Wow, didn't expect to see @xfennec pop up on hacker news while drinking my coffee this morning! I don't know if he'll see this, to be honest didn't know he was still doing things - but this person basically got me into programming and game development-I really can't believe it.
xfennec (and some friends?) I think built a game engine called Raydium, and one of their games called Mania Drive-a Track Mania clone-got distributed with OpenSuse installation CDs back in the day. When I was just like 12 years old, my dad installed that on the family computer and it was all we had, Mania Drive was one of the coolest games on there. Me and my siblings played that for literally days and months on end, making crazy levels we couldn't beat without knowing every turn. It was a huge part of our childhood.
Their game engine was in C with PHP scripting, I remember posting some levels to their forums and asking, in retrospect super dumb, questions and they were so polite and friendly. I remember us joking at the time that the French seemed like these god-like game developers, it had such a profound impact on us, I even wrote about it last year and linked a video of Mania Drive first[0]. I went on to learn Python and then lower-level languages as a result. I'm not sure I'd be coding today without them, to be honest.
Sorry it's off-topic, just really blown away to see a username like that pop up in my feed. Really goes to show that kindness + some cool open source software can have profound effect on people.
Are there any established companies that design products like this? Every story I see about consumer friendly design is either the first product from a company that stopped being consumer friendly down the line, or the only product from a company that's now dead.
xfennec (and some friends?) I think built a game engine called Raydium, and one of their games called Mania Drive-a Track Mania clone-got distributed with OpenSuse installation CDs back in the day. When I was just like 12 years old, my dad installed that on the family computer and it was all we had, Mania Drive was one of the coolest games on there. Me and my siblings played that for literally days and months on end, making crazy levels we couldn't beat without knowing every turn. It was a huge part of our childhood.
Their game engine was in C with PHP scripting, I remember posting some levels to their forums and asking, in retrospect super dumb, questions and they were so polite and friendly. I remember us joking at the time that the French seemed like these god-like game developers, it had such a profound impact on us, I even wrote about it last year and linked a video of Mania Drive first[0]. I went on to learn Python and then lower-level languages as a result. I'm not sure I'd be coding today without them, to be honest.
Sorry it's off-topic, just really blown away to see a username like that pop up in my feed. Really goes to show that kindness + some cool open source software can have profound effect on people.
[0] https://devlog.hexops.com/2021/increasing-my-contribution-to...