Author Topic: Final year into programming?  (Read 11617 times)

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Offline Madskillz

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Re: Final year into programming?
« Reply #30 on: June 20, 2010, 01:15:05 am »
Well it sucks to see you go again, and this time permanently. You have been a great asset to the community and have definitely provided a great haven for programmers of all languages and non-programmers alike. I'm sure Omnimaga will continue to strive.

On a side note, I have been thinking its about time for me to call it quits too. I seem to be going in the other direction though. I am moving on to mobile development and bigger projects that I just dont have time for calcs as much as I used too. I do plan to finish a good majority of my projects though. So you wont see me fully gone until they are done.
well as said in my initial post, chances that I completly leave are not 100%. IN fact they are low. It's just programming that I am most likely gonna move on from. I love the community and what people create, but I cannot seem to go at a lower level programming than I am right now. I guess my speciality was limited to RPGs after all... but sadly, I got bored of creating RPGs, since they take so long to create and requires so much thoughts for what to add in them and time to debug

I hope if you quit calc stuff that you still show up around from time to time. :)
-Programming is tough, and I know you're a capable guy it just takes a lot of time. We all have busy lives and finding that time to sit down and really get down and dirty with a language is hard to come by. So I understand where you're coming from. You know how long projects can really drag on a coder and cause a coder to lose interest. Working on RPGs doesnt help that issue any either.

As for me I wont be gone this year for sure, not until I can bring some life back into RS at least.

Offline DJ Omnimaga

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Re: Final year into programming?
« Reply #31 on: June 20, 2010, 02:58:32 am »
it would be nice to see RS have more activity. It has updates, but most are behind the scenes :/

Buckeye is doing a good job but it would be nice to see the other staff post more too :(

On Omnimaga, there are some staff rules to prevent staff from going inactive. On the old board we had some in its early days, but we decided to be more lax afterward. Finally only two or three staff were active anymore coding. Now for example, staff needs to post a minimum of 10 times within the last 30 days, with the exception of July and August, where it's 5 (to acommodate trips and the like). They also need to have some active projects or the like. We also make sure staff are active enough (including working on a project) before adding them to the team.

ANother thing that can be done is branching out, but sadly that doesn't always work. With Cemetech, it did, with hardware mods, Blockland and Freebuild, but with Omnimaga, with PC stuff, ROM hacking, Casio/HP calcs and to a lesser extent, music, it didn't. On MaxCoderz they tried branching out toward PC and 68k stuff and it failed too.


And WOW Madskillz you have like the highest amount of arcade trophies I think ;D

Offline DJ Omnimaga

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Re: Final year into programming?
« Reply #32 on: June 27, 2010, 01:36:16 am »
I do not want to get anyone's hopes up, but

After suggestions from Builderboy, SirCmpwn and someone else I forgot who, I have managed to find some ideas to circumvent my issues in my last Axe project attempt. Finally, I discovered that what I was trying to do was not just hard in Axe, but apparently in any existing language that doesn't support floating points. Most of my issues also came up from the fact it is rather tricky to deal with negative values in Axe when it comes to physics+collision detection. For example, when accelerating to the left, my sprite would instantly go to max speed to the right. I never could figure this out. I also had issues with collision detections.

Finally, after a talk with Builderboy, I faced the reality that I would be forced to check for collision detection for all 4 sides separately, add another check for when I jump. I also realized it would be too much hassle to deal with acceleration where I can move at speeds like every 0.5 pixels.

So what I decided to do, after I cleared my mind temporary from some stuff (including the pressure from being admin), was to rewrite the engine from scratch. I also was forced to make it at a lower quality than what I had planned at first. One feature was completly changed and the physics when you accelerate/decelerate are rather weird: it checks for left/right keypresses every 6 frames, and basically you'll move at 1 pixel rate, then suddently after 6 frames it will jump to the double, then 3 pixel rate, then 4. It may look a bit half-assled (sp?) when you move at times, because of this. But sorry, this will have to do now, if I ever want to release something using it. It is not that bad either, anyway, I think.

Finally, what I did was to convert the engine so instead of the sprite moving around, it's the entire tilemap moving around (well, there are no tilemap yet, but the way the engine works, I can pretty much use anything that are 8x8 plain black squares on the back-buffer.) and the sprite remains at the center of the screen. In other words, scrolling. For some odd reasons, this was the easiest part of the project to code so far. I think this will be a bit trickier when I use actual tilemaps, though (or something that looks like tilemaps).

I don't promise anything, but at least this is a start, and I think removing myself from admin helped a bit removing some pressure (altough I got some a few days ago because I learned the person that was in charge of changing the FTP password typed it wrong, locking the entire team out of the site. Fortunately it is fixed, now, but it was scary.)

Offline Galandros

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Re: Final year into programming?
« Reply #33 on: June 27, 2010, 09:26:27 am »
Good news! Glad to know.

