"Programming" clicked for me pretty immediately, but those quotes are entirely necessary because I started with Visual Basic...which is more so a form of programming, imho.  Next I moved onto HTML, Javascript, and CGI in Perl, which isn't even "programming".  Then I moved onto making "games" in Visual Basic...like Pong.  Finally I learned that "real" games were written in C++(this is before C# existed and Flash was a useful game dev platform) using DirectX and/or OpenGL.  Unfortunately, C++ eluded me for over a year, but a programming class that I took in high school finally made real programming click for me.  "The rest is history", as they say.  I now have over 10 years of professional experience, have published 2 games that are available on Steam(Killing Floor and Red Orchestra 2), and I know more programming languages and technology platforms than I care to admit.  Thank god for that atrocious(in hind sight) high school programming class that focused on C++ and the Win32 API.

You can pull down a web page to check for a version in about four lines of C/C++ through libcurl. That includes initialisation and cleanup. Omaha sounds good too.

Up to you though.

I agree with this, I wrote a very simple updater(checks for an update very quickly and then downloads the update using a batch file) in about a day and polished it up with about another day of work...so, 10-15 hours total probably.  I'm also willing to share my code on how I did it, should you be interested...it's ugly, but will definitely get the job done.

Our programming teacher at university once said something about how ironic it is how they first train us several years to become good at programming & software development. After few years of work most of us has risen to leading and management tasks, something we have almost none education. He was talking about CS degree.

I don't think it's accurate to say that most rise to leading/management, but it's still an interesting point.  I think that's why universities offer Software Engineering, which appears to discuss software architecture and project management along with programming.

I think if I could do it all over again, I'd prolly bump it up to a $2 minimum because I bet it wouldn't have driven away very many of the $1 sales in proportion to that added income.  If someone's going to take out their credit card for a dollar, spending $2 instead isn't a very big deal for most people, I don't believe.  The difficult action for a lot of people is actually pulling out the credit card and typing in all the numbers...someone wrote a whole post about that on this forum somewhere, explaining that setting a minimum will make some people pay who would have otherwise just grabbed it for free simply because it's too much hassle to grab their wallet.

We released Break Blocks under pay what you want and it wasn't very successful.  I think that has a lot more to do with people not being willing to give the game a try because it doesn't look as difficult/interesting as it actually is.  So, from our little experience, the only useful thing I can share is that you should definitely set a minimum price and even if you set the default to a higher amount, the majority of people will pay the absolute minimum.  Over 80% of our sales were the minimum($1) and only about 2% paid our default/suggested price($5).

I know that in a 3D environment, this has been achieved by using cylinder collision between the entities and employing queueing systems at any choke points that exist in the world(where only 1 entity can move through the area at a time, such as a door).  The reason to use cylinder collision is that it inherently allows the entities to get past each other 99.9% of the time if they run into each other.

Oh god why... Why would anyone write such an ugly and totally unreadable piece of code?

Is it sad that this line was immediately readable to me?  Obviously the whole thing was pointless and is not any sort of well written, but I've obviously dealt with ternaries a little too much =D

I was simply saying that the people in key positions at large companies are probably not Linux advocates with a few notable exceptions like id due to Carmack.

Are you implying that there is no market value in releasing on Linux and that the only reason to do it is to help Linux not your company (being advocate of the system instead of maximizing profit)? Shouldn't personal preference be irrelevant (for a big company at least) when making such decisions?

Based off the points that have been brought up here, I'm not convinced how much "maximizing profit" can be accomplished by targeting Linux.  I would venture to guess that a larger percentage of games released for Linux are profitable, but I'm not convinced that also releasing a game on Linux will increase profits by any significant percentage versus the cost to support it.  Obviously I could be entirely wrong, but I think some good points have been made in this thread.  That being said, I will be supporting Linux in my future projects.

I don't remember exactly but certainly. Also I dont think I meant to look angy. Anyway, I apologies.

Oh, I certainly accept your apology and I apologize if I misunderstood your tone.

Long, seemingly angry post.

I hope you simply misread my post or you were just having a bad day, because I don't believe I even insinuated the core "insult" you spoke of.  I said "Obviously there are a number of people at companies like Valve that have a firm grasp of Linux, but perhaps it's been a struggle even for them to change the popular misconceptions for the "higher ranking" personel" which was intended to mean that those who like/use Linux are not likely to be those at the top of the "structure" at Valve.  I certainly didn't imply "Valve people or people in a lot of game companies does know enough about linux and open source world to use it, still you consider them not being able to make their game work closed source on linux?".  I was simply saying that the people in key positions at large companies are probably not Linux advocates with a few notable exceptions like id due to Carmack.

I believe there's a large misconception about piracy on Linux, as well.  The concept of Open Source Software being the normal distribution scheme has often been cited as a problem for closed source projects, which the majority of games are.  Since Windows is the main development platform for AAA games, I think most developers at these large studios don't understand Linux very well.  Obviously there are a number of people at companies like Valve that have a firm grasp of Linux, but perhaps it's been a struggle even for them to change the popular misconceptions for the "higher ranking" personel...though that's perhaps more about the alleged distribution issues than piracy, as previously mentioned.

