trilinearnz

The PTO doesn't have to be all or nothing. Would a more strategic 2-week (or 1-week) break be better received?

Also as a more passive job-seeking strategy, you could leverage your professional network of past co-workers to let you know if any opportunities come up (always had a lot of success with this personally). That way you can dip your toes into the job pool without having to switch focus completely.

Extremely well said.

It may be helpful to consider the matter from the lens of 'what is my core competency'. I had similar existential questions recently, and pursued an MBA to that end (after realising that I enjoyed analysing people behaviour in companies and thought that might translate into a management career). By the end of it, I realised that I was simply able to 'do' the job of a dev much more naturally than becoming a manager. At that stage, the problem changed from 'what do I want to do' to 'what can I actually do'.

I'm sure you are capable of switching careers and skillsets more successfully than I was, but for me, metaphorically speaking, after peering over the hedge, I came to be content with the color of the grass on my own side.

Is this about the original Sim City, Sim City 2000, or does it cover all of them in a general way?

My advice would be to dip your toes into some of the languages / frameworks that the "specific tech stack" jobs are wanting, so you at least have some exposure to it. Then, you can focus on selling your wealth of general programming experience and transferrable skills to bridge the gap.

A good lens might be to view those positions as senior first, and technology second, even if you don't necessarily voice that perspective in the cover letter / interview.

The hip swivel worked well, functionally, but I always lamented how stiff the character animation looked because of it.

Was the vertex compression responsible for the wobbling/swimming effect you'd see on models, when running Q1 and Q2 in OpenGL mode?

That is an excellent resource. Thank you for sharing

Agree with this. For me, being able to tweak Quake (when it came out) was massive. You could poke around in QuakeC, make a funny model / map etc. The fact that customisability extended to it's two sequels was even better.

To a lesser extent, even being able to modify pretty much any game mechanic via the pull-down Console was amazing too. A great entryway to programming for the young enthusiast!

Always was a wonderful advantage to owning a PC over a console. That, and the accompanying utilities you could combine with the game, to create new graphics, sounds etc.

Similar thing in Terminator: Skynet back in the day. Shoot at the moon and you get an "Ow!" message appearing in your status area. A few more potshots and it literally falls out of the sky - great stuff ;)

Certainly id's code is clean and well-structured, however I always had a tough time trying to grok it as a layperson. Comments (those within the functions) are relatively sparse, and the code often contains quite cryptic expressions that are somewhat bewildering to those without an high understanding of 3D graphics.

This, of course, makes perfect sense as an output from an industry leader in the field (Carmack). However it definitely requires a lot of foreknowledge and, dare I say it, a mathematical bent to follow with confidence.

This nomenclature was often used in licensed Quake codebases to indicate places where a vendor would put their own Mission Pack-specific alterations into the code. I guess they just 'up-merged' the modified code to the main id source when they were done, or perhaps the changes were done by id on behalf of them?

I believe there were similar bits in the Quake 1 source, e.g. for Scourge of Armagon (Mission Pack No. 1) you would see things like '// HIPNOTIC'.

Great story, thank you for sharing. I had a similar experience merely as an attendee at a local meetup. I submitted an idea for a quick talk, performed well, and this set me up well for a job with an outfit whose lead developer was in attendance. So, can vouch for meetups as being a great way to give your career a bump if you have some latent energy and are looking for a change :)

For things like doctor's appointments and being at home for tradespeople, I just put them in my work Outlook calendar as 'private' appointments. I may also make an alarm on my phone for 10-20 minutes beforehand, just in case I'm away from my desk. Nothing beyond that.