Jurassic Park: Trespasser

This is a "Welcome back!" post as well as a conglomeration of links to an interesting topic. Jurassic Park: Trespasser was a game I never experienced, but because of its ambitiousness (and the lack of funds and time to properly implement said ambitious design) it was equally regarded as the worst and best game of its time. Here are the resources, of which I have only read through about half:

Wikipedia Article (short and sweet)

Source Code Review (gameplay videos, interviews, and more)

Postmortem by Richard Wyckoff (from the designers, a behind-the-scenes look)

Source Code and More (I didn't link to this)

It is written in C++ which makes it an interesting chunk of code for me after I'm done messing around in C.

Did you hear me right? Yes, you did. I may have disappeared for a year or so, but I'm back! And working on becoming a "crack programmer so my dad can retire". :)

Also, an interesting read

Andrei mentioned in passing earlier that some of the earliest coders back in the '40s were actually women.

The mathematicians of the time were too concerned with developing mathematical concepts, and most notably, John Backus realized that there were women who were just as brilliant who would be willing to work on groundbreaking projects like those he was planning.

He designed Fortran with the assistance of some great woman thinkers of their time.

I thoroughly enjoyed reading about Grace Hopper, who had quite a hand in early programming. She achieved the rank of US Navy Rear Admiral, and contributed to Backus's work with Fortran.

Anyway, just thought I'd mention. I hope I don't offend anyone with my blog title... Just commenting on the societal notion that girls aren't nerds and definitely don't exist on the internets.

BAH!

Working on coding and writing tonight, because my fiance has a few projects he's busy with. I took more notes from K&R, but man do I still have a long way to go. No better way to put your knowledge to the test with miniature tests, like using what you've learned so far to write a program from memory.

Looking back over that little chunk of text (I wrote it out in my notebook), I made 4 terrible mistakes that would've kept the whole thing from compiling... The worst one was leaving out the variable assignment!! Aggh!!

It's okay though. Deep breaths, and lots of note-taking. I've taken to slowly working through the descriptions of the statements, going step by step until I'm certain that I understand what they're talking about. If I can keep that up, I think I'll be okay.

Anyway, for more notes, click the break!

K&R

So I cracked open K&R.