Introduction / The Journey Begins

The Purpose of this Blog

In this Blog, i will write about me, trying to build a virtual Universe from scratch... More specifically, i am coding a Game/Simulation Engine which should be able to generate procedural content on every scale. I know this is possible, i just dont know how (yet) - but i want to figure it out! This is a Hobby-Project so i will not promise to finish or release anything (although i really hope to). I will not even promise to regularly update this Blog. But in the last few years, searching for techniques, technologies and algorithms i came across many Blogs of people who, like me tried to build Games or Engines from scratch. I got a whole lot of inspiration from those people, and i found that most of them got a lot of motivation from the comments and discussions on their Blogs. So i thought why not start a Blog myself? I could really do with some extra motivation, and i would be really proud, if i managed to inspire someone!

I also want to recommend two of my favorite Blogs, if you are interested in Game/Graphics Programming Voxels and Procedural Content Creation they are definitely worth a look!
procworld.blogspot.com - all about creating procedural Voxel-Content in a endless world, some nice info about poligonizing Voxels, and more...
www.sea-of-memes.com - one man trying to build a Game in a Voxel-based Blockworld ( somewhat like minecraft but different ;) )...
Many of you will already know those Blogs, but i had to mention them, because those two people are just amazing and inspired me a lot! (If you two read this someday: I want to say thank you! And keep up the great work!)

What is this Blog about?

I intent to write mostly about this Project: "Magrathea" (Working Title) - a Game/Simulation Engine, able to proceduraly generate Galaxies, Solar Systems, Planets, Continents, Countries, Cities etc... at least thats the Plan ;). At the Moment i am not able to generate anything like that, but thats my ultimate goal. As i know myself, i will get sidetracked, bored and frustrated a lot on the way... so i think i will write (or rant) about many things related to programming, not only this Project. I may also write some Tutorials, but we will see.

My Experience

I have no "Professional Experience" as i never had a Job as Developer, but i am quite good at learning self-educated. I began learning to code about 17 years ago (i was 9 years old), and started with HTML. About one year later i learned Real Basic, Omicron Basic and then C. It took a while to understand how everything works, but i had much fun coding. So learned more about programming Languages and computers in general, and tried out everything i could get my hands on. So i learned more Languages like C++, Assembler, PHP, Java, Python, Fortran, Pascal (in this order) and last year i even learned C#, i hesitated to do so, as i want to code as near to the Processor as possible and dont like scripting languages or compiling to vm-bytecode, for Application Development - and i dont like Microsoft Products in General.
 I wrote many many small and mostly useless little programs, just for fun, and for learning purposes. I became interested in Graphics programming. So i wanted to try and make a Game (what a surprise ;) ). At this time i was not very experienced, so i tried some tutorials first... most of them were using Visual C++ and DirectX an Win32... did i mention my dislike for MS-Products? Here is why(related to coding): Coding the Win32 API is UGLY and gave me serious headaches, DirectX is not a bit better! VC++ (and all other Visual XXX IDEs) is just like "click there and let me load your project with a huge package of unnecessary code automatically, just dont bother learning how it really works"... btw. that is actually also the attitude of most (fortunately not all) Tutorials, which i think makes them rather useless. Finaly i found some Tutorials for OpenGL (most OpenGL Coders will remember NeHe ;) ) and some libs to avoid the Win32 API (especialy SDL).
Well, long Story short: i tried to write a Game - and got stuck. But that was a long time ago, and in the meantime i started several Game-Engine Projects, and everytime i got stuck on something else... lack of experience, unorganized code, lack of time, lack of motivation... and some more. But everytime i learned something more and now i will try it again - but different.

To be continued...

I wanted to write more for introduction... but i think this is enough for my very first Blogpost ever. Nobody wants to start reading with a Wall of Text ;). The rest will go to the second post, which will probably come sooner than any readers :D.

Last but not least: SORRY if my english is bad... i am not a native english speaker, and i had very little practice in actually speaking (or writing) english, in the last few years... so please be patient, i will improve ;)