Okay, so I used to post here several years ago; just over 4 years ago actually. I've grown up a lot in those 4 years, I can assure you. I honestly can't believe the way I acted, talked, typed, whatever, back then. I read through the old announcements, and was absolutely wowed by the fact that Arikado has been gone for over 18 months; I remember talking to him about the classes he was taking as a senior in high school.
I remember when DrLucky, ninjafish1991, and I would have all kinds of inane discussions on the offtopic section.....
But that's not the only reason I'm here posting about forum nostalgia.
When I was an active member, I had little to no knowledge of OOP, having only done any amount of work in BASIC, and having only taught myself this due to being bored in the latter half of junior high. I am a student in the Programming and Web Development shop at my local trade school, and we have a focus on Ruby on Rails for web servers, and C# as the main OOP language.
I'm currently working on a top-down RPG with three others that is similar to the old Legend of Zelda games, particularly Four Swords Adventures, but with the implementation of semi-random dungeons, an inventory system, weapon classes, sprite customizations, and more. We expect to have a working build with combat, travel from the hub to the dungeon and back, character loading/saving, and at least basic inventory management by the end of June. If anyone expresses interest in it, I'll make it publicly available. My personal role in the development is that of the animations, the sprites, and the weapon handlers.
To have thought that I would be this far along in such a comparatively short amount of time is just mind-boggling to me, even today.
To look back a few years and look at myself struggling to get text to output to a screen, well, it makes me laugh. It makes me realize that crazy things can happen, and will happen, and that you just have to let them happen, because it's probably not going to affect you in too negative of a fashion to outweigh the positives.
Not that anyone cares on this particular facet either, but I've also gone from making computer cases out of cardboard because I put all of my money into the components, to fitting an entire MiniITX gaming PC into an original Xbox, simply because I was bored with my current case. 80mm radiator bolted to the top half of the shell, with a single fan on top to serve as a pull, the push is supplied by the GPU that is secured just below it (Radeon HD 7970 Toxxic 6GB).
Ah, there's that old trait of mine. Telling everyone everything. This was a functional example, however, so I can let it slide as it were.
So, in conclusion, I loved my time here, left for reasons even I can't remember, went to school for the years in the interim, learned programming guud, made strides in the hardware end of things as well, and now I nostalgia'd all over when someone talked about running the Homebrew channel on their Wii U.
Arkytal
formerly z400100500 (to those of you who may remember me as z-numbers, the entire, uncut version is z4001005002600260294123711514268 )