NetGore

Wait aphro what's your old name again? I forgot lol

Anyways yeah, mirage source was really the kick start for me. Before that I did the same thing, moving picture boxes and using timers as gameloops. Funny thing is that Mirage source [was] extremely well designed, but I still thought Elysium/Konfuze was way better because of the features even though now I realise that they just shat on the code and called it a new engine. And then when William came so I left.

With vbGore I literally just stole goresock and used it for my own engine Upon looking at vbGore's code and comparing it to MS i knew something wasn't right, so i decided to make my own engine using the structural style similar to Mirage source with goresock and DX8. C# is very well designed though IMO, so no worries there.

I then proceeded to make 50+ engines from scratch and none of them made it even close to finishing, because I would always learn new ways of doing things and then start again.

This is probably 3 most successful of those 50

AND SPOILER TAGS PLEASE!

Side scroller FPS thingy

http://www.animephantom.com/ turn-based action thingy

Some map editor thingy

Hard to imagine, but I was even more of an egotistical jerk back then too. (I just looked at my first posts on vbgore)

iwas really not active on vbGORE forum i think i had about 30 posts and joined in 2007, i called myself SAMurai (becasue my name is sam pretty lame really)

Yeh i only used konfuze becasue of the extra features. I loved those engines they were more like game makers tbh, but they are kind of the only reason i'm doing this now. I've never bothered to make my own engine, like you said i've gone to, learn something new then start again, or never have a really set idea of what i want to do, so it gets nowhere. So instead i've just studied various languages and paradigms then just played around using different engines (mainly irrlicht http://irrlicht.sourceforge.net/, and modding valves Source engine, and earlier on vbGORE) i've never produced anything noteworthy and any mod teams i worked with on the Source engine always broke apart thanks to power struggles, its just simple stuff that over time is just knowledge built up.

I might actually start an engine project and complete one, just so i have finished something . At the moment i'm constantly working on college stuff as well as working on NetGore when i get time and helping out at SVO. I'm lazy and the only way to get me to do stuff usually is as part of a project thats already there

I thought arrays were stupid and confusing. At one point, I had 200+ variables in the format:

Dim MyVar1 As ...
Dim MyVar2 As ...
...
Dim MyVar200 As ...
Dim MyVar201 As ...

I am pretty sure it was to correspond to the same number of PictureBox controls I had.

I Used To Also Type All My Comments Like This For Absolutely No Reason. God That Was Annoying.

Dim MyVar1 As ...
Dim MyVar2 As ...
...
Dim MyVar200 As ...
Dim MyVar201 As ...

imagine typing out 200 separate variables how old were you when you started programming? And what did you start looking at when orpg engines became your thing i remember you saying somewhere once about a really old engine which you originally used as a basis for the grh system? I read this a few years back so i might be wrong

I was probably 13-14 or so when I started programming, but didn't really start doing much until maybe 16.

vbGORE was based off of ORE (Online RPG Engine) 0.4, created by Aaron Perkins (Baronsoft). The original intention was to make my own game, but after working on it for about a year, I decided to release it as an engine. I still had intentions to make my own game at some point, just like I do with NetGore, but so much time was spent making the engine that I just never really got around to it. Hopefully the same doesn't happen with NetGore.

That was it. Make sure it doesn't happen with NetGore, before long you'll have another engine and won't have the time Plus if you start making a game and then stuff needs to be changed in NetGore you can keep both going

Spodi, if you ever start on plagued dead, I would be glad to work with you on it
And as much as I'd love to contribute to the topic, I am not a coding beast with anything to reminisce on...so carry on

so you're aPhRo_SAMurai? hehe.
ah silly beginner stuff. if only i kept all my old code to show off while hanging my head in shame.
there was the mp3 player i made in vb5, since i wanted it skinable like winamp but really didnt know jack, i had about 2 dozen picture box controls for each button and loaded an individual bmp for each.

there was a site a made many moons ago when i was first learning about cookies and sessions, had some really ass backwards log in function. i passed it on to a buddy to help me out with something and when i got it back there was a comment tag along the lines of
"weird ass nonsensical login thing left in for legacy support/shits and giggles"

then there was my vb3 days where i just could not grasp the concept of properly using variables, so every project would have a bunch of hidden text boxes used to pass data between functions. or how i had no clue you could find a string in a variable, so i would use a hidden rich text control, use it's built in search function, and pass on what was returned as the selected text.

i dont even want to get in to my first attempts with C from when i discovered CGI.

digging through old code and wondering what the hell you were thinking is always good for a laugh. i think its a sign of a good programmer too though, since even though a method may be so horribly retarded compared to the proper way which you dont know about, you are still able to apply what little you do know to accomplish a goal. it may be disgustingly inefficient but it shows the right mind set.

http://www.vbgore.com/downloads/dxre.zip

Spodi's first "engine". lol.

^ disgusting I'm surprised you knew about classes and D3D but none of the basics.

I think I was the complete opposite to Spodi. I started at about 9 years old and got completely hooked from then on. I was always very picky about clean code, so I ended up using good coding practises even before I knew about it. Mirage source was also a big influence for me, and I noticed patterns like naming that helped me write my own code more cleanly and consistently. When I found out about arrays I thought they were awesome, I always used them wherever possible, so my code was always very flexible and making changes wasn't too difficult. This all soon became very natural to me probably because I started at such a young age, hence I guess why I was able to make stuff in such a short amount of time.

