Time for some warm-and-fuzzies! What happy memories do you have from your early days of getting into computers/programming, whenever those early days happened to be?
When I was in middle school, I read an article in Discover Magazine about “artificial life” — computer simulations of biological systems. This sent me off on the path of trying to make a simulation of bugs that ran around and ate each other. My tool of choice was PowerBASIC, which was like QBasic except that it could compile to .EXE files. I decided there would be animals that could move, and plants that could also move. To implement a rule like “when the animal is near the plant, it will chase the plant,” I needed to compute distances between points given their x- and y-coordinates. I knew the Pythagorean theorem, and I realized that the line between the plant and the animal is the hypotenuse of a right triangle. Tada: I had invented the distance formula!
I loved making maps for Q3. I made so many of them, some even got rotation on some servers. The simplicity was perfect for someone like me, just brushes and shaders. When UT2K4 came out I decided to try to make maps for that, but everything was intricate 3D models, which i couldn’t do, so I gave up and went back to Q3.
I even made some maps for Q1, but I think I spent most of my time trying to make mods. My favorite was an inferno gun from Battletech: Crescent Hawk’s Inception, which used the rocket launcher to shoot a fireball that would stick to the target and do big damage in ticks.