away. So I signed up and made my debut: A VB game contest. So thus I was indoctrinated into the YPN, the next big thing in my life. I do need to explain that this is where my infamous nickname of dxprog started. At the time I had begun writing games utilizing DirectX and I figured that was fitting: DirectX PROGrammer.
Also, something else I should mention. Somewhere in 2001, I believe, I started yearning to have my own PC. We had just hit the eBay scene and computer parts were abundant and cheap (if you got ones that were old enough :-P). So I figured I'd build myself and old 486. Well that was stupid. As far as I got was the processor. I believe at my Dad's 40th birthday party I told my Uncle Darin about that dream and I was hitting him up for spare parts (I also bugged my Uncle Dan. These poor guys :-P). Anyhoo, my birthday rolled around and I got a package from UPS. Back then that was a rarity. It was from Darin and inside was his old P133. I was eccstatic to say the least. I holed myself up in my room and took the thing apart and put it back together and installed Windows and made out with it... okay, not really ;-). But it wasn't too long after (or maybe at the exact same time) that my Uncle Dan came up from Pheonix. And he brought several box loads of stuff. Talk about guy heaven! Of course, over the years I've upgraded (gone through 2 monitors with bad cables) and now I'm pretty much happy with my system (though I kind of want an 80GB HDD, or anything bigger than what I've got :-P). There was one point where computer hardware was more fascinating than writing software. I ate, breathed, and slept the stuff. But I guess it wore off at some point because I'm not like that nearly as much anymore.
Okay, now that all that's out if the way I can continue with the web site quest story. I was trying to figure out how to do that so I asked my pals at YPN. I can't tell you how I figured out how to get ASP going or any of that, but I did and began my journey on web programming. It was around the same time that I saw some pictures of XP in a magazine. I couldn't believe that that was Windows. So I named my first completely ASP driven site: Matt's Page XP. When that proved inadequate I rewrote it from scratch and I still have the code for that one. But I didn't like _that_ either so I rewrote it again this time I actually named the engine, Fishion I (notice the beginning of the fish names), and I called it The M Zone.
So things were working out quite well for me. I was writing games and making web sites. The only thing I wanted was to be a moderator of YPN (yeah, I wanted it). The opportunity showed up when KaGez put out a "help wanted" for the new YPN engine: partyfish. I said I'd help and he signed me on. My first job was to write the search engine. And, surprisingly, I did it. It was bloody slow, but it worked. But after that things went downhill: whenever I'd add a feature something would break down. This kept happening until I said "SCREW IT!" and started over from scratch. That engine I called YPNgine and it was pretty good for my level at that time (I'd been working with PHP for about 4-6 months). That actually made it to release and served YPN for a while, until it too started to break down under the stress. That's when I sat and said "HEY! I need to make something that is going to work in any situation and can be easily patched or upgraded." I had been reading a book on game programming that utilized object oriented programming and the light clicked: Tetra was born.
The first things I did on Tetra was make some homemade cache and templating modules. Tetra became something so powerful and simple to work with that every site I've created since that February day in 2004 has had Tetra at its core. And I hate to ring my bell here but I believe that it's probably my finest work.
With all this web development, though, I didn't have much time for game programming. I mean, I was running YPN, I was running the site for the parish and somebody from Arkansas wanted me to make a wbe site for them too. So I'd been swimming in a buttload of web work with little room for anything else. Until one day just a couple months ago. I was prowling around Gamedev.net and there was an article about a VisualBasic game contest. I figured, "Hey! Here's my chance to finally make a game and maybe get something out of it too." Oh I got something out of it (and I'm not just talking about the prize ;-)). I decided to make a clone of my favorite puzzle game: Tetris Attack. I'd tried to do this before but horribly failed. But my resolve to make it this time around had never been stronger. I wanted a game to enter that contest and I wanted a legal version of my favorite game, so I began. Things were going great. I had things figured out and working. But I have this real problem of when I hand my program to somebody else the bugs pop up. So I decided to turn the game over to the pros at tetrisattack.net. This was probably the smarted choice I made. The first couple of weeks killed me. "This doesn't work right" "The real game wouldn't allow this" "Your physics are really borked!". It made me want to cry, but I got the problems worked out and it turned out to be a winner (literally). I learned a lot and the completely scriptable sidekick guy formed the basis for a game I currently have planned (but to tell you about it now would be a crime ;-)).
So there it is. Basically my entire history involving computers. I look back now and realize I forgot about some of my early VB game ventures (Space Shoot II, Space Invaders and Eat), but you get the gist of it ;-). Stay tuned for part II: My First Love: Nintendo!
posted by dxprog at
9:53 PM
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