Hello Steemit friends,
today i wanna dive a into a topic how we decide to be a active part of this world or not and what causes life changing decisions and why i think it has to do with your general mindset (which can change of course), your curiosity, creativity, joy and how you perceive the world around you from childhood on. I wanna bring a little light on my personal development. Don't forget to see the great video World Builder a the end of my post. It touches me each time i see it again!
In my life i'd often recognized that everybody is somehow wired to something and that is the result of a natural and logical development over decades. In my case i do it in retrospective because i don't noticed it for a long time. For me there were several decisions in time i made for myself how i wanna live and also how not. The search for my way began in the 80ties as school kid in 1982 7 years old. I think it was the first time i was a bit more aware of myself.
I got in contact with a thing we called later on LCD game. A device as big as a small calculator with a screen and some buttons. Below you see a very similar version of what i played. Mine was a landscape format in plastic colors skyblue and white.
12872 BT Toy Handheld Game Car Race - video by eastexit japan merchant
Nelsonic Car Race Game Watch - video by John GameWatchGuy
It was a gift from the so called "West" in East Germany. My parents had not the breath of a notion how significant that little game would be for me. With the second i turned it on i was totally immersed. I'd just listened to the bleeps and blurps and figured out what i have to do to get in control of the moving black symbols of cars, pavement strips and guard rails on the screen.. the time just flew by.. in the late evening the same day i crossed 9.999 points and noticed that the game had no further challenges for me to offer. Until that day the only media i'd known was Radio and TV.. but that..
interactive
.. thing was beating them all together. My parents told me at the next morning that they were looking after me in the night and saw that i was holding my hands in the air like playing with the LCD game..
Maybe i learned the following important things from that day:
Enthusiasm
..is the foundation of best performance (i really wanted to beat the game and was curious what's at the next level)
Persistence
..is necessary to get over nasty problems (i crashed uncounted times in the game but never gave up)
After that i was constantly looking after such games like my friends. One of them got Donkey Kong with TWO BIG SCREENS! OMG!
Game&Watch Donkey Kong - picture from wikipedia.org
Wow, i was begging him to give me some minutes but it was just a hope, the game was much sought-after. I think that was the root for the deep relationship to computers later. We were generation X, the one who get very early in touch with the rise of the home computers after the black hole with passive media TV or also called in Germany as "Glotze". The spark ignited a new awareness of that boring passive consumption of media but just in us the new generation. I observed our parents, grandparents and how often they consumed TV without any control of the content they watched. The only choice in such media was to change the channel.. how boring and brainsucking that was to see the dead eyes of people (don't get me wrong with games is the same if you're addicted and loose control of your life.. we also watched a lot TV as kids.. and i don't mention books i read in my youth too.. i describe just how i discovered computers and software and why i was so amazed)!
Then my cousin got a ZX Spectrum from his father. That was only possible because they belonged to the upper class in the GDR. We visited them mostly at birthdays and he showed me the newest games like the by cold war inspired ROM - Raid Over Moscow with it's snarling and annoying sound.. for me it was just wonderful how many different game elements and scenes this game had
Raid Over Moscow Walkthrough, ZX Spectrum - video by RZX Archive
and Saboteur!
Saboteur Walkthrough, ZX Spectrum - video by RZX Archive
another classic was The Brick and i remember that was the only game we played in the sitting room with the family on a TV screen. If you see the violent titles and content from the games above you may sense why they are not on public places.. although if you look at the graphics it were just a bunch of pixels with beepy sounds and music.
The Brick –ZX Spectrum– video by Old Games Database
What you guess.. i was a bit jealous of my cousin. That was a dream of a machine and he could play all day long withit?!.. The crazy thing was a year later or so he programmed his first games and proudly presented them.. i was amazed by his skills! He programmed something like a centipede clone with a playfield of mushrooms and trees and player controls.. oh man i thought he was genius at the time.. i was totally clueless how someone can realize that at the time..
..But there was another option for me.. I was also always a very sporty kid and teacher noticed that early. So i got into Judo in first class.. after the yellow belt and some competitions with bended arms and too many fights in my lower weight class right into handball.. after bearing the shouting rude trainer for some weeks into track&field athletics.. just to learn that my favorite type of sport javelin required too much endurance training and also got a sense what's behind the curtain of GDR's puppet theatre we should play a role in as adolescent, so i jumped right into table tennis.. where i'd fun for a few years to realize i never wanna be in competitive sports as my profession.
My best friend introduced me then to bodybuilding without any performance pressure we motivated each other and saw fast improvements.. big muscles yeah! It was the time the Terminator was our role model..
