Entering my 5th year of development. I would say Im a mix. I was taught basic principles of programming by several mentors at the company I am at and then I was on my own when it came to DirectX so between tutorials on the web and trial and error I would say I am self taught in D3D11.....That said I am still very wet behind the ears. My graphics work is entry level at best.

I coded some text based games and then tried a basic 3D renderer using high school maths.

I'm born and raised in the US. Say what you want about our "low test scores" (I'm a believer), but I can't stress this enough: much of the math skills you need are covered in the high school. I also went to public school, so I got the standard curriculum. We did all kinds of vector and matrix operations. We even covered basic concepts such as how to tell if vectors were orthogonal to each other. This brought me to the conclusion that much of the basics of 3D linear algebra is covered in high school. We didn't cover matrix transforms, or how to get the angle between vectors, but we knew how to multiply matrices, find their determinants, do vector addition, subtract, dot/cross vectors.

The big problem is that we didn't cover much of the concept, let alone the application, of these operations. So, we know how to calculate the dot product, yes, but did you know that value is the product of the magnitude of both vectors and cos of the angle between them?

NOPE!

We also learned very basic boolean algebra. You wouldn't know it from just school though, because George Boole, nor the term "boolean" was ever mentioned. We learned all of these seemingly useless skills. It's not like this stuff was relevant in anyone else's lives outside of my own, who already knew this stuff... Regardless of how well kids did on the test (many did quite well, IIRC), they'll forget about it later. Even I forget how quaternions work if I haven't needed to know the math behind them in months. All I need to do is get a refresher from Wolfram, and I'm all set. It's really not that difficult.

All of my friends who aren't programmers say that it's interesting, but the math turns them off. The thing is, they're just talking about programming in general. Just the act of "programming" itself is mathematically elementary. It's really what you want to do that determines the math complexity of your project. On top of that, they think 3D graphics are difficult to wrap their heads around. Ironically, just about all they need to know to get a jump on the math-side of graphics was already taught to them way back in high school.

I'd also like to point out that we also covered Bezier curves. This became relevant for me the year before I "learned" them.

well, i am more a generic programmer, than a graphics programmer. and also, i am a programmer, not specifically a game developer. i sometimes touching the game industry with my works, but nowdays i would not classify myself as a game developer.

talking from graphics - i used third party engines at first, but they was too buggy (just as nowdays), so i self-learned graphics programming with opengl 1.0 using tutorials on the internet. i was not a good programmer in C at that time, but i was still able to put together my stuffs relatively easily. at first, i not actually learned anything beyond my needs (~10 necessary opengl function to paint textured geometry), i just wanted to display the graphics i needed, but not cared about the features of opengl beyond that.

later i enhacned my knowledge a bit more, to cover newer technologies as my hardware (and as the market demand) become more modern (voodoo3->geforce4->radeon9800). my middle-scool math skills was more than enough, and if i need a formula, its easy to find it on the internet. later i started to design software renderers, becouse i was not satisfyed with the conception and compatibility of opengl, gpgpu and shaders.

I'm also pretty much all self-taught. I started toying with QBasic just about when it was on its way out, but then arbitrarily picked up this book and started feeling my way around the first IDE (the Borland one) and started learning more serious stuff. I remember arrays and the order of logic operators being strangely elusive when I just started out :).

Eventually I created my first window in WinAPI and thought "now that I have a window, the rest is easy-peasy". Boy, was I wrong :P .

Like many, I took up OpenGL with the help of NeHe's tutorials and continued reading books, all in my spare time, without really giving up a social life.

Eventually I found myself facing the same choice all people face when they graduate from high school. With no clear idea of what I wanted to do, I rolled in IT, with emphasis on software development. But then two strange things happened: as I took more and more courses, it turned out I knew too much for the school I went to, but too little to actually spearhead a sizeable project on my own; what was far more concerning was the feeling that I didn't want to labor away for someone else's dreams. So I graduated and rerolled in a completely different field, all while I started structuring my code into something a bit more cogent, which eventually turned into a something that started to smell like and feel like an engine. As a hobbyist, I find it surprisingly difficult to keep myself focused on a single objective, so pretty much all parts of my game engine are in very active development. Although, after years and years of rewriting and trying out different things, many of them are really starting to fall into place. Which feels awesome. :)

As time goes on, I do feel the sting of a lack of further formal education and the absence of the discipline of a professional work place in the back of my head. But I'm still not old enough to give up my dreams :).

So yeah - I don't have anything like L. Spiro's video to show for it, but what I can say with confidence is that I've studied and built a lot of stuff that I'm personally really really proud of. And again, that feels awesome! :cool:

I started programming on Extended Color Basic for Tandy COCO II when I was ~7 after browsing the computer's manual (They put programming information in manuals back then). Switched to QBasic on DOS and eventually Turbo C++ on DOS. Everyone pretty much used BIOS and OS interrupts to do anything useful in DOS.

It took me awhile to move to windows because nothing could produce fast graphics until DirectX came out, and DirectX 3.0 was a completely different beast in early windows 95. I'm highly amused APIs like Vulkan are coming around because I remember DirectX 3.0 having an immediate mode where you created command ques and similar ideas but they decided to move away from them in 5.0 (Never had a 4.0 DX).

I do programming for a living now on AntiVirus software and as a hobby. I guess I've been programming 28 years in general and probably about 22 in C++. I had no schooling, just picked it up on my own.