Hey, anyone out there a video game programmer? Or learning to become one?
I thought it'd be cool to open this subject to discuss all kinds of programming strategy focused on video games!
First we can all talk about our programming experience in that field;
I've started programming video games in Assembly on my Casio calculator back when I was in the lycee in achrafieh during my arabic and french classes and I totally fell in love with it, decided it was what I'll be doing for the rest of my life, and luckily enough I got a chance to get an education in that domain (real time interactive simulation) and programmed some games in C++ for NOA (nintendo of america); those were mostly console, therefor it was C++ mixed with the SDK of the specific console (Nintendo DS in my situation).
As much as i loved working at NOA I decided I needed to push my education a little bit further, so I'm now currently in Washington DC doing some university stuff.
PHP& MySQL have always fascinated me, I started learning PHP about 5 years ago during the PHP4 era, and I grew it with it when it came to OOP, then moved to PHP5 as one of their earliest testers back in july 2004.
Last november, I set a challenge to myself to try and "revolutionize" the way PHP is used nowadays in the video game industry, a lot of you here maybe know how many "Text-Based" games there are in PHP, games that take a couple of days to program, or can be programmed using pre written scripts. Games that really give PHP a bad name. So I decided to try and program a PHP browser MMORPG game based on a c++ architecture, by that I mean having the proper:
-Game loop
-Level loop
-classes for pretty much everything (physics, characters, enemy, AI, items, cities etc)
And most importantly for the game to be FULLY graphical, I didnt want any "html text" in my game. I was lucky to find 2 artists and 2 musicians who were willing to help out with the assets of the game for free, and since then its been hard work for all of us. But the efforts have paid off quite a bit, here are some screenshots of the current version of the game (still far from done, but its still pretty intresting to see):
First picture, just a random picture in the city:

This one is still in the 1st city, but in the jail :)

In one of the houses of the 1st city, demonstrating one of the things you can do to other players

What kind of RPG doesnt have a decent weapon shop? ;)

Conversation with an NPC(non playable character)

A -VERY- early screenshot of the battle system (temp background image, temp HUd etc)

Another very early screenshot of the 2nd city (just a sneak preview)

Another screenshot of the battle system, ignore my health in this image, I set myself to invincible while I was testing it so the rats kept bitting me :)

The 1st enemy killed :)

The next 2 pictures are just screenshots of your menu screen

Another very early picture of the hospital:

Now, some demonstrations of the weather system =)
Clear weather:

Rainy:

Foggy:

And here's a special something about what happens when you drink a lot of alcohol ;)

I'd just like to remind you by now that this is only a browser game using ONLY PHP & MySQL (the only flash is in a non-visible background frame running hte music), the reason we have such simplistic graphics is because of bandwidth issues, some of you may know how PNG's work, their size get bigger as their palette gets bigger aswell, so we decided to leave the graphics simple to a few colors to minimise our bandwidth issues.

And to finally to give you an idea of teh scale of the game, heres the world map:
http://www.laene.nl/Marc/worms/images/maps/WormsMap.PNG
You can see the multiple cities, quests area's, arena's, casino, and misc stuff on it =)

Anyways, for all of you video game developpers out there, share your experiences with game programming, there's always something to learn frome each other!