Are you, or were you, a computer programmer? Have you made anything that you're proud of, or that was difficult to design? Well, here's the place to brag! You don't need to get technical if you don't want to (I'm sure not gonna!), and you don't have to limit yourself to just one achievement, though I think we'd all like to hear about the one you're most proud of!
I mostly made games, the first being a simple text-based RPG on our good ole commodore 64 ^^ simple in the fact that the user was presented with two choices at various points, and was carried to the next point by a simple "goto" statement. As you can imagine, this took a LOT, and I do mean a LOT of planning! Then I decided to add an additional level of complexity by creating my own randomization mechanism: variables created by the choices the player had made up to that point. This determined some factors in the extremely simple combat system of the game, as well as the locations of the mines in the mine field in the end. I started the program when I was 11, working on it on and off until it was complete, two years later. By that time I'd lost interest in the C64, as my brother had started to teach me C, which we used to create much more complicated (graphical, even) games for a gameboy emulator. My greatest achievement was "car," where you are a helicopter with two frames of animation (helicopter blades and no helicopter blades), and must drop a bomb on a car that moves across the bottom of the screen. After all the work I put into it, it was very disappointing to realize that the program was barely worth 30 seconds of gameplay! I lost a lot of my interest in programming shortly afterward, as I attempted to design more complex games. I grew sick of combing my code to find a single missing semicolon, or slamming my head against the monitor for a good solid week before e-mailing the creater of the development tool I was using, to find out that the tool did not in fact support randomization. I dabbled in some offshoot of Java afterward (not by choice, it was all they taught in my highschool computer science class), which spawned the simple and fairly addictive game "sword swing" in which you battled imaginary monsters by setting various relative numbers in fields for the attack, strength, magic and defense ratings you'd be using in your fight. Fun, until you figured out how the variables were interacting with one another
I personally used to make simple 2d games. The last one I made was was an adventure game similar to sonic and such. Basically you had to go through the level collecting objects and killing bad guys until you reached the end of the level. But in the end I stopped making it because it takes forever, and you have to make sure everything is perfect. However I might finish it one day if I ever become interested in programming again.
well i once made a program in Pascal that could calculate factorial of a specified integer!! :eusa_danc
ummm, I made a red ball once in YaBasic on PS2... Took me 7hrs. its was supposed to be on fire :eusa_doh:
Actually, the last project I worked on was very similar to this, although I wasn't programming. I was in charge of sprite design, music, and just general planning. It was a pretty ambitious project for me and a friend of mine to be undertaking as seniors, but we really thought we could do it. We had a lot of great ideas going in, and my friend was able to wrangle up some awesome kits. What defeated us? Jumping. Well, that's not technically correct. We could make the character jump fine. What we needed was a physics engine that all entities on the screen were affected by, also known as gravity. We just could never pull it off. The code would look perfect, but it just would not work, and there'd be odd little glitches like the sprites vibrating up and down, or the floor suddenly becoming a conveyor belt, ect. That's what ultimately drove me away from programming.
Hmm, I haven't done a ton of stuff to brag about, but I've done a little bit. I've probably spent more time programming on my TI 83+ than anything else... I made this really cool (and slightly random) RPG, but I never finished it (you wouldn't believe how long it takes to program on your calc... there's no error handling, either... :dry: ). I've also got this random little website that I've created, and done a few things with. I've got a few half-finished projects there, as well as several more that aren't complete enough to stick online. I took a Java class this past semester, but I'd really like to learn more about web development (PHP, mySQL, etc).
I made a few apps in vb i made a page refresher to increase your profile count and also a windows xp patch a simple dvd player and a ip tool that show your network ip address
For one of my compsci programming assignments while at uni I had to do this relatively complex program that let you input text-based commands to draw things on a screen... I think it was basically a simplified version of Apple Logo for those who remember that. If it was even an Apple thing, but basically you had this "turtle" (i.e. cursor) you could command to draw stuff. Anyway, I worked and worked and worked on it (programmed in Scheme, which is a Lisp-based derivative that is AWESOME for learning how programming languages work but relatively tricky to get to do complex programs because everything has to use tail-recursion) and was stuck on this bug that I could. not. solve. So anyway I finally left campus to go home and as I was getting on the bus to go home, I figured it out in my head so I quickly wrote down the solution (this was before the era where everyone had a laptop) and when I came back to school on Monday, I plopped it in and it worked perfectly. This is how I learned the extreme value of leaving your work if you're stuck on a bug (or anything, really, that's tied you up) and coming back to it "fresh," so to speak.
There's another good lesson that goes along with this: don't wait until the day before the assignment is due to work on it, so you give yourself that option.
Grr! Hehe, I think most programmers posting in this thread know what that feels like. I've been there a lot, and my biggest problem is, well...you know how they say the key to being a good programmer is to be an efficient programmer? Well, I was the furthest from! My back end was soooo sloppy, it took forever to locate the source of the problem! To all those who grit their teeth and mentally cross their fingers before clicking that compile button, I salute you! ^^7
