Quoting: Colombo

Quotefound a legendary girlfriend

Does that mean that she is unique? Do they respawn? Or are they even instanced for each player?

How was the bossfight?

Totally unique, and unfortunately I don't think they respawn. The instanced thing, now that's a philosophical question if I ever saw one.

Oh, and no boss-fight. I guess I leveled up enough to have a good random encounter :)

Some nice reads in here, funny how things sometimes develop in life. ;)

I started with Basic in 1992 at the age of 8 on the C64 my Brother and I got from a collegue of our mother. We had tons of games on floppys and my brother knew the most basic commands to get us started. Me uncapeable of english at that time, quickly found interest not only in playing games, but also looking at those start skripts and what they were doing. After lending a C64 book from the local library I taught myself to program in Basic, It were glorious times. But same as Luke, my teeny years hit really hard, was always out with friends doing shit the whole day, not learning for school. Nevertheless in High School I attended first a Basic, then a HTML, then a Java course, and the foundations for my future were laid. I bought my own first PC (a marvelous AMD K6-II 450Mhz with a Riva TNT2 graphics card) and continued with my Java endevours. I finished high school and got into university where I also learned C and later C++, the Java course was hilariously easy for me already.
After university I ended up in a company as an administrator for Windows and Windows applications (yeah I know, the dark side, but somehow you have to pay the bills) where I only needed batch scripts and later Powershell (which is actually really good), and some C# programs for administrator stuff.

But last year, after 10 years, I got the chance to change from Administration into Development, now mostly working on web apps with HTML & JS (all hail jQuery my saviour), but also some Java EE projects with Vaadin framework and Java EE Backend stuff. My newest project is writing a web frontend for a Powershell Backend via ReST, which is a really cool project. At home I tinker with some PHP stuff for a Metal Website of some friends and myself, or if not playing games, I do some basic game dev stuff with either C++ & SFML, or Java & LibGDX.

I got a Commodore 64 and a Datassete (cassette recorder) in 1985 and started learning BASIC with a book called https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Home_Computer_Course. At university I learnt TURBO PASCAL in 1989 and TURBO C in the 90s on an IBM PC clone under DOS. I had access to a SUN workstation running UNIX so I learnt a bit of Bash command line just to be able to download shareware games from an FTP server. I still have some Commodore 64's.

I started with BASIC in 1985, followed shortly by Z80 assembler. Yes you got that right, C64 sucks, long live the ZX Spectrum :P
Classic 8-bit flame-fests aside, you really could learn how an entire machine worked back then. And the manual on the ZX spectrum was a work of art. Kids these days have it easy. In my days patching a bug was literally patching a piece of paper on a card.

Started with Basic on ZX Spectrum.
Then gwbasic with ms-dos
Then some Pascal
At this point started using windows.
Then a lot of Mathematica
Then some C++
At this point started using Linux
Now it is Python

I first started programming in 2nd grade, when the computer teacher let me loose with a copy of MicroWorlds (Logo). I made a horse racing game (the horses would get random speeds, but it set the blue horse to always win, and I thought I was a clever 8-year-old for always picking it), a maze game, spirographs, and even presented a book report with Logo animation.


In Middle School we had a few projects that involved building websites. I installed a lot of scripts from DynamicDrive onto mine. In hindsight I really had no clue what I was doing, but my website stood out by having color-changing backgrounds, animated gifs, and mouse-pointer trail effects. In the 90s that was the height of coolness. I cringed more than a little when I archived my site before Geocities shut down.

I also experimented a bit with programming in BASIC on the TI83 calculator. At first I was hampered by not realizing there was an 'insert' key on the calculator, and my first few programs were marked by having many blank lines in between each statement, in case I needed to add something there later. Once I figured that out though I got on pretty well, and my math teacher asked me to write a program which would graph a random linear or quadratic function and make the user guess the equation. Apparently he used it for teaching for a few years...

Thankfully in High School I was finally offered a proper programming course and began to learn what I was actually doing.

Some really nice stories here :).

My father was working with computers, so I had computer since 1994 (4 years old). I was obsessed with games at that age. At one point, I asked my mother how many lives do I have, which granted me a few days long computer ban. At that age I wanted to make video games. I started programming around 2000, and I Started with C/C++. Nothing serious, just calculators and stuff, I didn't really understand pointers, memory allocation and all that stuff.

Fast forward to 2004 I had few C/C++ courses in high school where I learned about some more serious stuff in C/C++. But other than with computer related courses, I was pretty lazy, and my grades where showing that. Around that time I also started to explore linux. Then came collage in 2008. Next 8 to 9 years (I was, and still am repenting for my extreme laziness at high school) where dominated by python, Java and C#, and my C/C++ skills where pushed aside. I became regular linux user, not because of collage (collage was the reason why I never left windows), but because it was hobby of mine.

I started working as programmer in 2014. Throughout the collage I envisioned myself as some LOB application developer, and that is indeed what I am doing on my current job. Game development became something of an unreachable dream to me. That was mainly due to me not being confidant enough to ever try it out. I thought it was something really hard to wrap my mind around. That all changed in 2016 when I had collage course in Unity game development. It showed me that game development is indeed a reachable dream to me. Unity re-sparked my desire to became game developer, and for that alone Unity really special game engine to me. Since December 2016 I am spending my free time to learn SDL, and C/C++ for that matter. 8 to 9 years of rusting C/C++ skills did me no good.

