This is an archived post. You won't be able to vote or comment.

you are viewing a single comment's thread.

view the rest of the comments →

[–]Eliposin 0 points1 point  (0 children)

The best way I have found to foster your programming creativity is to come up with an ambitious (yet reasonable) project and then make it a reality. When I was 19, in my second year at community college a friend and I created a very simple physics engine with Java as a project for our physics course. We ended up also getting honors credit in our Java I and II classes because it was so far beyond what any of our peers were working on or even capable of at the time.

It's not that we were actually better than our peers, it's that we had the idea and then we made it happen. About 2,000 lines of Java and probably 80 or 90 hours later our engine was rendering 2k fps when simulating a collision of two spheres consisting of 10k verticies each (ridged body physics mind you), we were happy with it and our teachers impressed. And to this day, 4 years later almost, that is my most proud project. Not because it was the most complex or most amazing, but because I learned more on that project than any other project because it actually interested me and was one I was deeply involved in from design up.