Never, ever, ever...
Posted: Mon May 21, 2018 1:52 am
code your own game.
I just went back and looked at the Alura code from 2006. It was written in VB and relied heavily on modules and ini (txt) files. We had 10 races with unique classes for each race for a total of 100 classes... each with different abilities... all "supposedly" balanced once they hit max level. Then I began to think about the meaning behind it all....
It was a flashback to the 1980s when I was first learning to code on this entity known as the internet.... It was a bracing time. HTML wasn't invented yet and browsers were years in the future. Cobol was king, Basic was dead, and I was on the cutting edge creating new games and cool programs like converters that told you what degree Celsius it was when you typed in Fahrenheit and simple games that worked like stories as you chose a path forward. The computer systems I was using became obsolete though and I had to move away from the cassette driven computers to something new... floppy disk drives.
With these new creations I moved into learning Pascal and Visual Basic. Since I was in college by this time, and Microsoft had created a GUI for their DOS system, I was learning a new programing language every semester. Each semester the professor would tell us "this is the next big thing" for us to learn. Only briefly would they mention C or Basic since those languages were decades old and definitely part of the past, a thing to be scorned. Then the big one hit us... Netscape, the first browser that standardized the language and moved computing away from Unix for good and into the demon Microsoft's war with Apple.
I didn't give up though. I took a couple of years off to work for a living (and earn tuition, my parents aren't rich). I came back and it was a whole new world. There were new languages yet again to learn such as ZPL and Coldfusion. We even had a class that switched mid semester from Coldfusion to Java... just because Sun Microsystems looked cool to our professor. I flew through my lessons and learned not one, not two, but half a dozen programming languages over a two year stint trying to finish my degree.
It was during this time while I was writing a DOOR Game that something hit me. My world was shattered. I was a broken husk of a man left reeling from the revelation that struck me out of the blue one night while inputting code for an ASCII character to attack another ASCII character over distance.... The code I was implementing was a variation on Basic. I had spent 10 years of my life learning computer skills only to have come full circle and returned to the simple "if/then" world of ancient computer languages. This was more than I could handle.
I left the computer world behind. I was stung by the betrayal of my professors, the corporate giants who worked to make our work obsolete before we could complete it, and the perfidy of the internet gods. I abandoned my precious computers and fled into a life of customer service, criminal justice, and law... okay, and some booze. My years in higher education seemed wasted as I had discovered that I was in a race to run back to where it all began. Yes folks, the old computer languages held over as legacies from the 1970s were destined to rise like a phoenix or a vampire to rule over the computer world of the future. I had been an unwitting slave to it's evolution... caught up and discarded in the craze of finding something more efficient than simplicity.
My self exile from the computer world would last for nearly another decade before I found myself being thrown into learning HTML Version 3. Life had thrown me a curve by putting me in a line of work where I had to not only learn this new version of an old language again. I was also put into a position of having to oversee the dreaded coders who were now slaves to their computers. My understanding of the precursors allowed me to debug code and work miracles of compatibility adjustments. Before I knew it... I was captured by the machine overlords and my mind was no longer my own.
Others found me in the cyber dunes of the internet and pulled me into their orbits. I found myself revived and coding like mad. I believed I had found a pathway through the cyber chaos. Visual Basic .NET framework was all I needed to focus on to align the deviations of computer code work into one unifying language. My quest had finally taken me to the other side of the coding nightmare and I saw daylight at the end as I worked to code a game that was complex, modular, and desired in the world!
Yeah... that didn't work out very well. My vision of a unified code base shattered as Microsoft cracked under the weight of it's own sanctimonious need to be the ONE. The very thing that I thought would allow for a "universal code" turned out to sabotage my efforts. The .NET framework was ultimately unstable. I had backed the wrong horse. My colleagues and friends who had gone the route of C were about to go further, faster than I could relying on the cross dependencies of the .NET framework. Visual Basic was good enough for simple things, but was inferior to C (C++ actually) when making interactive software.
Now I sit here, 30 years removed from the start... looking back through the scraps of code I've compiled over the years. Sure, at the time it was good work. The projects had their problems but they worked and functioned the way they were intended... most of the time. Still, I had to come to a self realization that hurt. By looking at those clips of old code I now can see the problems inherent in the system and the systemic fractures in the code base that created instability and holes for exploitation.
In short, my work sucked. Nothing of the old code is salvageable. Alura, my largest creation, can't even run on modern computers since the dependencies were removed. Sure, I could force register DLLs and other venerable files that are obsolete to make the program run... but at what cost. Yes, the computer gods have passed me by with their tortuous demands for an ever expanding understanding of coding overviews. Each year still, a dozen new computer languages are paraded out... all based on the original languages but just shined up for the cool kids. Most will be dead ends that won't last long enough to finish a project. And here I sit... in the dark... wearing only a cock ring.
Well it's time for me to drop my bottle of wine into the garbage and go to bed. Good night everyone and I hope you feel a little better about yourselves having read of my misery and failure.
