Re:The Making of Elite
by jacquesm on Saturday June 14, 2014 @07:21AM
(#7892563)
I spent weeks if not months first playing it and then taking it apart bit-by-bit to see what made it tick. It was like putting your hand in a bag and coming up with one gemstone after another, crazy optimizations incredibly inventive coding and a whole load of easter eggs.
The program did a series of rounds to decrypt itself after loading, with every new round encoded inside the previous one. After manually unwinding the first 10 or so of these onion like layers there was a message for the foolhardy:
"Does your mother know you're doing this?"
Or something to that effect. My buddy Gideon and myself knew right at that moment just how far we were outclassed.
That didn't stop us though and taking elite apart taught me lots about programming. Especially about programming the impossible in a severely constrained environment.
If you want to really learn how to become a better programmer constrain your resources and then make it work anyway.
The program did a series of rounds to decrypt itself after loading, with every new round encoded inside the previous one. After manually unwinding the first 10 or so of these onion like layers there was a message for the foolhardy:
"Does your mother know you're doing this?"
Or something to that effect. My buddy Gideon and myself knew right at that moment just how far we were outclassed.
That didn't stop us though and taking elite apart taught me lots about programming. Especially about programming the impossible in a severely constrained environment.
If you want to really learn how to become a better programmer constrain your resources and then make it work anyway.