Dark Bit Factory & Gravity
GENERAL => General chat => Topic started by: Clyde on May 20, 2006
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I've so many memories, of programming routines, some that backfired and others that people went blooming heck over. And I wondered, and thought it a good call, to make this post and see what memories you folks have throughout your coding years.
What was your first ever coded routine? Can you remember, and what platform was it on.
What's been your best routine so far, and what's been the effect / routine you've been most unhappy with and would you go back to it, and rework it?
The most memorable time for me, was coding some colour split raster bars in 6510+ on the Humble C64. My biggest disaster was attempting Texture mapping, something I hope to one day learn how to do. Today, my most treasured routine is one that myself and my partner in code in Gravity have come up with, which still remains to be seen. We're quite proud of it, and it will feature in a production very soon, I hope.
I also find it, that as I get older, the brain seems to need more pushing for inspiration for new concepts with routines. Don't know if it's the same for you.
Cheers and all the best,
Clyde.
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Flippin heck, there's some questions there.
The first ever thing I coded that you could call an effect I suppose was in Spectrum basic, basically you had UDG's (user defined graphics) and I made this animated square and printed a screen full of them.
Anyway, I found that by constantly redefining the UDG I could get a whole screen full of smootly spinning squares.
The hardest and most satisfying thing I ever coded was not a demo, it was a conversion of the old Atari classic Battlezone.
I made a filled 3D version of Battlezone in a cult-ish language called Yabasic.
I had it published on a magazine coverdisk too :)
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Good question Clyde.
First thing I can remember writing to completion was a game on the Speccy called the Miner's Strike. It was back in 1985 and I wrote it with my brothers. It was like Space Invaders but with policeman and you fired Miner's at them. It was written in assember and can remember my brother working on the graphics for hours at a time.
The most satisfying is two things.
The first was when I was at school and me and a mate were pissing around and we coded what you call a dot ball. Something like 144 dots spinning around. The teacher was impressed and asked if we could do a head... yeah right! We managed it in the end but looked more like a Mr Potato Head more than anything else.
The other most satisfying, and the one definate memory I have is getting vectors on the Amiga working for the first time. Me and a mate were working for weeks and weeks on getting working! It was something stupid like 4am that it finally worked, a Eureka moment :) I jumped around like a maniac and woke the whole house up. We worked on it for weeks and week optimizing it, squeezing every single cycle out of the machine. Eventually we got it faster than TEC/Cryptoburners line source, which legendary as a sort of benchmark for the time.
Approaching my 35th birthday, I find more and more ideas and concepts running around my head. I've literally got a desk full of bits of paper with routines scribbled in pseudo-code and crappy drawings. Never get the time to put them into practice though which is what frustrates me more than anything else.
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Life gets in the way Pentagram. Unfortunately we all get jobs and have to pay our bills.
I battle with time myself so I know the feeling all too well.
We all have to spend too much time in work, never mind.
In 30 years you'll be retired and hopefully you'll have the time to get some of them coded.
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hahaha collecting me pension, losing my marbles, but still programming... now that's a thought to keep me cheerful!
Doesn't help that the work that pays the bills is programming as well. If it's been too stressful the last thing I wanna do is sit down and battle away at an effect.
Saying that, I've just sat in front of Photoshop for four hours redesigning my web site! :)
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First of all I like to say HELLO to the forum as this is my very
first post :!: I just saw the bbs-tro an pouet and liked the threads
I read so far - so I joined.
Back to the topic - the first real fx I used to code was the typical
typewriter / telex fx. Guess that I really got into programming after
seeing the movie WARGAMES ;)
It was my kind of helloWorld program I tend to code whenever
I started playing around with new hardware and/or programming
language. Finally I used it in a little bbs-tro on the amiga which was
my first scene-production ever. You can download it here :
http://www.weltenkonstrukteur.de/dl/ffactory.exe
The code I was most proud of wasnt a demo-fx really. It was a bbs
system I wrote completely in Basic on the Amiga. It became rather
complex and I really like working on it ...
So, no spectacular fx that really fascinates me. I really prefered the
simple stuff like starfields and so on ... call me an oldschooler if you
want ;)
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Hi Benny, welcome to the board :)
The intro in the link you posted is an Amiga exe I guess?
There's lots of people who love oldschool stuff here (and new stuff too).
Glad that the bbs intro has worked :) We're hoping to pull in a lot more members, this board was really only just launched a couple of months ago, we were at another place a long time before that.