In the meantime SBC's became obsession of mine, I love the idea of credit card sized computers. All that led to my thesis work for graduation, which is ARM Linux game development with SDL, which is expected to be finished around October this year.

When I was a small boy I happened to see the IBM 5150 in a television program back in 1982 which for some reason "clicked" with me and I just knew that computers would be the thing for me.

Thankfully our local library (out in rural nowhere) for some reason had one book about BASIC programming so I borrowed it and started to write my own small BASIC programs on paper, after a while there where many many pages written :)

Fast forward to Christmas of 1986 and I got hold of my first computer, a C64. Completely without either a tape deck or floppy drive so all I could do all day long was write programs in BASIC which then disappeared into /dev/null when the machine was turned off.

Don't really remember which year, but aprox 1987 or 1988, I got a Action Replay cartridge which also meant that I got access to a disassembler with which help I learned 6502 assembler. Unfortunately at that time I had not access to any assembler software so in order to code in assembler I had to use the disassembler which means (if you ever used the Action Replay then you will understand what I mean) that code could not be inserted so you had to plan every program carefully and put NOP instructions at places where you thought that you had to go back later to add actual code. At some time later I got access to a real assembler which made things that much easier :). Still the limited amount of memory on the C64 combined with the fact that it uses a paged memory model meant that it was still quite cumbersome to fit both an assembler, your code and your running program in the machine at the same time (AFAIK many other C64 coders in the scene used memory expansion cartridges for this).

Around 1990 I bought an Amiga 500 (for around €500 back then) with my own money and discovered the wonderful world of the MC680x0 family, to date it's without question to nicest processor I have ever coded for when it comes to assembler (i.e x86 is a complete crazed out insane monster in comparison). The Amiga also introduced me to multitasking and a Unix like environment, in short I still feel that it's the best computer system that has ever been built.

For you who have never programmed for the Amiga I can tell you that i.e the AmigaOS version of Gnome/QT, i.e Intuition, was so simple that you could code GUI applications in just a few lines of assembler. Compare that with the "modern" toolkits where you have to write pages of code in C++ just to open a simple window...

In 1998 I started working at my first workplace, then as a Windows developer in C++. Still back home I only had my trusty Amiga (now equipped with a whopping 127MB hard drive!) which just shows that if you can master one language then you can cope with another :)

After a few years with C++ I more and more come to use it as C with classes and when I discovered Linux and Linus Torvalds (and does that boy not like C++) I finally made to move to completely drop everything object oriented and used C exclusively.

At this time I finally put my Amiga in the basement and replaced it with a Linux machine (running Gentoo), so I've never ever run a Windows computer at home :)

Around 2001 my then employer got hit by a BSA sting and they where forced to pay a few millions under the table for not having enough Windows licenses (and for not having their name shown in a press release about the event [who would have thought that BSA used black mail...]), something that helped me with introducing Linux as a viable server platform for that company. Another funny thing about the BSA sting was that they had been tipped off by a former grumpy employer who where sacked due to him among other things hosting a big piracy FTP server from our data center (which I caught him doing, at which point he only tried to hide it better...) and it was his job to purchase the licenses so what he did was stop purchasing licenses and then getting a tip bonus from BSA...

I quit that job in 2007 and together with 4 other former colleagues I started a new company in 2008 which is 100% Linux both on desktops and servers, and all development is done in C or PHP. We have recently expanded (to 8 people in total, wow what a big company!) and managed to force our local competitors to close shop.

So this turned out to be more of a personal introduction than a mere "how did I first start to program" but I just discovered the forum today and just went with it :)

I dont know if LOGO can be considered as a programming language, that drawing app with the turtle?... :D

Well I started programming from a very young age , I thing 10-12 years old.
Did my first ascii game in basica with 3 lvls and text animation them moved to gwbasic!
I have created a DOS Application for a company to keep their contact records at a very young age

Then started assembly/c and c++ programming for school/college and as hobby ofc.
Then Visual Basic and html was the trend those days so I have started learning VB and HTML doing many cool stuff.

Then I got hired by a Document management company with cooperation with Filenet(IBM).
We did a lot of government projects , I did even a face recognition scanning software.After many work projects it made me hate programming.
Then another company with FoxPro programming wanted me to work for them, so I went to work for them where they made me totally quit programming.
I haven't done any serious programming for over 10 years (Just small scripts in order to automate some workflows for my work).
What I hate most in big companies is that you spend many hours doing miraculous programming that is like impossible to make it work and somehow it works and instead of rewarding you for your efforts and the way you did it , someone else is taking the credits for your work.... :><:

Anyway I am trying slowly slowly to start programming again but this time I will do the things that I like instead of doings things for other people even though doing things for other people was profitable.

Bad memories will always be an obstacle but hopefully I will overcome them and find the joy of programming once again.

Quoting: GuestBASIC on a ZX Spectrum +2 in 1988ish (from reading the manual!)... AMOS then 68K Assembly language from 1994... Pascal under MS-DOS in college in 1998, C (MSVC 6) in 1999... i'll stop there ;)

MSVC 6, the last usable version of MSVC they ever released (among other things it was the last version before they decided to do their insane completely vcredist). For many years I used MSVC6 to compile our stuff for Windows before finally switching over to GCC there as well.