 3D Art  2D Art  Games  Programming    |
This section attempts to briefly summarize me as a programmer. First off, to get it out of the way:
C++ was my first programming language. I learned the basics in school and after that it felt like the only viable option (in 2008) for making games. Soon after, I discovered the source code for Doom and other games written in C, which led me to learn that language as well.
Needless to say, video games have been a big driver for me to learn programming. I wanted to understand them on a low and high, as well as artistic level.
Uncovering the mysteries and inner workings of games, and implementing a lot of it in my own games, has been a true joy.
To this day I still remain mostly on the low-level end of things. Of course not all the way down to bare metal, but I do look at generated assembly quite often (Godbolt rules, I should almost add it among the tools at the top!) to make sure things are compiled the way I want them to. I want to know what's going on with the hardware, what system-calls are being made, how much memory is used and what libraries are used. That the software I release is ballpark reasonable in terms of performance, in relation to the work that is being done.
I like to work with a minimal set of dependencies, and prefer not to rely on big binary blobs or black boxes where I have no way of knowing what may be causing a problem.
I write C and C++ in a similar way. Some might call my C++ "orthodox". I'll use complex types where necessairy, but most of the time simple arrays of simple structs will do. I'm not afraid of raw pointers, but I also like it when things are trivially copyable (without serialization etc). I use inheritance in moderation and yes I am a student of Data-Oriented Design.
I don't need to explain the usefulness of Python and JavaScript. I do use them a lot. JavaScript for anything that runs in a browser. Python mostly in combination with Blender 3D for custom scripts, but sometimes for pure math/puzzle-solving. I do miss the type-safety, and with Python I miss the ability to just brute force loop thought some things and not have it take several seconds (where it would happen in the blink of an eye in C). I know of Numba JIT. Having tried it I concluded that for me, when performance is required, it's just easier to use C++ instead.
Lua is language I've embedded into some of my C++ software projects, as well as make games with in Love2D and TIC-80. It's small, fast and fun to program in. What's not to like?
The Seal Programming Language is yet another scripting language, one that I have created to amuze myself, and to learn. Writing the compiler sure has thought me a few lessons. The focus of the language isn't on syntax or style, but on practicality as an emebedded language. The runtime state use very little memory, in a single block, that you can copy to a different memory location (trivially) and then continue to run as if nothing happened. A detailed write-up should happen once I've dealt with a few more bugs...
I've made small games with Java and C#, and it worked well, but honestly I don't have much more to say about these languages. My biggest weakness as a programmer may be my lack of experience working with bigger teams on bigger projects. Version-control, big binary assets, tons of legacy code that nobody knows what it's there for, waiting for things to sync etc. I've heard many horror stories that makes the choice of language appear just a small part of what goes into it.
So much of the magic behind games, and the joy of figuring out how they work, lies in the math and algorithms.
I've studied and implemented various algorithms related to game-AI, rendering and collision detection, such as GJK, Bresnham, Dijkstra, A*, Median-Cut, Cohen-Sutherland and Sutherland-Hodgman. I've also implemented many abstract types using various data-structures in C and C++.
I don't have a background in Math, but I've picked up a lot of Linear Algebra and some Calculus writing games and physics engines. When it's time for some some "serious math" (by my standards), Desmos graphing calculatior goes up often enought that I should perhaps add it to the list of oftenly used tools.
Well, hopefully by now you have some idea of what kind of programming creature I am.
Bye!