Hahaha, I know what you mean there. I started doing this stuff when I was 14 and I must say that I believe the whole self taught comp sci thing really helped get me into college. Certainly you will be one of a small number of well experienced students once you get to college. Well, I don't know about student bodies at schools like MIT, CalTech, or Stanford, but what I just claimed certainly applies to the ivy league. When I visited MIT and brought up the different comp sci stuff I had done the people I talked to were really amazed - very few kids do anything like us. I've only met one other freshmen so far who is anywhere near me, and even he hasn't done any reverse engineering (but he is one of the top ranked for rubks cube completion in the world, something like 3rd in the world for doing them with his feet and one of the top for doing them blindfolded). By the way, nil, modzy, I don't know what your plans are or where you are in life right now but I can say that colleges LOVE kids who teach themselves things to a high proficiency, and I believe especially love kids who can say that they have reverse engineered something. It has that sort of genius-nerdy cool to it that so few people can claim. Plus, at least at columbia, you can opt out of taking the ridiculous into courses and jump straight into something like datastructures and algorithms or classes beyond that just by talking to professors and displaying a good knowledge of the course content.Samuco wrote:College is still three years away for me. I am also about to head back to high school, so I won't have much time either. I don't mind editing small parts of the code or GUI, but I also have to fit time for school and my other software projects. The duplicate button also doesn't seem to work. Simple fix though
-Sharpy
I must say that wish I started programming earlier, but I was hoping that my high school would actually have a comp sci class that would teach me what I wanted. They ended up canceling the class due to a lack of interest. So, I just decided to teach myself. But then I got pissed off at the teach yourself java book I was using for not teaching me anything that I thought was useful and so I started just looking over other people's code to see how programs worked. That meant that along with cobbling together what programming meant and entailed I was learning other people's, shall I say, odd coding styles. This really made things bad when I learned obj-c from bobindashadow's sparkedit port and not from proper resources. I would only look up very specific material that the project required for it to work (hence the magic numbers for offsetting selection rather than translating click coordinates - I had no clue what the error was coming from and didn't spend the time in the beginning to learn about views). Almost all of the GUI stuff and all of the opengl related code and most of the bsp and model parsing code is what I took from bobindashadow's project and, needless to say, there's a lot that could have been improved upon that I just didn't care to learn.
So yeah, I want to make swordedit actually work. That would be cool. After that I still want to make giant robots a la gundam, but I'm going to take things one step at a time.