Stupid things you remember doing when starting out.

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Original post by PumpkinPieman had found some of the stuff I did years ago but I think it's all lost, oh well. It's something I find pretty funny looking back at it. In some cases a dark spot now.

Tried hitting the Wayback Machine?

I remember I was the first kid in the school with a level 100 pokemon. I was also the first kid to catch all the pokemon, I was also the first kid get all the pokemon to level 100....I played that game way to damn much.

I remember in grade 9 i found something called winMessenger or something like that in the windows/system32 directory. Good fun during tests. especially good fun when all the morons found out about it and messaged the entire school network. of course, i was smart and never got caught. It was triply good fun when i found the program that the school used to control the machiens, so i could go take over kids computers and stuff. lol.

I created this website that was intented to beat gametutorials.com's collection of tutorials. This was three GT themes back ago, when you can get the tutorials for free and the website isn't that Flash crap now. Anyway, I posted on the forum saying that my website (http://directgames.freezope.org - Ugh... I just HAD to put that stupid "we moved" up. I want my memories back!) contained tutorials easier to understand than GT. Well, The Tutor (GT's admin) replied to my post very nicely, saying that though my tutorials lacked depth and continuity (7th grade writing skills), he found the Ti-83+ tutorials interesting. I think its because I talked so much about why Ti-Basic doesn't require closing parenthesis and quotes.

Ah, I tried http://archives.org to see if it had any DirectGames archives around, but apparently I created a robots.txt. -_-

EDIT: Another story!

I remember trying to make an RPG in QBasic. I figured out how to display a map with tiles, but I couldn't figure out something as simple as moving from one map to the next.

[Edited by - WiseElben on July 1, 2005 8:34:52 AM]

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Original post by Fruny Quote: Original post by PumpkinPieman had found some of the stuff I did years ago but I think it's all lost, oh well. It's something I find pretty funny looking back at it. In some cases a dark spot now. Tried hitting the Wayback Machine?

No luck, although I found my friends old website. Your New Friend

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Original post by PumpkinPieman Quote: Original post by Fruny Quote: Original post by PumpkinPieman had found some of the stuff I did years ago but I think it's all lost, oh well. It's something I find pretty funny looking back at it. In some cases a dark spot now. Tried hitting the Wayback Machine? No luck, although I found my friends old website. Your New Friend

I think that falls under the "Evil Genious" category. Brilliant, yet amazingly annoying!

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Original post by PumpkinPieman Story #1 I remember playing Jedi Knight in 1997, in fact I used to sneak online on at 10PM so I could get a few extra hours on my 56K modem. During that time Pokemon had just hit the market and it swept through elementary, I was in grade 7 at the time so I was one of the kids who bought and traded cards in the play ground. Anyhow, I was apart of a one man team editing Jedi knight. Playing around with cogs and models as well as their textures in paintbrush was a big thing for me at that time. The original theme for the mod was pokemon so I named it "The Jedi Pokemon Trainers" mod. Level design was very crude then especially with the tools that were available, so I ended up making a small version of palette town. I created a website and everything on angelfire, I didn't know HTML so I used a program on the 'Microsoft home essentials' package and "cooltext" which was some site that generated buttons and stuff. I had found some of the stuff I did years ago but I think it's all lost, oh well. It's something I find pretty funny looking back at it. In some cases a dark spot now.

Wow. That's two threads about Jedi Knight in one day. What are the chances of that happening again?

I don't see how what you guys did was stupid, but maybe a little funny and reminiscent for you. Now in my case, I did do something stupid when I decided (for a little while in my life) to follow a certain religious ideology regarding something as mundane as software licensing. I still don't know what I was thinking...

hmm unfortunatley i was banned from using the pcs in my school for changing all the bios passwords in one of the labs to something obscene, changing the admin password (never type it infront of your students ;) ) and printing fake ID's :P

First gaming experiences were with the commadore amiga and the ZX Spectrum, i used to do the odd game magazine "Build it yourself" game, but i was too young to know what i was doing, i just copied stuff for a new game.