Feel free to chip in wherever you feel like.
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Hi Benny, welcome to the board :)
The intro in the link you posted is an Amiga exe I guess?
Thanks for the nice welcome.
Yes. It is an amiga exe (ecs). It works on an emu like WinUAE though ;)
There's lots of people who love oldschool stuff here (and new stuff too).
Glad that the bbs intro has worked :) We're hoping to pull in a lot more members, this board was really only just launched a couple of months ago, we were at another place a long time before that.
Feel free to chip in wherever you feel like.
I really like the iintro - although I have to say I am not very active atm
concerning coding demo fx. Now here and then when I have some
spare time. Nevertheless, I am in the scene for quite a long time and
still like the creativity of it.
Atm, I try to experimenting with some fx for mobile devices using J2ME.
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@benny: Nice Amiga intro dude, you should send it to Pouet (http://www.pouet.net/) :)
Btw, :hi:
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Yes indeedly :hi: Benny!
Great to meet and greet you welcome aboard dude.
Cheers and all the best,
Clyde.
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::) ....
Three years ago (at the age of 16 or so), my first program was:
'--------- Begin Program ------------
PRINT "Hello world!"
'-------- End Program ------------In QB1.1 .... XD
Favorite routine so far? hmm.... I really like motion the bluring routine I do in pure FB.. Deleter wrote a code with it, and I quickly picked up on the idea and advanced apon it, and now I can do some really awsome effects.. :D
I don't have one routine I'm not unhappy w/, I learn everyday, so I have too many to want to think about.... Only thing I might change, is how I didn't get into a community untill 2 years after I started coding, I would have learned alot more, cause I never really challenged myself until I had any real compotition.... however, I did learn how to solve problems on my own, and I'm a better coder for that, so I guess that wasn't too bad.... =) ... plus ppl missed my 100% noob stage, they only got the 40% of what was left.. (I'm at near full geek now, w/ those slight n00b moments (like forgeting about HEX$ and writing my own Dec to Hex routine... :'( ))
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Shit, why do I feel so fucking old all the time? ??? Everyone is younger than me.
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We'll if its any concelation im 31 this year.
My first ever proggie was:
10 Print"Hello ";
20 Goto 10
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I am 31, too. Damn is it normal that sceners are that old nowadays ???
Nevertheless, nice to see that I am not the oldest guy here ;-) To be honest
I really thought that the majority here is about 20 or even younger...
Somehow I feel relief now ..
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I'm probably older than all of you except Wham.
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@Shock: Heh, we have the same age :cheers:
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Hehehehehe, everytime I ask you your age it's always different dude.
haha, you old git. :p
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Since when is 30+ old?
<- Is 19 going on 20 btw.... ;D
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It's all in the mind I guess.
In 6 1/2 years I'll be 40 :(
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Just turned 35 (in May) here and the feeling is GOOOOOOOOD! ;)
Suppose it depends on the sort of lifestyle you lead. lol
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@Benny - Cool a 1975 Child.
30 something is when your realizing life, and 40 is when you can start to enjoy it. So my Dad told me.
And I add and try to remind myself, that your only here once so enjoy it.
To me the 80's were and will always be the best decade of them all.
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To me the 80's were and will always be the best decade of them all.
Here.. here!
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The 80's had the best demos and the best music so I'd agree with you.
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The fist ever C64 demo I got from 16-bit PD, was Censor Designs Wonderland 9. Really clever what you can get out of 64k and 8-bit.
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Prologue
I wanted to write something in this thread since weeks. That's a very nice theme. Sometimes, I feel good when remembering the old times of coding. Especially when I am unmotivated for coding and want to grasp some mood for it. Sometimes I get into my old archive and watch all my demos from the oldest to the newest one to see my progress or wonder how did I finished that thing in a short deadline and why the other thing didn't went as good as I want. I even remember my anxiety/frustration connected to each of my work. Sometimes I read my old codes to laugh with my mistakes. It's a great thing to remember my past. Each demo remind me mistakes to avoid. Nostalgy of things I was doing another way. My lost enthousiasm..
