[optionalparens]

Fair enough. Definitely there need to be better resources for getting started in 3D programming, particularly in C/C++, but the barriers to entry are also related to what makes things powerful at a AAA level.

In some ways, just grabbing an engine like Unreal or Unity is a decent alternative to something like JS to learn (some even let you use JS or use other languages that also have traps). Big game engines leave a lot to be desired and at times abstracts too much or makes things like handling shader code annoying. Still, most larger game engines like these two are the closest thing to having LOGO for 3D games programming.

You can at least get stuff on the screen relatively quickly, learn a few things, and then start replacing it from there. I personally learned quite a bit way back when just decompiling or reverse engineering stuff from people much smarter than me.

Sometimes I feel like there's a lack of things like what the C64 provided for younger kids and adults today. I suppose as expectations have risen, so has complexity of getting going.

[brokenmachine]

> Sometimes I feel like there's a lack of things like what the C64 provided for younger kids and adults today. I suppose as expectations have risen, so has complexity of getting going.

Although I understand the gist of this statement, I wish I had all the amazing (and cheap!) powerful stuff we have around now to play with when I was young. Also the effect of easy access to information on the internet now cannot be overstated. You can just pull up a youtube video on any subject you might be interested in immediately. It's amazing.

I remember manually typing out pages of C64 code from a magazine to generate a fractal. After typing for literally hours, the actual single fractal picture took hours to generate... Still satisfying in the end to witness it being generated pixel by pixel, but it was surely a lot of work and needed a lot of patience for a kid. Plus if I had mistyped any of that code, it would have been a big disappointment for sure. Kids nowadays have no idea how tough using computers was back then.

[optionalparens]

Yes, very true, obviously I just mean conceptually poking around. In many ways we definitely have it better now. I am infinitely more productive today. Simultaneously have gone further from teaching the low-level stuff properly.

I spent hours, days, and weeks of my life on things related to graphics/games programming such as:

- Building mouse drivers from scratch or implementing them from alternative vendors

- Implementing/Working with DOS protected mode

- Manually compressing memory/implementing swapping

- Implementing blitting from scratch

- Implementing z-buffers from scratch

- Reverse engineering consoles to steal processing power from idiotic sources just to render a tiny bit more data or later, a few more polygons

- Spending a huge chunk of cash to throw in a math co-processor into my machine at home

- Debugging code for hours only to realize things like the problems are caused by seemingly unrelated problems such as tape media is at fault, the floppy is corrupt, or the file system doesn't work the way the vendor said it does in the specs

- Rendering a scene and then going home, only to come in the next day and see it is still not done

- Converting from 72 billion formats and interpreting, finding, and/or correcting corrupt data from each one

- Rewriting entire pieces of code bases to squeeze out several more bytes of EMS and XMS

- Implementing 2 or more graphics APIs for the same game. Thank you 3dfx, S3, and many others that pained me, not to mention at a higher-level, OpenGL, DirectX, and so on.

- Doing all my work on 1 platform, then loading it on another. Thank you SGI for taking years off my life.

- Writing matrix operations in pure assembler for the simplest of operations

- Having multiple workstations for reasons such as "this one has the Matrox card in it."

The list goes on. Yeah, I don't miss those days. But I learned a lot, we all did. And the barriers to entry definitely reduced the signal to noise IMO.

[brokenmachine]

There always has been and always will be problems, there are just different problems now...

We can't even imagine what kinds of crazy stuff the next generation will come up with, with all the resources they have available now. The barriers to entry are still there, but the goalposts have moved significantly.

[gspetr]

You sound like you've had some interesting experiences in the trenches, do you have a blog or something where you share your thoughts about the craft?

[prefect42]

Funny that, I've used that exact expression before, with Matrox framegrabbers ;-)