Then i picked up modding when Neverwinter Nights was released, got into scripting and then into C++.

I remeber lots of infinite loops, missed ; and badly used pointers.

Funny, i still do :P

I once made a 2D side scroller in QBASIC and wrote a line of code for every single space the character could be in.

So instead of ... if map[player.x][player.y] == something do this ... I wrote if player.x == 14 and player.y == 1 do this ... I laugh every time I think of that game.

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Original post by AsOne I once made a 2D side scroller in QBASIC and wrote a line of code for every single space the character could be in. So instead of ... if map[player.x][player.y] == something do this ... I wrote if player.x == 14 and player.y == 1 do this ... I laugh every time I think of that game.

On my first 2d shooter, I figured out with the speed of the bullets, there could not be more than about 7 bullets at a time, so I had something like this:

int g_Bullet1Pos;
int g_Bullet2Pos;
int g_Bullet3Pos;

//.. etc

For both players :)

Imagine the code for the collision detection now.

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Original post by Hedos Quote: Original post by AsOne I once made a 2D side scroller in QBASIC and wrote a line of code for every single space the character could be in. So instead of ... if map[player.x][player.y] == something do this ... I wrote if player.x == 14 and player.y == 1 do this ... I laugh every time I think of that game. On my first 2d shooter, I figured out with the speed of the bullets, there could not be more than about 7 bullets at a time, so I had something like this: int g_Bullet1Pos; int g_Bullet2Pos; int g_Bullet3Pos; //.. etc For both players :) Imagine the code for the collision detection now.

i get nightmares just thinking about it lol. actually, i did something like that for a game i wrote back in 2000.

When I started programming in Visual Basic, I wanted to make a game right off the bat. So i started adding all the captions of each label together as I didn't know about variables.
Label1.Caption = "1"
Label2.Caption = "2"
Label3.Caption = Label1.Caption + Label2.Caption

it was pretty deadly :P

I found the "system" directory in Windows 3.11 and started clicking on all the executable files. I also did it for Windows 95 as well.

Needless to say my operating system had to be repaired with a good reformat.

I made a top-down tiling engine in &#106avascript, with the intention of making an RPG...

I wrote an Intrusion Detection System called Cerberus IDS that basically used system() calls and config files to determine if their was an intruder in the system, then used system() calls again (little did I know about symlink attacks) to load up ipchains. Infact, if you want to see the code, go here:

TADA!

Somehow, it was distributed with KDE in the back of Linux Magazine.

Also, I founded RRFN (required reading for newbies) -- a beginner hacking search engine like 4 years ago. It was quite popular among the Undergroundnews.com boards.

As for with game development? Well, when I was a LOT, LOT, LOT younger (think 6), I thought video games were made like movies, and you had to record EVERY SINGLE POSSIBLE STEP the player could make. It totally made sense in my head. When I actually started programming games? Luckily, I had enough programming background by then not to do something too stupid. Though, my attempts at a QBasic RPG were quite laughable (did anyone else use DarkDread's QBasic RPG tutorials?)

Ah, the good ol' days.

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Original post by Cibressus I remember in grade 9 i found something called winMessenger or something like that in the windows/system32 directory. Good fun during tests. especially good fun when all the morons found out about it and messaged the entire school network.

Yes, some dingleballs found out about 'net send' at my high school and messaged an entire school district of about 600 (elementary, junior high, high school, post-secondary, adult education) schools. Now, if it had been something innocuous like "Hi" it might have been fine, but as I recall it was something like "Eat shit".

The first computer I ever owned myself was an old beat-up 386. It was still fairly good for its day, and only marginally edged out by the new 486 line (in my eyes at the time). I'd learned the dark art of messing with AUTOEXEC.BAT and CONFIG.SYS, and (with the help of a local guru) had built a pretty powerful menuing system on a boot disk. I could set up custom bootups for all of my games, with specially tailored parameters, and even launch them automatically. The games (and some other programs, including my shiny new copy of Windows 3.0) were all organized in hierarchical menus. I was the king of boot scripts.

