Note: This blog post is from my old Blogger site, before I switched over to tadukoo.github.io. As such, there may be references to the old blog rather than this current one.
Before we get started, I’d like to note that I had to correct stuff in here, because it turns out I don’t remember the events as well as I thought.
Growing up, my parents had dial-up through Juno. This meant all downloads were 2 KB per second and being online meant no one could use the phone. So I didn’t get online much. I did get into a few online games, which led to me wanting to be online more. I grew to hate Juno.
Somehow with Juno, I got OHRRPGCE and tried making RPG’s on it, but failed. I ended up playing the example RPG that came with the program. Eventually I gave up on the RPG’s, because it wasn’t becoming as great as I imagined.
Somehow I also later got Game Maker, and tried making STSB (Super Tadukoo Smash Bros.) on that. I had to look up how to add most of the elements of the game, but I got it working with a Master Hand battle using one attack (from both Master Hand and you) that was like bullets. It had 4 or 5 characters you could play as, but still just that one attack. I gave up on it when I was trying to make Luigi an unlockable character.
My friend showed me Minecraft around its Beta 1.5 version (around April 2011), and I started playing in Beta 1.6 (around May 2011). Unfortunately, the computers at home weren’t good enough to run Minecraft, so I was out of luck. I could only play it at his house or when another friend came over with his laptop.
By late June or early July, I had played around with Minecraft mods and quickly decided I wanted to make my own. I made a really complicated idea (See here). I decided I wanted to make that idea into reality, so I looked up tutorials on making Minecraft mods. I remember thinking I found tutorials for everything I needed except making new dimensions (since the mod required 5 new dimensions). Unfortunately, the tutorials weren’t working right when I tried them out, and I didn’t know enough about programming to fix it. So I basically gave up. This was still during dial-up, so I was limited on my ability to figure stuff out anyway.
Minecraft had quickly become my favorite game, but I couldn’t play it at home. So I asked for a laptop for Christmas, saying I wanted it to be able to play Minecraft. My parents said they didn’t know how to set-up dial-up on it. I said I didn’t want internet on it unless it was high speed. So a few days before Christmas, we got Comcast. And on Christmas, I got the laptop I wanted. It was able to run Minecraft. It was also better than I expected in terms of speed and performance. I would later run a Minecraft Bukkit server with over 40 plugins on it and could easily have up to 15 people on at once including myself on the laptop (with little to no noticeable lag).
I started running a Minecraft Bukkit server on January 15, 2012 called Tadukooverse. Since then, it’s been down more than it’s been up, but I’m still trying to find time to run it and keep it alive.
In February 2013, I was in the TadukooCraft Era of my server. I named it that because the server was down, and I was planning on making my own custom server software for Minecraft (I’d call it TadukooCraft). At that point, I was teaching myself C++ in order to take an existing server software and change it to suit my needs. On the 18th, I finished learning C++, and on the 21st, I started copying the code from hCraft to use for TadukooCraft. hCraft was open source and had a license that allowed me to do this.
While I was learning C++, I tried making a program that would decode a type of code I made up at some point. I never completed it, because I was trying to make TadukooCraft.
Sometime around this point at school, there had been something we signed up for earlier in the year to go to a college and learn about working in a career we chose. I had chosen teacher, because that’s what I had thought I wanted to do until I had Oral Communication in 9th grade and hated it. This was 10th grade. I talked to someone in order to change my career choice for the field trip to something to do with computers (it didn’t really matter what I chose, because all the computer fields were combined into one by the trip anyway). It was at this time that I knew I wanted to program.
At the time, I also planned on learning Java to help me make a custom launcher that would include mods I make and work alongside TadukooCraft. By April 6th, I gave up on trying to make TadukooCraft.
By June or early July, I had gotten into learning Java, but couldn’t find much that I liked. I ended up looking up how to make Bukkit plugins, and on July 5, 2013, I started making “Tadukoo Plugin”. By now it’s been renamed to Tadukoo Essentials. Basically I was thinking there were too many commands in Essentials, so I could make a smaller plugin that included the commands I actually use. I was basically using this plugin to learn how to program in Java as well.
On July 20, 2013, I decided to make an original plugin idea for Bukkit. I decided to make a plugin that would allow you to read the Bible in Minecraft (through commands or getting it as books). Essentially, this plugin is where I learned the most about programming in Java (for the basics).
In early 2014, I had to make my decisions for college. I procrastinated on doing it, but by April (I think), I had picked the college and major (Computer Science). It took me a while to figure out Computer Science meant programming at the college, because other colleges meant IT or computer engineering when they used “computer science”.
I had to get help in making it, and I asked the creator of BookShelf for that help. He also made a few extra suggestions that improved upon the plugin. I got to Beta 0.2 of Tadukoo Bible by July 19, 2014 (almost one year exactly from when I started), and uploaded it to BukkitDev.
The reason it took a whole year was because early on a friend told me that no one would use the plugin. I told him I would on my server, and that was enough for me. When the server went down for an extended period of time, I got discouraged, thinking no one would use it. Then in early 2014, I noticed someone had left a comment on GitHub for the plugin that they wanted it finished, so I worked on it again. Putting it on BukkitDev and seeing positive comments further encouraged me to finish it as well.
On November 25, 2014, I joked about the OHRRPGCE games’ titles and from that came T.A.D.U.K.O.O. I.S. T.H.E. G.R.E.A.T.E.S.T. P.E.R.S.O.N. W.H.O. E.V.E.R. L.I.V.E.D.. During the first semester of college (August to December 2014), the only thing I really learned was the syntax of Python, because we used that to learn about the basics of programming.
On November 28, 2014, I finally completed the plugin for 1.0 (as in v.1.0 of the plugin, with all the features I wanted in at that point and the entire Bible). I had planned to release it on Thanksgiving that year, but I put off working on it due to college, and scrambled to finish it Thanksgiving night. When midnight had passed, I decided to go to bed and finish it the next day.
T.A.D.U.K.O.O. I.S. T.H.E. G.R.E.A.T.E.S.T. P.E.R.S.O.N. W.H.O. E.V.E.R. L.I.V.E.D. became the main way I learned and retained how to program, as I needed to learn new things for new features and use what I already knew for older things.
Second semester of college (January - May 2015) didn’t teach me much about programming either, as it was still the basics, but in C. I did learn a few things though.
Third semester (August - December) I actually learned helpful things about programming, which was in Java as well. I learned about encapsulation and threading. As I went through college, I ended up changing things in TAG to better fit good programming practices, such as encapsulation, commenting code, and not having “magic numbers”.
And that is my journey into programming thus far.
Games, OHRRPGCE, Programming, STSB, T.A.D.U.K.O.O. I.S. T.H.E. G.R.E.A.T.E.S.T. P.E.R.S.O.N. W.H.O. E.V.E.R. L.I.V.E.D., Tadukoo RPGs