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Comment by chaoticmass | Hacker News Reader

When I was in highschool I started writing a game in Qbasic. Along the way, I wanted it to have a console (like Quake) where you could enter commands and modify the game as you were running it. This lead me to create a scripting engine in Qbasic, and long story short, I’ve been on a yak shaving epic quest now for almost 30 years now. No game, but I have a hybrid C / Lua game engine/general purpose application platform. Still tinkering and still no end in sight. I’m having fun though!

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> I wanted it to have a console (like Quake)

Hah!

I couldn't figure out the 3D math for quake, or write a fast texture mapper, so I stuck to working on things like Doom level editors.

But, I loved the quake console so I made a similar thing for my editor, basically just a hot key that swung it down and I could change a few hard-coded variables and added some commands like loading/saving files.

Thanks to the flexibility that Quake console provided, we were able to set up a three computer null-modem cable network using an additional serial port card on one computer, and play Quake multiplayer like that. We’d felt like we’d hacked the planet at the time.

We did that exact setup in college! We ran serial cables out our windows and along the outer wall to the other two rooms. It was triumphant.

We did that too, except it was for playing OMF2097, because sharing a keyboard sucked (and we'd always fight over who'd get to use the right side of the keyboard, which was obviously the best side in those days).

I've been using quake-style terminals for... pretty much as long as I've been using terminals so about 15 years now and I can never go back. Sometimes I open a new terminal window to e.g. run my application but I always forget it exists.

I like electronic music production and mixing, and at some point embarked on the quests of writing a DAW (for which I wrote my own state library too) and a dj application. The DJ application I started this year, the daw has been going on for 5 years now.

I think it's helped me at work. Even though I don't have a job with anything related to music or audio, getting in the weeds of building a complex app like this has a way of teaching you all sorts of things. But even if it weren't, it's fun! When work is stressing, for some reason I find coding something completely unrelated, fun and fully my own de-stressing too.

I find you working 30 years on this game engine/application platform very cool and admirable! I hope this or some other project of mine accompanies me for that long.

This is a great thing, because along the way one learns tons of stuff, that other not so interested/involved people never learn. It is a means of becoming a more capable developer/engineer.

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