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RELAXED THREAD YO.
Anyway:
At 8 years old I started writing BASIC programs on DOS because I wanted to make a clone of Pokemon Red/Blue for gameboy in DOS (
That got boring, and about this time (10-10 1/2 in age) I was talking to my uncle at a family event and he was telling me about his job at a software company, and about C++ which is what they used. He got me a copy of Visual Studio 6 Professional and so I started playing with that, VB6 and VC++, and I found my dad's old C book, which I read and was able to follow using VS. Then I bought two books, one "learning C++" primer book and Bjarne's book as I knew he was the creator of the language. I read the easy one and used Bjarne's as a reference (though I did skim the STL stuff).
At the time, a friend of my brother's gave him a copy of Half-Life as it was a new game and quite epic. We both played it through, had a lot of fun with it, then we heard about this mod for it called Counter-Strike. We installed it, started playing, and it was quite awesome at the time it was still beta before Valve purchased it. I started reading some online forums about it and notice a handful of people would somehow be AMAZINGLY GOOD at the game and get nothing but headshots and shoot people through walls etc. I quickly came to understand this was from the first cheat, mainly a modification of the client.dll in the mod (back before there was any security and this was easy), by a guy in a group called clientbot, his handle was Chazz and the cheat was called ViperG (the source you can still find lying around in some places, but that's a really legacy cheat, but still one of the best ever made). It was the first client-hook.
I was fascinated by it, but no source was released at the time. Recently from that there was some guy who released XQZ cheat (where the "XQZ wallhack" came from), a purely OpenGL cheat. At that time I was a member of MPC and Abso and I from there worked together to try to produce new functionality and reproduce the functionality in XQZ. It was my first real C/C++ project and it was quite advanced, so I wasn't able to produce anything of quality for a while. That goes off into a much bigger story so I'll just leave it there.
Then in HS, we had comp-sci "advanced" courses so I took those, and it was taught in Java. That's where I learned Java (in ~2004), the book was rather introductory and all of it but the Java syntax and classes I already knew (data structures, algorithms, etc). So I was bored with it, but I learned it and have used it quite a lot when the time calls for it. In college for CS, I learned Lua for extending a project I was working on, Javascript (I knew it from web development, but I mean really learning JS and writing code in it, this was when big JS frameworks for web development started becoming popular), Python because it's useful, C# because a friend of mine was heavy into it and it was useful for writing easy GUI applications, PHP because I needed to make dynamic websites and applications, LISP because it was recommended to me. And more and more. I never stopped learning languages, and I use the one for a task which is most appropriate.
The people I was going to school with who appeared the least capable in CS and who I'd consider "noobs" never did. They just sat there with VB.NET or Java and that's all they ever used. Then in junior/senior level courses when we had co-op group projects and poop, they always wanted to use VB.NET (for making a website or something for example) or Java for anything else. I couldn't handle that because it was a terrible decision and clearly suggesting PHP for a website or jQuery + CSS + PHP for a nice AJAX dynamic page, or suggesting C++ or Python for an application where they were far more appropriate than Java wouldn't fly because NONE of them knew any of those well. So I would do the entire project myself in 1 day, and say "there, if you knew what the duck you were doing, you'd be done already." I quit the CS program because the people here suck, the professors here suck (I know more than most of them.. wtf?), and the school won't accept suggestions for curriculum. I just finished a math degree because, oddly enough, it's preferred to a CS degree anyway, and math is one of the only other subjects I like. This is also a lot of where my massive cynicism about programming, language choice comes from as well as my stance on stupidity, poor education, and how little CS degrees mean these days.
