| When I was 14, Turbine Games released a patch to Asheron's Call which broke Decal for a few months. Decal is/was a framework for developing and running plugins for the game. These plugins could do anything in the game that the player could. One such plugin at the time was ElTank. ElTank was primarily a combat macro. It would hunt and loot for you. But since decal broke, so did ElTank. I still wanted something to play the game in this way for me. So I found another tool, ACTool. ACTool was a scripting environment which was normally able to hook into decal but it didn't require it for some basic things. I spend a days learning the ACTool language and managed to put together a VERY crude botting system that would be (poorly) navigate through one specific dungeon. Only one dungeon since I had to hard code my route. It would also manage my vitals -- health, stamina, and mana. Additionally, it was able to keep me buffed and log out if I died. I managed to do all of that by pixel scraping. Based on the color of specific ranges of pixels I could do some pretty nifty things. This was the first time ever programmed anything and it was SO hard and SO rewarding. At this time, I didn't even realize that Software Engineering was a career path. And if it was I didn't think I would be able to make it through an engineering degree because of the math requirements. Fast-forward to age 19. Engineering wasn't even a consideration, neither was school. I joined the Navy instead. My Navy rating had me doing some linux system administration stuff and I thought that was really cool. At the same time, a friend of mine wanted to do a Java class at the local Community College and didn't wan't to do it alone, so I did it with him. And it was so much fun that I decided that I was going to become a software engineer. SO when I finished the Navy I focused all of my energy towards college. When I graduated I was able to line up a job. |