However on the other hand, my games ran really bad because I had no idea about performance or side-effects. I would never use constants, because I had no idea what a constant was. I would always max out my CPU, doing dumb things because I didn't know what data-types were, I thought hard-drives were infinitely fast, and I thought you could blit a million layers no problem as long as the code base was small.

Basically my code always gave a false impression, it would look so pretty and elegant at first, and then you're like "um ... wait a sec".

Looked through my old comp, but I seems as though I deleted the myDocuments folder for more space, oh well.

DXRE and my inability to use arrays were not at the same time. That was like... pretty much when I first started, and my "graphics" were moving PictureBoxes with timers.

I think we've pretty much all done that i wanna plug my hard drive in but it means i got to take apart my PC and plug it in so i cba Maybe next time i load it up i really think i have my first attempt at an rpg on there still. I remember making an "IRC" client (it was not irc by any stretch of the imagination) for a clan i used to be in playing some seriously bad/old hack n slash called Rune: Halls of Valhalla. Anyway it was more of a peer to peer chat client which i eventually added more features in and had a multiplayer vector graphics game in. Which was my first attempt at games and i got networking in there too, lagged like hell because i didn't know that much about winsock nack then.

Oh god, I don't even remember when I started programming. Good lord. Must've been around 9-ish. Like Bake, only not Japanaussie and probably a hundred times more retarded. I think I started in VB6. Yeah, that was it. I effed around with Mirage Source/Elysium (god I loved those engines <3) and took a high school-level course in VB.NET. I then never touched VB.NET again.

Hmm.

Fast forward a bunch of years of doing jack shit, and here I am using C#/C++. And HTML. And stuff. So yeah.

As for dumbass things I've done while programming... Lessee, one project I tried doing when I was 13/14 was a 3D Armada ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armada_(video_game) ) (I loved this game so much <3) clone in C# using XNA. 'Twas interesting, but it was more like an engine as it were. It had moving around, firing, blowing crap up, leveling up, support for 2 players (maybe more, I forget), a dialogue system, switches that could be activated by said dialogue, switches that activated boss spawns, a UI to show health/weapon/etc. and multiple enemy types, and particle explosion and level-up effects. The only thing that was really missing was a shop and inventory system for buying and storing multiple weapon types. Had that been implemented, I seriously could've had something.

It was pretty neat. The problem, though, was that it was written HORRIBLY. No comments whatsoever, there was no OOP (procedures, aghhh), and... ugh. It was crappily written. I came back to it a few months later to eff with it, and I couldn't understand what the hell was going on. (Also this was back in the XNA Studio 1.0 days.)

Of course, I'd come back to it, and try to clean it up, but MY FUCKING HARD DRIVE DIED ON ME WITH IT AND MY XNA XBOX-COMPATIBLE ROGUELIKE AND MY INCOMPLETE FINAL FANTASY TACTICS CLONE AND FFFFFFF.

So yeah.

I began with whatever the scripting language in RPG Maker 2k was XD

I wrote my own ATB Battle system and Pretty Mainmenus.

After that I went on to Game Maker and its GML, went up to 3d and stuff,

until I realized that actual coding isnt much harder than these frickin scripts xD

AND THEN CAME SCHOOL -.-

now I finally have time.

Began with RPGMaker when I was... 12-14?

^ I <3 Ruby.

Pfft my first "game" was a powerpoint that had 9000 slides.

^ Loool I remember when people did that.

I had used flash since very young so I never even considered this, and then when I saw my friends brothers make these I was like wtf?

rofl that is Epic what kind of games were they?

Well basically it was a game where every possible path to do anything had to have a slide for it.

So lets say theres this one room and theres 5 blocks your character stands on the middle block. All the blocks surrounding your character would go to different slides when clicked and the fights were pretty much a logic thing. There would be a little box saying how the enemy attacked and 4-6 options would show up to choose from put simply if you chose the wrong one it's time to start over.

I remember spending countless hours sitting in the cafeteria working on this and then people would come over and be like "WTF are you doing? Thats the stupidest thing I've ever seen. Why would you want to make a game anyway?" Then when I finally finished it I gave it to a few of my friends they had fun for about 15 minutes and it was done. Now the 8 months it took me to finish it was hardly worth it though lol. If I were to remake that game now it would take me about a week with programming. There were even videos where certain slides would have timers and it would play them out like a video but... yeah windows movie maker would be faster.

The storyline was basically something like this... You live with your grandfather and your dad your dad leaves for long periods at a time to go work in the mines south of your house to make money. Now there was news of a problem down at the mines where a demon attacked... supposedly killing everyone your grandfather tells you this and tells you he is sorry your father is dead. You sprint into the house and run up to your room in which you cry. After a few seconds you say to yourself I'm going to go find my dad. In which you go to the refrigerator and get a piece of cheese you take the cheese to the basement and use it to lure a mouse out of his hole. After fighting the mouse you get a key to open a chest in the attic the chest in the attic opens the gate that is around your house. You proceed south to the mines where there was a man standing at the entrance that gives you a pick to clear some rubble. Then there was a fight with... someone he was like the demons henchman or something like that. After killing him you proceeded deeper into the mine where you found the demon and after him telling you there is no hope your father is as good as dead he proceeded in pushing your father into a pit of lava. Then the final battle began. After this there was a "to be continued" slide that showed up a lot were disappointed with that lol. So close to the end... yet there was no end. Cliffhangers ftw.