Early days
I have few memories from my little grasp of basic in Amstrad CPC 6128. My first computer. It was 8bit and at that time (10-14 years back?) I was playing a bit of games and rarely tried to do my own game in basic. Un(?)fortunatelly the computer use was very restricted (we were three brothers with one computer and too hysterical parents who wanted to protect as from becoming geeks ;)) so I wasn't much into it to get bored after hours of gameplaying so that I learn assembly and stuff. I only remember oneday when the disk drive was corrupt (a usual problem of CPCs) and so we couldn't load any game. But the basic of most 8bit computers was always in ROM, heh it was there each time I opened the computer! So, I remember the summer of 1995 (I was 15 years old) when me and my brother started coding demos and games. Yep! One of our dream was to code a game, but we couldn't understand several concepts (How the hell do I have collision with enemies, labyrinth walls, etc. Also I was so stupid I didn't knew about DIM then and if I had 10 enemies I should make lot's of variables x0, y0, x1, y1,..,x10, y10. So I made a karate game like street fighter with two players and each player was one 8*8 pixel char and if one char was near the other, a punch/kick would loose some energy. And the other char was dancing like crazy and hitting on the air with RND, hahaha :). And demos, even several years before I even knew there is a thing called demoscene, my love was mirrored there. I mostly did some graphical demonstrations in that basic by designing chars (SYMBOL and SYMBOL AFTER where you put binaries, that's a basic function in Amstrad to design your own characters. I remember some data with binary, SYMBOL %00011000, %00111100, %0111..... that my father showed. Then in other listing there were either &HC0, &H9F or regular numbers. I remember my father told me "Forget these, it's too hard to explain to you.." but later (that's the most surprising), I got the connection between the numbers and the binary! Maybe I read it in a basic manual? I don't remember. I got it myself? Or did we learn it on school? Maybe, maybe not. I remember that I decoded the logic between binary and decimal, but it seems strange to me to do this alone. Surprising now I try to remember. There I learned converting from decimal to binary and back! And so I wrote my chars in decimal and the lines were smaller. I don't remember if I also understood hex then. So, except from the karate game (which listing I coppied in an old textbook (I still keep them!) because there was no disk to save!) I also made graphical demos with drawing lines and fade out pallete, characters, slow circle drawing, simple stuff in basic preety slow and unattractive but fun. One of my best programms of that era was the circle drawer! There is were I read a circle drawing example using polar coordinates in a source code. I think I understood alone the logic and coded the programm where you move a pointer that draws a straight line except if you press two other keys to curve left or right. And two other keys increase/decrease the curving speed, so I could draw spirals, wild curves with high diferrentiation, and so on. Ahh.. before even meeting the demoscene or any other computer freak who can code. I guess my past showed my future. I am a visual mathematician, especially liked graphics and algorithms, maybe I wanted to code a game but this have changed (Surprisingly that I never coded a simple game yet because I was always occupied by demos to try something diferrent ;P)
Continued tomorrow..
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@Benny - Cool a 1975 Child.
Not quite. I turn 32 this year, so I was born in 1974 ;-)
To me the 80's were and will always be the best decade of them all.
Definately. I really like the spirit of the 80's, too. Especially the scene was cool.
Having no internet and mainly doing mail swapping - that truely rocked. And
remembering dialing into some bulletin boards with my first dataphone (akkustik-
koppler) ... what a fun O0
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Also I was so stupid I didn't knew about DIM then and if I had 10 enemies I should make lot's of variables x0, y0, x1, y1,..,x10, y10.
Hehe, you did that too? You just reminded me of a program that I once wrote on the Vic 20, it was in Basic and I wanted to have a rocket that took off and flew up the screen and I remember spending hours painstakingly programming seperate positions for the rocket as it moved up the screen.. All because I didn't know about for next loops! Hehehe.
I mostly did some graphical demonstrations in that basic by designing chars (SYMBOL and SYMBOL AFTER where you put binaries, that's a basic function in Amstrad to design your own characters. I remember some data with binary, SYMBOL %00011000, %00111100, %0111.....
Spectrum basic was like that too, you could use binary to define your own user defined graphics. I remember feeling really clever when I learned how to convert the binary to a decimal number, I thought that I had invented some ingenious way of protecting my graphics!
And Benny, I remember the days of mail trading very well too. Putting glue on the stamps and rolls and rolls of packing tape around the jiffy bags so they could be re-used. The talk back then was that modems and speed were killing the scene... The diskmags and group intros became full of adverts for mail traders with warez 1-2 days old. At that time I decided to swap only demos and GFX and got some really cool friendships that lasted for a long time.. I wonder what happened to some of those guys sometimes, especially Soul / LSD, Saint / TSL, Fobia / Anarchy, Krest / Rebels. If by any chance they ever google this page up, drop me a mail, I'd love to know how your lives have turned out!