So basically, from playing Pokemon on a gameboy I was interested in making games like that which lead through 14 years of learning and awesomeness which is how I ended up where I am today
Anyway:
At 8 years old I started writing BASIC programs on DOS because I wanted to make a clone of Pokemon Red/Blue for gameboy in DOS (
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), gotta love those motivators. I sucked butt at it but my father was a CS major in college so he gave me a book and taught me how to do stuff so it was cool. Then after a year or so, I had a basic sprite-driven scroller like pokemon/zelda and a battle system and it was all nifty. I got bored of it though. So we got a new PC, with windows 95, and so DOS was meh (even though you could still boot into it). So I picked up a copy of VB 3.0, which was an extension of BASIC, it was cool making windows and guis and writing code so I cloned a lot of software, Notepad, AIM, MSN Messenger, calc, and even wrote an alarm program that read times from a text file and would popup an alert and optionally make a sound when the time was up, then got into writing so called "proggies" for AIM at the time which was the thing to do. That got boring, and about this time (10-10 1/2 in age) I was talking to my uncle at a family event and he was telling me about his job at a software company, and about C++ which is what they used. He got me a copy of Visual Studio 6 Professional and so I started playing with that, VB6 and VC++, and I found my dad's old C book, which I read and was able to follow using VS. Then I bought two books, one "learning C++" primer book and Bjarne's book as I knew he was the creator of the language. I read the easy one and used Bjarne's as a reference (though I did skim the STL stuff).
At the time, a friend of my brother's gave him a copy of Half-Life as it was a new game and quite epic. We both played it through, had a lot of fun with it, then we heard about this mod for it called Counter-Strike. We installed it, started playing, and it was quite awesome at the time it was still beta before Valve purchased it. I started reading some online forums about it and notice a handful of people would somehow be AMAZINGLY GOOD at the game and get nothing but headshots and shoot people through walls etc. I quickly came to understand this was from the first cheat, mainly a modification of the client.dll in the mod (back before there was any security and this was easy), by a guy in a group called clientbot, his handle was Chazz and the cheat was called ViperG (the source you can still find lying around in some places, but that's a really legacy cheat, but still one of the best ever made). It was the first client-hook.
I was fascinated by it, but no source was released at the time. Recently from that there was some guy who released XQZ cheat (where the "XQZ wallhack" came from), a purely OpenGL cheat. At that time I was a member of MPC and Abso and I from there worked together to try to produce new functionality and reproduce the functionality in XQZ. It was my first real C/C++ project and it was quite advanced, so I wasn't able to produce anything of quality for a while. That goes off into a much bigger story so I'll just leave it there.
Then in HS, we had comp-sci "advanced" courses so I took those, and it was taught in Java. That's where I learned Java (in ~2004), the book was rather introductory and all of it but the Java syntax and classes I already knew (data structures, algorithms, etc). So I was bored with it, but I learned it and have used it quite a lot when the time calls for it. In college for CS, I learned Lua for extending a project I was working on, Javascript (I knew it from web development, but I mean really learning JS and writing code in it, this was when big JS frameworks for web development started becoming popular), Python because it's useful, C# because a friend of mine was heavy into it and it was useful for writing easy GUI applications, PHP because I needed to make dynamic websites and applications, LISP because it was recommended to me. And more and more. I never stopped learning languages, and I use the one for a task which is most appropriate.
The people I was going to school with who appeared the least capable in CS and who I'd consider "noobs" never did. They just sat there with VB.NET or Java and that's all they ever used. Then in junior/senior level courses when we had co-op group projects and poop, they always wanted to use VB.NET (for making a website or something for example) or Java for anything else. I couldn't handle that because it was a terrible decision and clearly suggesting PHP for a website or jQuery + CSS + PHP for a nice AJAX dynamic page, or suggesting C++ or Python for an application where they were far more appropriate than Java wouldn't fly because NONE of them knew any of those well. So I would do the entire project myself in 1 day, and say "there, if you knew what the duck you were doing, you'd be done already." I quit the CS program because the people here suck, the professors here suck (I know more than most of them.. wtf?), and the school won't accept suggestions for curriculum. I just finished a math degree because, oddly enough, it's preferred to a CS degree anyway, and math is one of the only other subjects I like. This is also a lot of where my massive cynicism about programming, language choice comes from as well as my stance on stupidity, poor education, and how little CS degrees mean these days.
So basically, from playing Pokemon on a gameboy I was interested in making games like that which lead through 14 years of learning and awesomeness which is how I ended up where I am today
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