Some programming aspects are really counter-intuitive like all kinds of math is done in the low level as integer numbers. So it takes some time to get over (learn the low level, discover alternatives or eventually use another language are some ways to get over) those low level inner workings of coding. Hopefully exists BASIC and the like for relieving us from all these hard aspects.
Axe Parser really makes you immerse a bit into the unsigned and signed integers math, though. But BASIC can be annoying sometimes for giving us all those DIM, MEM, OVERFLOW, UNDEFINED errors. How many times I was starting to be irritated for errors after others and had to leave for another day. :P
« Last Edit: June 27, 2010, 09:28:13 am by Galandros »
Hobbing in calculator projects.

Offline ztrumpet

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Re: Final year into programming?
« Reply #34 on: June 27, 2010, 11:46:44 am »
Awesome DJ!  I'm glad you're coding more again.  Good luck on your project! ;D

Offline DJ Omnimaga

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Re: Final year into programming?
« Reply #35 on: June 27, 2010, 01:45:55 pm »
Thanks guys. Also Galandros I agree a bit about BASIC. For me, though, DIM and LBL errors were more an issue in my early days of programming, though, because I was still learning how to use lists and matrices as well as Gotos. I finally stopped using the later. Besides that, the errors I got hit the most by are ERR:DOMAIN, MEMORY and SYNTAX. The worst gotta be Domain in my case. MEM errors were solved mostly by not misusing Goto and by splitting my programs in more files.

Offline shmibs

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Re: Final year into programming?
« Reply #36 on: June 27, 2010, 10:04:29 pm »
*whew*
* shmibs gives a relieved sigh

that was pretty scary for a bit, but i'm glad to hear that you're still working on stuff, even if it's only temporarily
you've been a huge influence in my own programming "history" even if i only just joined the forum and i've never released any major projects. your musics especially have been a huge help; i listen while programming and it helps me focus and work faster

anyways, if there's anything i can do to help don't hesitate to ask. contrary to popular opinion, not all of us have lives of our own to keep us busy, and my own current projects will either a. be finished very soon for the axe contest or b. act solely as something i come back to every month or so in my freetime and will realistically never be completed

at least stick around in the forums, will ya? there's no way i'm going to let myself come in here just in time to see a living legend disappear

Offline DJ Omnimaga

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Re: Final year into programming?
« Reply #37 on: June 27, 2010, 11:19:32 pm »
Thanks a lot. Glad you appreciate my stuff. About the music, which songs in particular do you like, by the way?

And yeah, I'll try to stick around as long as I can. Technically, though, I shouldn't even have been around since a week ago, though, because back in November I did myself a promise that if I ever hurted Omnimaga (and a member) with one of my overeactions or other stuff I do, I would remove myself from the community to prevent it from happening again. This happened a week ago, kinda, so I sort-of broke my own promise, really. (which I told some other people before) If I noticed I caused trouble too often and end up with lots of people who used to like me on my bad side again, I'll probably do what I promised, though.

Offline DJ Omnimaga

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Re: Final year into programming?
« Reply #38 on: June 28, 2010, 11:43:18 am »
I will probably post a topic about the project if I manage to implement the map engine display.

Offline DJ Omnimaga

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Re: Final year into programming?
« Reply #39 on: July 04, 2010, 06:08:32 pm »
Well it has been 9 years now. The last one? Idk. Maybe I'll release some new stuff, still, even if from now on my coding would be heavily helped by others, meaning none of my projects may be fully my own nor fully solo.

For sure, though, in the last 9 years, I have seen so much stuff happening, some bad stuff, as well as some good ones. I can remember some of the following, for example in the bad stuff there would be the first big activity slump in the TI community in 2001, along with the Ticalc.org CD recall and their archives going offline for months, one year later the Dimension TI/Calc.org server crash with a big piece of history going away (I missed Badja website for a while), Ticalc.org pending queue reaching a record of 1380+ files in 2002, Void Productions dying, Drubu Productions flame wars on MaxCoderz and obviously Hays Games and incidents between some #tcpa members and Omnimaga (which eventually lead to Omnimaga shut down in 2008).

And of course there were good times, too. Hays Games, while being bad, still provided entertainment in the TI community in some ways, even if indirectly sometimes (such as their guestbook, until bots started flooding it). Many great progs coming out since that time, meeting great people, some of which I've been talking to for 7 years now (tr1p1ea and Iambian), discovering new epic lib-enhanced BASIC tricks, Omnimaga success in 2005-06, despite not being as good as the new site and meeting even more great people recently. There were of course some great times back in the old MaxCoderz days as well, even thought back then I was a forum n00b

If I managed to finish that many projects past 2003, even thought at this time the BASIC vs ASM arguments were pouring on the Internets, it's because of other people that supported me during the entire time and if Omnimaga new website is so successful it's because of all the people that supported me since the beginning, motivating me to make it as good as I can then the contributions of all the members around.

For now, though, my future in TI programming lies in my capacity to learn more new complex stuff and of course hoping I won't have a repeat of the life issues I had to deal with in Sept and Oct last year. I would like to remain around for as long as possible (and hope a lot of the current people stick around for a while too, even if some of us no longer code for calcs anymore by then)