I never had a modem back then, my parents were scared of the telephone bill.
I feel very lucky to have grown up in an era where I'd be sitting on the stairs and hoping that the postman would come early enough so that I could check out the latest releases before I went to college.
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And Benny, I remember the days of mail trading very well too. Putting glue on the stamps and rolls and rolls of packing tape around the jiffy bags so they could be re-used. The talk back then was that modems and speed were killing the scene... The diskmags and group intros became full of adverts for mail traders with warez 1-2 days old. At that time I decided to swap only demos and GFX and got some really cool friendships that lasted for a long time.. I wonder what happened to some of those guys sometimes, especially Soul / LSD, Saint / TSL, Fobia / Anarchy, Krest / Rebels. If by any chance they ever google this page up, drop me a mail, I'd love to know how your lives have turned out!
Yup. Faked stamps ... lol ... the good old time. It was such a cool network having swap-partners
around the globe. I remember how excited I was whenever the postman comes with 5 to 10
packages for me. So cool ....
I never had a modem back then, my parents were scared of the telephone bill.
...
Lucky you. I started off with a dataphone (akkustikkoppler) which has 300 bits per second. In
addition I lived in a region where no bulletin board system were available. So I had to pay for
long distance calls. I was rather shocked (and my mom as well) when the first 500.-DM bill
comes into our house - and I was at a age of 12 or 14 or so ...
Well, in the end it was really worth the fun ;)
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Hehe, you did that too? You just reminded me of a program that I once wrote on the Vic 20, it was in Basic and I wanted to have a rocket that took off and flew up the screen and I remember spending hours painstakingly programming seperate positions for the rocket as it moved up the screen.. All because I didn't know about for next loops! Hehehe.
LOL!!!
And Benny, I remember the days of mail trading very well too. Putting glue on the stamps and rolls and rolls of packing tape around the jiffy bags so they could be re-used. The talk back then was that modems and speed were killing the scene... The diskmags and group intros became full of adverts for mail traders with
Ahh,. the times I never lived. I was introduced to the scene from some CD with demos and then the internet. Hopefully there are still some nice guys out there swapping, just because of the feeling of it. I tried swapping with two people from the C64 and Speccy scene. We swapped PC disks, C64 disks, CPC stuff and coverdisks. Writting letters in those lovely electronic noters on a disk =). I had this experience for a while, even if it feels a bit odd todays that I already had the stuff my friend sent me, from the net. I miss the times. You were getting a rare demo or preview that few hundreds of people in the world had got. Hopefully I had the experience of mailswapping, though it wasn't the same. My friend Antitec from the CPC demoscene had a drawer full of letter envelopes in a mess from 1995 till 1998 mailswapping. The experience. To receive a disk or letter from some guy in another place of the world after a month of silence, with news, demo previews, new releases, electronic noters, music, gfx, coverdisks, and to write back with your news. There were news, after a long time, communication had a meaning. My friend thought later that the internet would make communication better, though it wasn't the same when someone sent you a short email where he didn't put more than 5 minutes and my friend wonder why now that there is email, the communication of the CPC scene was more rare? Ahh..
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This brings back some memories, I've just got my old amstrad cpc6128 back. Along with all the games on tape and disk, magazines and peripherals like mouse, speech synth and drum machine. Unfortunately the belt in the drive has disintegrated and I don't have the right audio leads for loading off tape :( so I can't try much out atm but other than that it all looks in pretty good condition.
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I am 31, too. Damn is it normal that sceners are that old nowadays ???
Nevertheless, nice to see that I am not the oldest guy here ;-) To be honest
I really thought that the majority here is about 20 or even younger...
Somehow I feel relief now ..
Guess what? I'm 31 too. :*)
My first routine? A bunch of print statements in basica on a 286 with monochrome monitor 10 years ago. :*)
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I can remember the Step By Step books that covered mostly all the 8-bit computers, did quite a few things with it. Shame they only made a few issues.
And I have fond memories of buying a magazine called "Your Commodore" which had real lengthy code listings all in Data statements, some of them were spread over several issues. Not all of them were special effect mind, but it was good practice for finding the keys. hehehe
And I'm going to be the same age as you on the 24th of Next month.
Time sure flies,
Clyde.