lawnjelly

God of programming. Except the hard stuff like 3d geometry. And maths. All these bugs creep in. Godamned floating point. And other hard stuff. Ok I admit it, most 18 year old nerds will know loads more about maths.

39 years old, going a bit senile. Learned basic on a spectrum age 9. Made first games. Character space. Learned 6502 machine code on a bbc age 12. Pixels woohoo! Wrote my first multiplayer code shortly after on the school econet (before the internets were invented). It sucked somewhat. Got banned from the school computer room for a week for 'hacking' (sending data from one computer to my friends computer) *sigh*.

Went to africa. Went to uni (learned pascal, then c++ somewhere around then). Got a degree. Went to another uni, got a phd (learned OOP, what was I doing before that???). Decided academia sucked. Programmed games. Got a job programming games. Programmed games. Decided game industry sucked. Quit. Went on a drug fueled extravaganza of wine, women and song. Bought a house with gf and her kids. Dumped them.

Now programming games again, as well as side projects (interactive children's books, DNA stuff, natural language stuff, music software). Have dabbled in a huge number of areas, I'm probably more a jack of all trades master of none.

Likes:
Visual studio 6 (last decent version)
Simple, elegant code
Precalculation
Spending as much (more) time on tools to get the right data than on gamecode.
Memory pools
Static allocation
Fast frame rates

Dislikes:
Anything post VS6 (wtf were they thinking?)
Dynamic allocation
Nested Includes
Singletons (wtf?)
Inappropriate use of design patterns (because it's a design pattern, innit)
Use of STL in production (non tool) code (UNLESS you have full understanding of what goes on behind the scenes)
Dodgy third party code
C++ constructors / destructors (where not necessary) - use explicit calls instead to guarantee order of construction / destruction
Having to work with sub-par programmers / managers
People who dive in changing code to 'bodge' in a feature without thinking about overall structure

Words of advice:
Think about the structure of everything before you start coding. Think about fast (reliable) physics, fast rendering, multiplayer, visibility testing. Everything is interdependent. Don't start on one until you've thought about everything. Generic and expandable is good.