Oh, and kudos to whoever can figure out the comment about the ring. That one is real retro
I just went back and looked at the Alura code from 2006. It was written in VB and relied heavily on modules and ini (txt) files. We had 10 races with unique classes for each race for a total of 100 classes... each with different abilities... all "supposedly" balanced once they hit max level. Then I began to think about the meaning behind it all....
It was a flashback to the 1980s when I was first learning to code on this entity known as the internet.... It was a bracing time. HTML wasn't invented yet and browsers were years in the future. Cobol was king, Basic was dead, and I was on the cutting edge creating new games and cool programs like converters that told you what degree Celsius it was when you typed in Fahrenheit and simple games that worked like stories as you chose a path forward. The computer systems I was using became obsolete though and I had to move away from the cassette driven computers to something new... floppy disk drives.
With these new creations I moved into learning Pascal and Visual Basic. Since I was in college by this time, and Microsoft had created a GUI for their DOS system, I was learning a new programing language every semester. Each semester the professor would tell us "this is the next big thing" for us to learn. Only briefly would they mention C or Basic since those languages were decades old and definitely part of the past, a thing to be scorned. Then the big one hit us... Netscape, the first browser that standardized the language and moved computing away from Unix for good and into the demon Microsoft's war with Apple.
I didn't give up though. I took a couple of years off to work for a living (and earn tuition, my parents aren't rich). I came back and it was a whole new world. There were new languages yet again to learn such as ZPL and Coldfusion. We even had a class that switched mid semester from Coldfusion to Java... just because Sun Microsystems looked cool to our professor. I flew through my lessons and learned not one, not two, but half a dozen programming languages over a two year stint trying to finish my degree.
It was during this time while I was writing a DOOR Game that something hit me. My world was shattered. I was a broken husk of a man left reeling from the revelation that struck me out of the blue one night while inputting code for an ASCII character to attack another ASCII character over distance.... The code I was implementing was a variation on Basic. I had spent 10 years of my life learning computer skills only to have come full circle and returned to the simple "if/then" world of ancient computer languages. This was more than I could handle.
I left the computer world behind. I was stung by the betrayal of my professors, the corporate giants who worked to make our work obsolete before we could complete it, and the perfidy of the internet gods. I abandoned my precious computers and fled into a life of customer service, criminal justice, and law... okay, and some booze. My years in higher education seemed wasted as I had discovered that I was in a race to run back to where it all began. Yes folks, the old computer languages held over as legacies from the 1970s were destined to rise like a phoenix or a vampire to rule over the computer world of the future. I had been an unwitting slave to it's evolution... caught up and discarded in the craze of finding something more efficient than simplicity.
My self exile from the computer world would last for nearly another decade before I found myself being thrown into learning HTML Version 3. Life had thrown me a curve by putting me in a line of work where I had to not only learn this new version of an old language again. I was also put into a position of having to oversee the dreaded coders who were now slaves to their computers. My understanding of the precursors allowed me to debug code and work miracles of compatibility adjustments. Before I knew it... I was captured by the machine overlords and my mind was no longer my own.
Others found me in the cyber dunes of the internet and pulled me into their orbits. I found myself revived and coding like mad. I believed I had found a pathway through the cyber chaos. Visual Basic .NET framework was all I needed to focus on to align the deviations of computer code work into one unifying language. My quest had finally taken me to the other side of the coding nightmare and I saw daylight at the end as I worked to code a game that was complex, modular, and desired in the world!
Yeah... that didn't work out very well. My vision of a unified code base shattered as Microsoft cracked under the weight of it's own sanctimonious need to be the ONE. The very thing that I thought would allow for a "universal code" turned out to sabotage my efforts. The .NET framework was ultimately unstable. I had backed the wrong horse. My colleagues and friends who had gone the route of C were about to go further, faster than I could relying on the cross dependencies of the .NET framework. Visual Basic was good enough for simple things, but was inferior to C (C++ actually) when making interactive software.
Now I sit here, 30 years removed from the start... looking back through the scraps of code I've compiled over the years. Sure, at the time it was good work. The projects had their problems but they worked and functioned the way they were intended... most of the time. Still, I had to come to a self realization that hurt. By looking at those clips of old code I now can see the problems inherent in the system and the systemic fractures in the code base that created instability and holes for exploitation.
In short, my work sucked. Nothing of the old code is salvageable. Alura, my largest creation, can't even run on modern computers since the dependencies were removed. Sure, I could force register DLLs and other venerable files that are obsolete to make the program run... but at what cost. Yes, the computer gods have passed me by with their tortuous demands for an ever expanding understanding of coding overviews. Each year still, a dozen new computer languages are paraded out... all based on the original languages but just shined up for the cool kids. Most will be dead ends that won't last long enough to finish a project. And here I sit... in the dark... wearing only a cock ring.
Well it's time for me to drop my bottle of wine into the garbage and go to bed. Good night everyone and I hope you feel a little better about yourselves having read of my misery and failure.
Oh, and kudos to whoever can figure out the comment about the ring. That one is real retro
