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Books like that are cool and were a big influence on my desire to become a programmer, but I didn’t know it at the time. One of the bigger revelations I had fi

Books like that are cool and were a big influence on my desire to become a programmer, but I didn’t know it at the time. One of the bigger revelations I had first learning to program was based around a confusing thing I’d wondered about the very first time I saw a 3D video game, Super Mario 64. Up to that point my young brain could have imagined how a 2D game could be programmed, naively thinking they had just coded up every possible game state. But the sheer number of permutations in the 3D, open world plane immediately made me realize that was impossible to do because of the sheer number of permutations - so I concluded something else must have been afoot, but it was all mystical to me. Anyway I was struggling bad with programming concepts very early on and tried to make an interactive multiplayer text adventure game in the same exact way as this book, struggled mightily, until one day I realized some of it could be done algorithmically rather than encoding every possible permutation into the game - and it clicked. A very vivid and surreal moment for me that I’ll never forget. As we age and get more senior, we forget little sparks like that sometimes I think. Thanks for posting this

Jerrrry 3y ago
>my young brain could have imagined how a 2D game could be programmed, naively thinking they had just coded up every possible game state. But the sheer number of permutations in the 3D, open world plane immediately made me realize that was impossible to do because of the sheer number of permutations - so I concluded something else must have been afoot, but it was all mystical to me. This is so nostalgically intimately familiar it is nearly uncanny.
- brandonhorst 3y ago
  I to remember having the exact same thought with the original Pokemon games. I could never wrap my head around how the battles could handle randomness.
wetmore 3y ago
In a similar vein, I remember that when I was learning to program, I would look at applications like Word and get overwhelmed with the idea that you would need to implement everything from scratch.

Jerrrry 3y ago

>my young brain could have imagined how a 2D game could be programmed, naively thinking they had just coded up every possible game state. But the sheer number of permutations in the 3D, open world plane immediately made me realize that was impossible to do because of the sheer number of permutations - so I concluded something else must have been afoot, but it was all mystical to me. This is so nostalgically intimately familiar it is nearly uncanny.

brandonhorst 3y ago
I to remember having the exact same thought with the original Pokemon games. I could never wrap my head around how the battles could handle randomness.

wetmore 3y ago

In a similar vein, I remember that when I was learning to program, I would look at applications like Word and get overwhelmed with the idea that you would need to implement everything from scratch.