Obviously these forums are a good place to start, but you could also try the GameDev.net forums...and I'm sure there are a ton more options out there.

Leadership is a separate skill from programming. You can be a great programmer and a lousy/inexperienced leader at the same time.

Quite true...I also dealt with the opposite for many years...a lead programmer who could manage a project decently, but couldn't really program very well(but thought he could).  I believe this is just as lousy of a candidate for a lead programmer.  I think there's a delicate balance between competency and humbleness that a lead programmer must strike, as they should be respected by those they are leading without being so full of themselves as to not listen to their staff...on top of being an excellent project and people manager.  As was said earlier, this is truly a rare set of qualities, so hiring from outside is often the only choice.

lol, obviously people are a little passionate about this topic...no sugar coating of pure hatred going on in this thread =D

i'd rather take my hatred straight than sugar coated

but then again i don't even like hatred

i'm not hating on anyone personally, just C++

I know...it's just funny to see the hostility pent up about particular languages come out in a public forum. /me is simply amused

Reviving this thread for a little gem I just found

Code:

if(newLine)
   newLine = !newLine

 

Haha, we had a programmer write a line like that during a programming test to see if he should keep his job.  We then gave him a chance to redeem himself, thinking it was an honest mistake.  When he was unable to understand why that was wasteful, he was promptly terminated.  He was a really good friend of mine, so I really didn't want him to get fired.  He's since moved away from programming to be a millionaire starting multiple businesses, so it all worked out in the end =)

I am not a fan of Smalltalk in the least.  Granted, my exposure to it was through VisualWorks, which might very well be the worst piece of software crafted by human hands.

Still, I don't like it.  The syntax for Smalltalk just sucks.  There are other solutions for doing that whole hot coding thing than having to use Smalltalk.

lol, obviously people are a little passionate about this topic...no sugar coating of pure hatred going on in this thread =D

The snippet above will print ‘true’ and you cannot do anything to change it in Ruby. But you can easily change this behavior for Smalltlak. If you want to ... treat an empty collection as ‘false’ just define ifTrue:ifFalse: method.

Redefining the basic language constructs as you go. Awesome idea. Totally results in readable and predictable code. Just look at how great operator overloading works out in C++

This is the most retarded shit ever.  C++'s syntax is almost illegible as it is, so OF COURSE changing things up on people is just going to make it worse.

Damn man, just tell us how you really feel...don't sugar coat it or anything =P

C++ is perfectly legible if you spend a bit of time with it.  It's not as easy to learn/read as other languages, but once you learn it the power makes it entirely worth it.  Personally I hate a bunch of the abilities C++ offers, such as templates, multiple inheritance, etc, so I just roll with straight C, but I don't believe it's "illegible"...though 12 years of abusing the language may make one a little biased

I'm no cryptologist, so I'm no expert here

1. Encryption doesn't necessarily infer randomization, particularly when only using a private key.  The idea is that it's very difficult to crack without knowing the private key.  Usually it's the public key that causes the output to appear randomized, from my understanding, because it's often a randomly generated public key.

2. My bad, I haven't used RSA.

3. I use my own because it further adds a layer of unknown to someone staring at the final output of my algorithm.  Obviously that's just security by obscurity, but I like to think it helps a little

Edit2: it is going to be a kinda mix between overhead shooters like Shadowgrounds, tower defense games and zombie shooters like Killing Floor. (No, it's not another zombie game.)

I know you've already made the decision to go with Unity and it sounds like you're gonna be happy with it.  I just had to post because you mentioned a game that I actually worked on as one of your influences(Killing Floor).

Also, I was just posed with the same question between Unreal and Unity, and as a low-level programmer I had to go with Unreal hands down.  I have a ton of Unreal experience and limited Unity experience, but it seemed obvious when using Unity that it's much more Designer friendly than Unreal but not very programmer friendly.

I tend to use Tiny Encryption Algorithm aka TEA or XTEA to transform the data with a private key then, if the output needs to be unpredictable, I encrypt it again using a public key...finally I use my own number to character string transform(similar to RSA, Base64, etc) and interlace the public key into the encrypted data.  The result is a seemingly random data output that is still decryptable.

This article was so fun to read  

What is interesting about Smalltalk
1. Smalltalk syntax
in Smalltalk:
service := WeatherForecastService forLocation: 'Toronto'.
forecast := service forecastForDays: 5 format: 'Xml'.

in Ruby:
service = WeatherForecastService.forLocation 'Toronto'
forecast = service.forecastForDaysInFormat(5, "xml")

service.forecastFor ->{puts "Do stuff"}, ->{puts "handling errors"}

The same code will look better in Smalltalk:
service forecastFor: [Transcript show: 'Do stuff'] error: [Transcript show: 'Error!'].

not sure if trolling or just pascal programmer

Haha, agreed!