Archeology 101

Yesterday I was a little bored, so I started looking for a good ol' fashioned FPS to play. Of course, while digging through older CD's, I came across some old CDIS backups. And, of course, I came across, semesters worth of work. And, for me, work == old, forgotten code.

While I was digging through all that code, I found my OGDF project. It was a gaming framework that I was working on while at CDIS I was going to use for student work, as a baseline for 'hey, here's some framework code that will get you into game programming while avoiding some of the pitfalls of dealing with window resizing, switching to fullscreen/windowed mode ... you know the stuff I'm talking about in this blog now.

Some really interesting ideas in that codebase, that I'm probably going to pull forward.

But, oh my god, some awful, AWFUL ideas in there as well (Yeah, I found the Singleton Hammer¹).

Anyway, one of the crazy things that I found in there was a series of articles that I wrote that eventually went on to become the lua series I wrote for Gamedev.net (shameless promotion) and were then published in 'Beginning Game Programming: A gamedev.net collection'.  It's crazy how something I wrote over 10 years ago still has an impact on folks; I still, once in a while, get questions on it.  I always intended on writing more on scripting languages (like using python, or other, alternative languages), but I could never find the time to do that.  And it's something that I don't get to spend enough time on day-to-day to become an expert on the subject.

1.The Singleton Hammer refers to any new programming/design methodology that people get tunnel vision on ... where if you only have a Hammer, everything looks like a Nail.