tom_mai78101

EDIT: Added a mirror in case Imgur is down.

This is an image posted by the one and only famous "notch" of the Minecraft game.

It's interesting that he's implementing a new variant of 6502 CPU in Java. Suppose you are writing a game that requires a complex CPU as a core gameplay, when you write something like this, do you consider it to be efficient, given that it has to be implemented in a high level programming language?

To me, I haven't seen a method to create a programmable CPU assembly instructions in pure Java sense, until now. This brings up a whole new, and most direct, approach to this.

And other than being efficient or not, what is your point of view in regards to implementing a small complex CPU (like redstone circuitry in Minecraft) in a game?

Thanks in advance.

I swear, once Microsoft updates their compiler to be compatible with C++1x completely, it will be in year 2020...

Java comes with it because of JVM. .NET is the same story. If there is a VM to C++ like JVM to Java, you would probably get the consistency you get in Java.

EXACTLY how you described my thought! But yeah... If there's a VM for all platforms to C++, then maybe I don't have to worry a thing about this at all. If only Microsoft would create .NET for all platforms available, then I'm in heavens!

For example:

int firstVariable = 0;
 while (true)
 {
  int secondVariable = 1;
  firstVariable++;
  if (firstVariable > 0xFFFFFFF0)
   break;
 }

There are two variables, firstVariable and secondVariable. firstVariable is initialized to 0, and secondVariable is initialized to 1. After a long execution of this small code, what happens to secondVariable? Does Java create new instances of secondVariable every time it runs into that line of code, or it overrides the instance of secondVariable the moment it started existing in the memory?

Side question: Can it also happen in C and/or C++ in Visual Studios?

Thanks in advance.

I always thought of myself as a tiny speck of dust in the middle of a clean room, no matter where you look, you can't seem to find a place suitable for you to grow in.

I had never thought of how other people were to look at this, if they were to experience the same thing again and again in different ways.

Man, I feel deeply sorrowful that I actually complained about my situation, and yet, everyone had or will be experiencing this sooner or later, and they aren't even complaining about it; they accepted it and moved on.

Whenever I hit a bottleneck, I feel like I do not have the power to fight over it, I do not have the knowledge to fix it, nor do I have the ability to predict myself when I will be finishing it. There's this urge inside of my body, wanting to do something about it, wanting to know why it does it, how it does it, what's the reason behind all of this, and many many uncertainties I could not answer by myself. I am wrong.

Is this what people call it "depression"?

And I thank the authors of their posts above this for giving me some different perspectives on my current "down" situation. I will be able to find my way out of this.

TL;DR, I know. You may skip on down and read the question underneath the line near the bottom of this post.

 

For once, it's a rather dull experience I've ever had, something that's totally meaningless in my entire life.

I was told by an experienced programmer residing currently half a world apart, who has seen some dark sides within the gaming industry over there, that I "might as well give up when you're programming at such a pace."

At first, I was doing some programming practices with an alternate library, SDL, and I shared a small bit of my unfinished project to some of my classmates. One of them decided to ask the programmer, who for some reasons had been in contact for some time, and wanted to help me seek some helpful advices from that person.

This programmer, as described by that classmate, is part of the hardware engineering team in Nintendo, which they develop the Nintendo 3DS. The classmate told me in a more direct approach, saying the programmer did gave some advices:

• Programming like this isn't going to take you to far places. (Describing how my project is really small and noticeably useless, which in truth, it is useless.)

• Don't keep reading programming books, learn to read some other books that are not programming related. (Been reading too many programming books that I'm stuck in wrong places.)

• You have not devoted a lot when you're writing this. Especially this rather small and crude project, it looks like you're just following tutorials and not actually learning how to use them. (I always follow in other programmer's footsteps when it comes to learning APIs.)

• If your family is able to afford you higher education, you're best bet is to give up programming for the time being and finish your Master's degree. Then come back. (Don't know if it's encouraging...)

I don't know if I should heed the programmer's advices, as the classmate said his voice on Skype sounds like he doesn't really care about me or my future. I haven't heard how he actually sounds like, but here's where the problem comes in.

After a week or two, the words my classmate told me haunt me. Whenever I turn on my computer, I started thinking about myself for not able to finish what I had started a long time ago (Not about to finish reading a single programming book), and decided to try starting over. The more I read, the more tiring I get.  This went on through a holiday season here, with each day not able to force myself to start programming. I was able to finish my programming homework and turn it over on time, I couldn't do anything else outside of the curriculum.

In my current state, whenever I think about Visual Studio, or look at the programming books I used to grab off the shelves and start reading, my guts feel like I couldn't achieve anything and that I have no knowledge about the APIs I was about to learn. And now, with the final exams coming, I couldn't bring myself to do anything productive. Someone described my status as "demotivated", hence the title.

 

I wanted to know how programmers / developers fill up the hollow void inside of you, how do you get your motivation back up and running, like it was used to a few weeks ago? Since I was affected by the programmer's advices (shown with listed dots), are they all telling the truth?

Could you clearly describe what you're actually trying to do?


mhagain is correct that you shouldn't rely on implementation details, but if you tell us what you're actually trying to achieve we may be able to recommend a solution.  

My guess is that you might be wondering how to restore the previous desktop resolution after going to full screen and changing the settings?

This came from here.
It has nothing to do with programming or whatsoever. I'm just trying to fiddle with Windows 7 to try to get the factory presetted window size (trying to obtain the original width and height of the modeless window, in other words, I'm trying to get the window size of ["My Computer" after clicking "Computer" in the Start Menu, just after installing a brand new Windows 7 OS on your computer.])

Please recommend a book of DirectX programming for starters.

I am not new to programming, and i have a passion for programming, game development. I am new to OpenGL (started to learn recently), so should i start learning DirectX now or gain some more experience with OpenGL before making the switch?

Go here. See your account name at the top? Move your cursor to that name, then move right until you reach "Resources". You should be over "Resources" and a drop down menu appearing underneath it. Click on "Books". Your guide to everything starts from there.

I'm curious to know how many books do programmers read in their career lifetime. I have heard people reading over 20 books since high school. There are some people that read books, but didn't actually finish reading it completely (Chapter 1 through the Appendices), does that count as "You've read a book"?

And when you read, do you read the same parts over and over again once per books you have in your possession? Does that make some parts  of the contents redundant?

This affects me setting a goal during my free time, to read about 15 programming books on C/C++, DirectX and OpenGL, and 2 big books on Java. And I would like for some opinions. Hopefully, it's not about what kind of books I have to read, just need the total amount. Thanks in advance.