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Like many other programmers, I originally picked up programming because I wanted to write games. I spent time on my own in high school messing around with rudim

Like many other programmers, I originally picked up programming because I wanted to write games. I spent time on my own in high school messing around with rudimentary 2D libraries in C++. That feeling of awe and accomplishment that was captured the first time an image successfully moves across the screen was what got me hooked. After starting college I soon learned of the trials and tribulations of software engineers in the gaming industry. I changed my degree to Computer Engineering, took the embedded track, and recaptured that sense of awe by staring into the abyss of an Oscilloscope. Albeit, I did still take several graphics courses as electives (simply because I loved the subject).

BurningCycles 8y ago
For me it was my big brother passing his Commodore 64 down to me as he got himself an Amiga. First it was just playing games, then doing some stuff in the built-in basic, and then following an assembly language course in a monthly magazine. By the time I managed to display eight sprites on the upper part of the screen, trigger a raster interrupt, move the same sprites to the lower part of the screen and thus have it appear as sixteen sprites on screen, I was hooked. It was like being able to wield magic.
- ggambetta 8y ago
  Similar story here, but on a ZX Spectrum :)
- Flow 8y ago
  My thing was sprite-multiplexers. In theory it's very simple. You sort the sprites by y-position, then use raster interrupts to reprogram the sprite registers for "(spriteN++ & 7)". The hardest part is sorting. It takes quite some time to sort data on a 6502. I "invented" my own sorting routine for this, but I later learned that most coders used bubblesort since most of the time sprites move just a little so it's mostly sorted already. My routine used half the stack. I took ypos >> 2 and used that as an index to the bottom half of the stack. If the position was occupied I used the next pos etc. To collect I simply used a PLA(pop) instruction. There were holes of course, so you had to check for empty slots. That routine took about the same time every frame. 32 sprites was not very hard to do, sorting-wise.
  - BurningCycles 8y ago
    Yes, bubble sort was an obvious choice given it's easy to understand and implement, I came across this article some time ago which goes through many different ways to sprite sort for general multiplexing and presents 'continous insertion sorting' as the winner, was a fantastic trip down memory lane. http://selmiak.bplaced.net/games/c64/index.php?lang=eng&game=Tutorials&page=Sprite-Multiplexing http://selmiak.bplaced.net/games/c64/index.php?lang=eng&game...
electricslpnsld 8y ago
> After starting college I soon learned of the trials and tribulations of software engineers in the gaming industry. Graphics is used well beyond the games industry! Anecdotally (talking to friends, getting recruiter emails, etc) Apple, Facebook, NVidia, and Google have been hiring like crazy for non-games graphics-related positions.
- CoolGuySteve 8y ago
  Google's comically bad at hiring for it though so I wouldn't count on them. When I interviewed there after having worked on graphics extensively at Apple and other places, they asked me how to load balance real time search suggestions and I failed, obviously.
  - Arelius 8y ago
    Ohh I agree, but I had an entirely differn't experience. I went through round after round of interview, passing the interviews without problem. But the team I was interviewing for wasn't able to get the information they needed, because I was just getting general CS interviews, so they kept trying to schedule more interviews. Eventually Amazon reached out, I had some interviews and accepted a position within 2 weeks. I had to tell Google I wasn't going to do any more of their interviews. They really need to improve their interview process for specialty positions, it really seems optimized to get recent CS grads into generic roles.
    - systemBuilder 8y ago
      You don't understand. Interviewing at Google is not about recruiting outside talent. It's about making the inside talent feel special when we blow off another qualified candidate.... I was one of those special-feeling interviewers with 32 onsites and zero hires (I recommended 10 by the way). I finally quit that shitshow and left Google.
- westoncb 8y ago
  Anyone else have info. on this? I started by writing games and game engines as a teenager (now ~14 years ago), reading "Real-time Rendering" and the "OpenGL Superbible". I've done a lot more with computer graphics since, writing pixel shaders for fun, building a web-based domain specific CAD tool (for a client) etc. Also been doing some computational geometry stuff more recently. I haven't had much luck finding positions for 'graphics programmers' though. I've found things like 'lead engine programmer' for game companies—which is a bit out of my league, IMO. But I'd love to work on things like the VR youtube player that Google did (doesn't have to be VR; 3D UI design is interesting to me regardless). Don't how to find these sorts of positions at companies like Apple/FB/Google etc., where I would hope they pay quite well (comments on that also welcome!).
codesushi42 8y ago
Seems like many people start and end this way. Games are a great motivation to learn how to code. But once you do, you find that other subfields of CS are more interesting and useful. And you just get older. :) But that is not reason to quit game development entirely. It is still a good hobby that makes you a much better programmer, because it touches so many areas of CS and math. 3d graphics, state machines, trees/graphs, pathfinding, multithreading, memory management, vector math, networking etc.
- rujuladanh 8y ago
  > But once you do, you find that other subfields of CS are more interesting and useful. And you just get older. :) It is true that some people, as they get older, claim to find games less interesting. In my opinion, some of them simply jaded a bit, and would be a good thing for them if they tried to find enjoyment again in the small things. I know, because I was there too. It depends a lot on the culture. There are also others that start claiming games are useless, immature and that the world will end if youngsters keep playing them. Entertainment has been useful even before civilization existed, and those that enjoy the time to entertain themselves, do; even if it is in the form of working on dream projects. Yes, that is playing too. As for your other point, there are objectively very few (if any) topics as interesting as games for CS people, given the so many areas of CS (and non-CS) they encompass at the same time. Hardly any other area of work touches so many domains. Only operating systems, browsers and CAD apps (and maybe Emacs ;) are close as vast.
  - kmbriedis 8y ago
    Interesting is very subjective term. E.g. some find theory much more interesting than games
    - rujuladanh 8y ago
      What do you mean by theory?
  - coldtea 8y ago
    >It is true that some people, as they get older, claim to find games less interesting. In my opinion, some of them simply jaded a bit, and would be a good thing for them if they tried to find enjoyment again in the small things. There are also people who still find enjoyment in small things, just not in games. It's not like computer games are that enticing beyond a certain point. You can wonder around shooting aliens or casting spells, or exploring space colonies, in some commercial game that's basically the nth clone of 1000 others before it so many times before it loses interest... It's like watching superhero movies for life. Yeah, people do it. But people also learn to appreciate more mature movie plots than "kid finds out they are unique, has responsibility to save world" or "millionaire with faults devotes time to fight supervillains", as their life experiences (e.g. kids, divorce, health scares, job trouble, mortality, love affairs, betrayal, etc) are not exactly the same as their brooding misunderstood teenager years when they wished they would "show everybody" anymore...
Ingon 8y ago
The desire to write games came later for me. What got me into programming was the desire to write viruses- they were this magical thing that I viewed as a game. A game to enter a system, to stay there hidden, spread and poke around, completely on their own. It was amazing world to imagine, but was way beyond what I could do at the time. And now, my ethics prevents me from even attempting it.

