Cracking the code - Designing tomorrow's Virtual Reality software

Can you tell us a bit about your coding background?

My programming background is heavily tied to my passion for games. I started out with basic text games in BASIC, on handed-down computers and with very few learning resources. As soon as I got access to the internet I explored a diverse variety of alternatives, such as C, visual basic, delphi and 3D-graphics-oriented varieties of basic such as dark basic. I think I probably came across C++ at this point, but it was likely a bit ahead of me. GameMaker came out probably a year or two earlier, and that was a really great tool, because for the first time I could explore my creativity without getting bogged down in too many technical details.

A few years later, and the release of Half-Life 2 blew me away. My PC barely ran it at the time, but compared to other 3D games I’d played it seemed really gigantic and expansive. Once I learnt that it could be modded I was very excited to download the development tools, and desperate to learn C++. I remember staying up all night and reading Bruce Eckel’s ‘Thinking in C++’. I hate to think of what my first C++ programs looked like, but knowing what I know now about the complexity of C++, they can’t have been pretty.