Shaun,
I want to start by thanking you for the audio games history, I actually
find it very informative and useful. I like having some idea of how things
went in the past, so I can get a better idea of how they will likely change
now, and in the future. I think it would be an excellent idea for several of
the "old timers" to collaborate on a detailed audio games history. With
everyone working together, I'm sure the time line of things could be fine
tuned, and many specific details and events would start to surface that had
been long forgotten.
I'm not really familiar with your phrase "hack it yourself", so you'd
probably have to define that for me. I would have thought it was the same as
"opensource devs", but you seem to have differentiated them in your last post,
so I'm not quite sure of the meaning you intended.
I can't really comment about being the fastest developer or not. When I
was just starting high school (1995 or 1996 I believe), I began teaching myself
programming so that I could make little games and things. When I had high
school programming classes, I was the "expert" who would know more than the
professor so I'd help my friends with their work and we'd spend class playing
my latest game rather than working on the day's lesson, haha. I went to the
University of Michigan and got degrees in Computer science and Mechanical
engineering, but I have to say that 95% of what they "taught" me I had already
learned myself before going. All in all, it was a huge waste of time and money
just to earn the piece of paper that says degree. I've always been the
stubborn person who was slow to change my programming habits when those around
me did. I always focused more on the end result, and how I could accomplish
the same thing in a quarter of the time, by
not changing my methods over to whatever was currently popular at the time.
In different situations, being stubborn like that is a problem, but for the
most part it has benefited me.
Since it seems I've started writing a bio of myself, lol, I'll say a bit
more. I'm sure there are people floating around who assume I only know Visual
basic 6.0, since that is what I've written my audio games in. For the record,
I do know C++, C#, Java, Objective-C, and a few of the smaller ones they make
you learn as you go through college. In my stubbornness I just use the one I
want to, depending on the task at hand. Oh crud, I'm sure I've just summoned a
barrage of comments from other programmers haha! I've been programming pretty
much every day since 1995, on all manner of personal projects. My specialty is
actually vision systems, which seems a little ironic since I'm also writing
audio games! For those who might not know, this means I write software AI
which uses a camera for input. I'm currently waiting to see if my program has
won $20,000 in an open engineering challenge sent out by the US air force.
The last thing, before I stop my speech, is probably the number one most
important thing to know about me. I simply cannot keep myself on a single
project. At any given time I am probably working on 10 different projects, I
think about them all day while I'm at work, I dream about solutions at night,
and the moment I get stuck on one, I immediately fill that spot of my brain
with a new one. This probably means I'll die young from some sort of brain
tumor haha! My wife and I have joked around about that since we were dating.
Because I'm always mentally wrestling with so many projects, I really do fit
the stereotype of the absent minded professor. I will forget where I am if I'm
out driving, I'll forget which cabinet we keep dishes in, and I'll even forget
friend's NAMES for like a day at a time! ROFL, I'm a mess!
I have no idea how this turned into a biography about me, but maybe it'll
entertain you guys to read it. Oh yeah, I'm married and 29 years old. Most
people start with that kind of information, I had to tack it onto the end
before I forgot. :)
---
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