BurningCycles 8y ago

For me it was my big brother passing his Commodore 64 down to me as he got himself an Amiga. First it was just playing games, then doing some stuff in the built-in basic, and then following an assembly language course in a monthly magazine. By the time I managed to display eight sprites on the upper part of the screen, trigger a raster interrupt, move the same sprites to the lower part of the screen and thus have it appear as sixteen sprites on screen, I was hooked. It was like being able to wield magic.

ggambetta 8y ago
Similar story here, but on a ZX Spectrum :)
Flow 8y ago
My thing was sprite-multiplexers. In theory it's very simple. You sort the sprites by y-position, then use raster interrupts to reprogram the sprite registers for "(spriteN++ & 7)". The hardest part is sorting. It takes quite some time to sort data on a 6502. I "invented" my own sorting routine for this, but I later learned that most coders used bubblesort since most of the time sprites move just a little so it's mostly sorted already. My routine used half the stack. I took ypos >> 2 and used that as an index to the bottom half of the stack. If the position was occupied I used the next pos etc. To collect I simply used a PLA(pop) instruction. There were holes of course, so you had to check for empty slots. That routine took about the same time every frame. 32 sprites was not very hard to do, sorting-wise.
- BurningCycles 8y ago
  Yes, bubble sort was an obvious choice given it's easy to understand and implement, I came across this article some time ago which goes through many different ways to sprite sort for general multiplexing and presents 'continous insertion sorting' as the winner, was a fantastic trip down memory lane. http://selmiak.bplaced.net/games/c64/index.php?lang=eng&game=Tutorials&page=Sprite-Multiplexing http://selmiak.bplaced.net/games/c64/index.php?lang=eng&game...

electricslpnsld 8y ago

> After starting college I soon learned of the trials and tribulations of software engineers in the gaming industry. Graphics is used well beyond the games industry! Anecdotally (talking to friends, getting recruiter emails, etc) Apple, Facebook, NVidia, and Google have been hiring like crazy for non-games graphics-related positions.

