1 Year BonzaiSoftware.com - How it started
by Michael Horsch
“Doom Is Guilty!“
I was very young when I played Id Software's Doom I and Doom II for the first time. It fascinated me for years, it had huge levels with lots of enemies, really great music and the atmosphere was very evil. At this time, I was 8 or 9, I had absolutely no understanding of computer games and how they worked, but I wanted to make my own. I thought artists would paint every possible frame you could see and then the player position and the view direction define which of all the images you see. So I started painting...
“The Magic Word“
...and soon I noticed that making a game this way would be too much work
My next idea was that there are special programs which do this work. Of course I didn't knew that there were already editors, but I knew that I wanted to make such a “game making program“, still without knowing how computer graphics worked.
Then, when I read a computer game magazine, I saw the magic word for which I was looking for years, the word which describes what I wanted to do: “Game Engine“.
“Learn C In 24 Hours“
But how do you make programs? My father told me that there are programming languages. I thought if I was able to understand such a programming language I would be able to make my own Doom with just a few clicks.
A few years later I had a “Game Programming Starter Kit“. It contained a compiler,a complete game engine and a book: “Learn C in 24 Hours“. I was able to read the book within 24 hours, but I understood nothing. So I read the book again and again, copied the samples, modified them and soon I was able to write my own small programs. Later I also learned C++ and some other languages, but I still wasn't able to make a 3D game.
“Give Me 3D!“
Fortunately the Internet had to offer many informations. From game magazines I already knew that Direct3D and OpenGL can be used for making 3d graphics for games. So I had to choose one of the two APIs. I decided to use OpenGL simply because it seemed to be easy to learn and powerful. It was a big step for me from simple console programs to a complete 3D application. I had to learn many new things and I realized that making a game engine wasn't as easy as I thought.
“A Bunch Of Shapes Connected By Lines“
After another year of writing some useless 3d programs I thought it would be a good idea to write a small game engine to better understand the techniques behind a game. The Combat Engine was born. At this time, I had no idea of software engineering(SE), so started programming it from scratch. The first two versions had some bugs and my lack of SE-Skills made it almost impossible to add new effects. But I learned from my mistakes and when I started the third version I even had a pseudo class diagramm. I wrote an editor and added support for shaders and stencil shadows, at this time the (very young) Doom3-Engine was the only commercial engine which also supported these effects.
“It's a Bonzai!“
I was proud of my work and so I decided to make my own homepage to show it to the world. HTML was no problem for me, but finding a host was a big problem. There were a lot of free hosts, but they didn't allow me to offer downloads and the traffic was limited. After testing some of them without any good results a friend offered me to host my site on his server. I also registered two free domains: bonzaisoftware.co.nr and bonzaisoftware.de.vu. Some old demos still have these URLs in their window title. Now I had enough space and unlimited traffic, but the server was so old and slow that it took minutes to load everything. Unfortunately the server died and I was forced to find a new host.
I finally found a host which was cheap and had to offer everything I needed. On October 30th 2004 I made the first news post and BonzaiSoftware.com was born.
“One Year Later“
Now it's time for a small review of the last year. It is nice to see that I have visitors from the whole world. BonzaiSoftware.com was visited 248.661 times and the visitor count is growing. I think this is a good amount for being one year online. The most popular pages are the water demo and the water tutorial page followed by the glow and RTT-FX demos. I have spent much time on my site and I think it was worthwhile.
“The Future“
Currently I'm working on a relief mapping demo (see the forum for details) which will be released in the next weeks. After that I'll continue planning the Lost City-Engine and the game. Of course I'll also continue to release new OpenGL demos and maybe some smaller games.
I hope you'll have another year fun with my site and the demos,
Michael Horsch