Hey there, guys! I'm Michael. I am a 13 year old programmer. I program various things in C#, and I also (sometimes) use the Unreal Engine.
I got into gaming and computers when I was about 4 years old. My parents had bought a PS2 Slim, and my first ever game was either GTA: San Andreas or Namco Museum: 50th Anniversary. Can't really remember but I still own those games to this day and have fond childhood memories of them, like that time me and my dad were playing Galaga in multiplayer mode.
I stuck with the PS2 for about 4 years, and we soon got a PS3. The newer, HD games looked absolutely amazing on it and I remembered playing PAIN as my first ever PS3 game and seeing what kinds of mayhem I could cause now that games could be a lot more fleshed out, not that I knew that at the time.
But, around that time, in Grade 3, we went to the eye doctor because my parents noticed me and my sister were having lots of trouble in the dark, walking into walls, not finding things, and walking really slow as if we were in a haunted house with no windows and the lights off.
The doctor DID notice we had some issues with our eyes and after countless trips to various hospitals, we found out that both me and my sister were born with a degenerative eye disease known as Retinitis-Pigmentosa (names for these diseases are a BITCH). Basically, over time, eye sight starts to deteriorate, and this was why I couldn't see in the dark. I now knew something was up. Over the years I lost my ability to read my own handwriting, something I could easily do in Kindergarten, all the way up to Grade 4.
The school had plans to get me a laptop in Grade 3 when I first found out about the RP. Luckily, I owned a Windows XP computer and could get around it just fine. I felt right at home using the computers at school because they also used XP. But, my computer skills were nothing like they are today, so I switched from the now cumbersome pen and paper to using a school computer for everything so I could sharpen up my typing skills and my ability to navigate all the different applications that the school had, such as SMART Notebook (which I now fucking despise and haven't touched in 2 years) and Microsoft Office 2007.
Around October of Grade 4, they had updated all the school computers to Windows 7, and, I was already up to date as I had an Acer computer, much more powerful than the old XP box which is now somewhere smashed up in the city's dump, probably buried under bags of dog feces and Dell Latitudes, and this new computer ran Windows 7. That, and I was able to bring most of my XP skills into 7, after learning most of the apps' new interfaces.
At that point I was like, the most techsavvy kid in the school, and people would always go to me for help, even with teachers. But, I wasn't done. In March of 2012, the school had finally bought me a laptop, running Windows 7. It was a Dell Latitude E5420 and, I still have that same laptop and use it every day at school.
For about 2 years I didn't know a darn thing about this, but they actually preloaded Visual Studio 2010 Express on the machine. In Grade 6, I opened it up to see what it was. I was already in to programming, because at home I played Minecraft with the ComputerCraft mod installed and I liked making little scripts in Lua, so I had to see what this Visual Studio thing was. Turns out, it was for creating your very own Windows apps. I thought this was cool.
At first, me and a friend were experimenting with Visual Basic, I created a web browser, a text editor, a rich text editor, and some other things. Then, I got into a YouTube channel called "OSFirstTimer" who made videos of his mom trying out different operating systems, and along the way she learned how to use them (she started out just like little 4 year old me with only the knowledge of checking emails, surfing the web and such). I liked the channel as it reminded me of my journey with computers.
At the time, he was starting work on a game called ShiftOS, written in Visual Basic. But, I had no idea of that game's existence and it took getting banned from a Minecraft server I became emotionally attached to, and stalking his Google+ page to find out about it's existence. I found out about ShiftOS in October 2014, and, was interested in developing it as I was learning VB and it was a nice way to learn.
I joined at a good time, they had a little competition going where they would let you create a ShiftOS application, preferrably a game, and the best ones would get put in the game in the next release. I didn't submit a game, but rather, OrcWrite, my text editing application. They accepted it because it was unique and I guess it made the game feel more OS-like. I stepped down from development for a few months as the community HATED how I got promoted because I made a text editor and not a game, but I came back around the time it became open-source. I added all sorts of cool things. A button on the App Launcher for Unity Mode, a feature that would allow Windows Apps to run in ShiftOS, I added desktop icons, and lots more. But, ShiftOS had died out, most of the community left because the forum admin criticized me about my eyes, which caused A LOT of drama, but the game was still under development and I took the admin throne after a few days of having no administrator (like a chicken with no head). But, we all knew ShiftOS was on it's death bed. I had a backup forum set up, for no reason except that our host was DDoSed, but this soon became ShiftOS-Next's forum, which was an attempt by me to revive ShiftOS. It flopped, hard.
So, I learned C# and GTK# to see if I could fully rewrite ShiftOS with cross-platform abilities, but that project was cancelled. GTK# is NOT usable for a game like ShiftOS, and, while you can get the Terminal application working, good luck with the rest of the apps and their GUIs.
I switched back to Windows Forms, but stuck with C#, and now, I have ShiftOS C#. I'll talk about that in the Town hall, but you can visit the website at
http://www.playshiftos.ml/. The website is a work-in-progress, and, you can play the game to find out why the website looks so dull.
Anyways, that's my "little" introduction post. I'm really happy to meet everyone here on TIGForums, and I'll definitely be here a lot.
Community