CoolGuySteve 8y ago
Google's comically bad at hiring for it though so I wouldn't count on them. When I interviewed there after having worked on graphics extensively at Apple and other places, they asked me how to load balance real time search suggestions and I failed, obviously.
- Arelius 8y ago
  Ohh I agree, but I had an entirely differn't experience. I went through round after round of interview, passing the interviews without problem. But the team I was interviewing for wasn't able to get the information they needed, because I was just getting general CS interviews, so they kept trying to schedule more interviews. Eventually Amazon reached out, I had some interviews and accepted a position within 2 weeks. I had to tell Google I wasn't going to do any more of their interviews. They really need to improve their interview process for specialty positions, it really seems optimized to get recent CS grads into generic roles.
  - systemBuilder 8y ago
    You don't understand. Interviewing at Google is not about recruiting outside talent. It's about making the inside talent feel special when we blow off another qualified candidate.... I was one of those special-feeling interviewers with 32 onsites and zero hires (I recommended 10 by the way). I finally quit that shitshow and left Google.
westoncb 8y ago
Anyone else have info. on this? I started by writing games and game engines as a teenager (now ~14 years ago), reading "Real-time Rendering" and the "OpenGL Superbible". I've done a lot more with computer graphics since, writing pixel shaders for fun, building a web-based domain specific CAD tool (for a client) etc. Also been doing some computational geometry stuff more recently. I haven't had much luck finding positions for 'graphics programmers' though. I've found things like 'lead engine programmer' for game companies—which is a bit out of my league, IMO. But I'd love to work on things like the VR youtube player that Google did (doesn't have to be VR; 3D UI design is interesting to me regardless). Don't how to find these sorts of positions at companies like Apple/FB/Google etc., where I would hope they pay quite well (comments on that also welcome!).

codesushi42 8y ago

Seems like many people start and end this way. Games are a great motivation to learn how to code. But once you do, you find that other subfields of CS are more interesting and useful. And you just get older. :) But that is not reason to quit game development entirely. It is still a good hobby that makes you a much better programmer, because it touches so many areas of CS and math. 3d graphics, state machines, trees/graphs, pathfinding, multithreading, memory management, vector math, networking etc.

rujuladanh 8y ago
> But once you do, you find that other subfields of CS are more interesting and useful. And you just get older. :) It is true that some people, as they get older, claim to find games less interesting. In my opinion, some of them simply jaded a bit, and would be a good thing for them if they tried to find enjoyment again in the small things. I know, because I was there too. It depends a lot on the culture. There are also others that start claiming games are useless, immature and that the world will end if youngsters keep playing them. Entertainment has been useful even before civilization existed, and those that enjoy the time to entertain themselves, do; even if it is in the form of working on dream projects. Yes, that is playing too. As for your other point, there are objectively very few (if any) topics as interesting as games for CS people, given the so many areas of CS (and non-CS) they encompass at the same time. Hardly any other area of work touches so many domains. Only operating systems, browsers and CAD apps (and maybe Emacs ;) are close as vast.
- kmbriedis 8y ago
  Interesting is very subjective term. E.g. some find theory much more interesting than games
  - rujuladanh 8y ago
    What do you mean by theory?
- coldtea 8y ago
  >It is true that some people, as they get older, claim to find games less interesting. In my opinion, some of them simply jaded a bit, and would be a good thing for them if they tried to find enjoyment again in the small things. There are also people who still find enjoyment in small things, just not in games. It's not like computer games are that enticing beyond a certain point. You can wonder around shooting aliens or casting spells, or exploring space colonies, in some commercial game that's basically the nth clone of 1000 others before it so many times before it loses interest... It's like watching superhero movies for life. Yeah, people do it. But people also learn to appreciate more mature movie plots than "kid finds out they are unique, has responsibility to save world" or "millionaire with faults devotes time to fight supervillains", as their life experiences (e.g. kids, divorce, health scares, job trouble, mortality, love affairs, betrayal, etc) are not exactly the same as their brooding misunderstood teenager years when they wished they would "show everybody" anymore...

Ingon 8y ago

The desire to write games came later for me. What got me into programming was the desire to write viruses- they were this magical thing that I viewed as a game. A game to enter a system, to stay there hidden, spread and poke around, completely on their own. It was amazing world to imagine, but was way beyond what I could do at the time. And now, my ethics prevents me from even attempting it.