Naturally, though, this wasn't enough. The power went to my head and I started mucking around with the BIOS settings. Sure enough, I happened across the System Boot Password. Now, I have no idea where I got this from, but I've always been extremely paranoid about computer security - down to locking my workstation when I use the bathroom. In my apartment. Where I live. Alone. So naturally this was an amazing and wonderful thing, because nobody else would be able to use my computer without my permission! Sweet! I entered something long, obscure, and cryptic, with lots of mixed case and weird characters. I wrote it down in three secret places to ensure I could never lose it or forget it. It was perfect. I would never have security problems again, and I was the sole, undisputed master of my machine.

So obviously the next time I booted, the password didn't work.

Now, this was in the days before the internet. I couldn't just hop on any one of half a dozen other web-aware computers that I had lying around and look up what to do. I had to send a letter to a guru I knew and ask just how bad I was screwed. After an agonizing few days, I learned of the magical thing that is the BIOS reset jumper. After another agonizing few days, I actually worked up the nerve to wade through the mass of electronics that was the 386 and actually reset the jumper.

With immense relief, I booted the system, once again the master of the electronic domain. The BIOS whined about having no recognizable settings. After a few minutes of dutifully restoring everything, I booted fresh, and was just about ready to feast my eyes on the welcome sight of my boot menus... and there was the boot password prompt.

After some more agonizing, and more days (some of which were also agonizing), I found out that the BIOS would retain the password flag, but not the actual password. Turns out it had been set to the default OEM password rather than cleared. In fact, it had been set to the OEM password since the very beginning, due to an obscure bug in the ROM, where you had to set the password twice to get it to take. More agonizing eventually revealed what the password actually was, and things were good.


I have since developed a deep aversion to the letters "ami" and have, to my conscious knowledge, never used them as a password (either in whole or in part) again. I've never set a BIOS boot password since then, either.

@ ApochPiQ: Hah, great story.

I remember as a kid playing a lot of games, none more passionately then a game with a little adventurous car. I don't exactly remember the name of the game but it was the whole reason why my family purchased a 486, that and my brother had stuffed a key in to our old computer which somehow fried it. There was this shop on Main Street that we got the computer from, our first colour screen computer. Years later after I was used to setting up my games on windows 3.1, 1994 rolled around and so did 812MB HD's and Windows 95! At the time there was only one main computer store in town where I'd buy all my games and what not, and at the exact same time we upgraded the hard drive and Windows 95. Now, I thought Windows 95 was cool at that age and I started looking through the hard disk and I came across a very familiar program; 'progman.exe'. So it loads up and I'm reminded of Windows 3.11, so I copy the file over to a disk so I could keep it for my own. Since it was my own now I seemed to figure that I can make my own new file list in it. Windows Explorer now kept all the files, so I started deleting massive amounts of directories to clear it out so all that would be left is my games. What I didn't know was that I was erasing my hard drive. It didn't turn out good after that...

I wrote a scripting engine for a pong clone. I never got to actually use the scripting engine, though, but it increased the pong executable from 100 kb to 500 kb.

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Original post by Ravuya Quote: Original post by Cibressus I remember in grade 9 i found something called winMessenger or something like that in the windows/system32 directory. Good fun during tests. especially good fun when all the morons found out about it and messaged the entire school network. Yes, some dingleballs found out about 'net send' at my high school and messaged an entire school district of about 600 (elementary, junior high, high school, post-secondary, adult education) schools. Now, if it had been something innocuous like "Hi" it might have been fine, but as I recall it was something like "Eat shit".

My favorite was to send virus warnings saying they needed to restart their computer or lose their files.

Edit: That was at work though not at a school. [grin]