Hi there!

[iNyan]

My name is Bogdan and I live in Romania Sure you've heard of it; hoping because of its nice things, unrelated to the bad publicity that we get nowadays

Stuff about myself that you might or might not want to read:

I'm 18 years old and still kickin' in high school, though in the final year (hell yes). Programming is one of my hobbies and also my only source of income at the moment. I've been doing it since 7th grade (5 years), when I met mr. Visual Basic. Whom I quickly abandoned for C#.

Overall I'm just an average dude with a computer. I'm friendly like hell, a bit naive, I like to talk about myself a lot and I tend to become very enthusiastic over small, and appealing things. I change my mind annoyingly often when it comes to choosing between 2 or more things.

Plans for the future (and I'm hoping for 0 A.D. to make my work easier): I intend to work with a few friends as a team in freelance programming during college. Then, if I get the chance, I will start a small software company. My final goal is to open up a coffee shop chain and have a large and happy family. Long story short: I like programming, but it's not something that I'd want to do all of my life.

So, I think that's enough to scratch the surface of my personality.

Why I joined:

I joined 0 A.D. hoping to be able to contribute to the project. And that's all there is to it. Nope, I lied. I mainly want to learn as much as possible from your work. Of course, I will contribute wherever possible, but learning is my main aim. At the moment, contributing would be difficult: I rate my C++ knowledge at 0.5/10. I never worked seriously in C++; only worked in C#, Basic, Java and some PHP/JavaScript. We'll see how it turns out in the future.

Hope to get along well and successfully integrate in this community Maybe we'll work together on 0 A.D. sometime, once I get the know-how.

Thanks!

Edited January 18, 2012 by iNyan

[feneur]

Hello and welcome Bogdan! Seems like you at the very least have a very good start on the programming, especially since a lot of the gameplay programming is done with javascript

[MishFTW]

Welcome to the forum! Lucky you, last year of high school.

[quantumstate]

Welcome to the forums, as feneur says lots of the game is developed using javascript. It is very easy to get started, you just pick something that looks interesting, then hop onto irc to ask questions when you get stuck.

Plans for the future (and I'm hoping for 0 A.D. to make my work easier)

Also I'm mystified by this quote. Can you elaborate on how you think 0 A.D. will make your work easier?

[Gen.Kenobi]

Welcome to the forum! Lucky you, last year of high school.

Lucky? DOn't think so. Last year of high school here on Brazil is always rushed. You must attempt to get into an university/college by making exams version thousands of candidates. The competittion is always very harsh and hard.

BTW, welcome iNyan! Hope you survive well your last year! Mine is starting in february

[iNyan]

Thanks for the welcome!

@ feneur

I'll start there then. JavaScript is not out of my reach

@ quantumstate

I have to leave almost all of the game development jobs I find alone, because the only way for me to build a game is to use C# and XNA. Which is not too popular among clients, especially since most of 'em want stuff for Android and iOS. Windows Phone 7 is out of discussion 99.9% of the time, and if they need something for Windows... well, I'd rather stick to utility apps for now and leave game dev for later.

I could have tried a tutorial, but it's my favorite thing to optimize and try better and better solutions for a problem. Too few tutorials discuss this. So, I've decided to start looking for open source projects. See how they're made, and learn stuff. I'm planning to take a look at some other open source games in the nearby future, especially Arx Fatalis now that its sources are free.

Hope this explains what I meant by 0 A.D. helping me with my work I am most interested in the AI and the engine optimization. Seeing it run at native 1080p (there were no options, but I didn't notice the resolution change) without any traces of lag on my laptop (not a top notch machine) made me think that I have a lot to learn from it.

@ Gen.Kenobi

It's not really heaven here either, but I'm not too stressed. Even though I have lots of trouble at math (I'm expecting to get a 7 out of 10 in the final exam ), I'm a straight 10 out of 10 student at programming, which represents 75% of my college admission rating. The competition is not that harsh in Romania at the moment, if you know what you're doing. You can easily distinguish students who are interested in learning from those who are not. To put it simpler, the average student that finishes a math & informatics high school isn't able to fully implement a doubly linked list w/o the teacher's support. People say it's the teachers' fault but I say it's the lack of interest coming from the student. My teacher isn't a top teacher. I learned the basics from her, but immediately afterwards I started advancing through computer science on my own. Because I was interested, that's all it took.

During the last year some changes occured in the whole schooling system here in Romania. Most of the changes were about exam security and overseeing. Basically, they made sure students are unable to cheat: they increased the number of overseers, the number of cameras etc. It was a country-spread disaster on the students' side: there were lots of high schools in which no student was able to get more than 5.00 out of 10 and pass the exam.

Thus, it's even easier to get to the top if you actually want to.

Edited January 19, 2012 by iNyan

[Jeru]

Welcome, iNyan!

Your stories about Romania & its education system are very interesting to me. (I am 24, a high school science teacher from Israel with many friends & acquaintances originally from Romania).

[iNyan]

Thanks If there's something in particular that you'd like to know about Romania's education system, feel free to ask me.

[Gen.Kenobi]

@iNyan: Hehehehe. Them lucky you! You have the choice to pick what subjects you want to have in high school? Like America? Here on Brazil we don't have that Luxury... We have to know almost everything about everything. But, unfortunatly, our system doesn't works too well... Public Schools are a mess and teachers are unpayed. So...yeah. Sucks. Specially the last year of High School, where you must review everything you learned and know it all by the tip of your tongue, if you want to get in a good university.

And if the course is competitive, like Med School, you're screwed. And I know. I'm screwed

But hopefully I'll do just fine. It's just a long year for me.

Very long one

[iNyan]

darn, no choices whatsoever That sucks. It's like the ideal educational system for... say, my dad. He lived through the communist occupation of Romania, and got used to everything commie-related. Including education. About Romania's:Yup, you can choose the subjects but you're not granted THAT much freedom. High school is basically split into different "sections" (you choose one when you start high school and stick with it throughout the 4 years; unless you want to move to another section, but it's not that easy to do it):

-> Informatics & math;

-> Philology & Literature;

-> Chemistry & Biology;

-> History

and there are some other high schools that also feature:

-> Economics;

-> Technical stuff, industries and similar;

-> Accounting;

-> Sports;

-> Religion.

I might have forgotten some. But it's enough to form an idea: the thing is that each section emphasizes on certain subjects throughout the 4 years of study. Every student, no matter the high school section, MUST take the final exams in maths, Romanian language & literature and one section specific subject. There are also the foreign language exams, but now can be regarded as obsolete: you just get a rating on a diploma that does not count toward the college admission rating.

Even though I'm in an informatics & math section, I need to learn the same stuff as the guys in philology, chemistry & biology and history. Add physics and geography to that and you get a ton of section unrelated stuff that we're expected to learn. The situation is a lot simpler at the other sections: philology students don't study math in the last 2 years of high school, and so on.

So yeah, there are lots of issues that should be corrected

Good luck with the rough times ahead!