I think a big reason why i not choosed competitive sports was also the lasting impression by computer systems at the time which gives me the gut feeling
"There is something more important to do than collecting gold medals and fight with others for.."
I think this was also due a funfair experience in our town. There was that one wagon with all these arcade machines inside like Wonderboy, Outrun, Vigilante, Phoenix, King & Balloon, Pooyan,.. it looked similar to the picture below but with far less room inside the wagon. Many machines were attached to the walls as small boxes with no huge cabinet.
80ties Arcade - picture by http://www.damncoolpictures.com
Each of the machines opened a gate to another world.. it was just fascinating and i begged my parents to give me some time inside to study and play :)
While i grow up my interest for computers grow more and more but in contradiction to my parents. Today it's known that the so called generation X was mediator to the older generation for the brand new technology.. to put it mildly, it was tiring to explain the advantages of the new technology again and again and to fight for my interests.
But it was a natural urge to do for me each day because it burned in me like fire and no one could stop me. The rebellion had started in children's room and i was one of the leaders. As kid it was clear to me from the first second as i got in touch with a computer..
"THAT's the FUTURE! YOU CAN BUILD and PLAY EVERYTHING you CAN IMAGINE!"
and i also ask the question:
"Why are so many people blind for the magic of the new medium and are so bounded to that old passive TV junk food?"
If we look today, high quality content on demand is vital to get consumers attracted to watching TV. Youtube and now DTube are my favored media if i look for interesting and easy to digest information on the fly. I do not watch television for many years now or very very seldom with my wife and hardly ever the ten years before. To be honest, I HATE WATCHIN' TV just for the fun purpose from the bottom of my heart because i'd seen many people including my parents who vegetated, suffered or get into bad state because of such passive consumption of irrelevant content.. don't get me wrong i love watchin' a great movies i choose by myself, in the past i'd used Lovefilm with Bluerays, but i hate all the casual media produced just to hold a consumer in motionless position to placing advertisement right in front of him.. ok back to the past
In 1987 i stood in front of a computer shop and in the display window there was the Robotron KC 85/4 for over 1,300 East Mark i think
KC85/4 by Robotron - picture by http://www.old-computers.com
I was dreaming to get this computer and do all the crazy things computers can do.. especially gaming and maybe what my cousin was doing but it should not happen.. because first it was too expensive (now im happy i'd not bought that thing..) and second the fall of the Berlin Wall happened on November 9th in 1989. We were excited! Now that unknown world had opened its gates to welcome us and we knew from there all the rare and good things were sent to us (my mother had regular letters with another family and they sent us parcels from time to time.
Right after that we went the first time in life to the West to Hof a bavarian city near the border. We got welcome money and done some shopping. My first buy was at a newspaper shop in the railway station. I was very excited as i entered the shop. So many bright colored magazines, books and newspapers i'd never seen before. Guess what i was looking for with my 14 years and the hunger for computers?
https://archive.org/details/asm_magazine-1989-11
Computer magazines.. and BAMM! my heart was beating faster.. i saw the ASM - Aktueller Softwaremarkt issue 11/89 and dived in to devour page by page.. it was so bright colored with a ton of games, advertisement and information to the current computer systems on the market. I read the magazine on the way home a second time and uncount times at home until it was all written in my brain.
After that it was crystal clear to me that i have to buy an Amiga 500, no C64, no Atari ST, no regret having missed the KC85!
..a half year later i had my dream machine and many of my friends were also getting their computers. The ASM had now arrived in our newspaper shops in the East and was at the time the top computer magazine. It combined many interesting game reviews with screenshots and a thoughtout evaluation system with a rating scale from 0-12 in different categories like graphics, sound, playability. We were contantly looking for games with an average of 10 and beyond.. i think it trained me early on to
look for quality
in all things and do my homework before i decide to buy something.
If someone had no Amiga they had an Atari ST or C64. If your dad was a doctor he had one of these PC's with monochrome screen and when he was at work we tried to load some games .
Space Quest from Sierra on CGA graphics - picture from http://nerdlypleasures.blogspot.de/2014/03/the-monochrome-experience-cga-ega-and.html
The trade with copies of games was growing and also computer clubs were founded to exchange the best games and applications. It was a crazy time which lasted just 2 to 3 years i think. Beside heavy gaming i learned also many technical things like to what's an operating system, how can i paint pictures with Deluxe Paint
Deluxe Paint 4 for Amiga - picture preview Youtube author: AmigaStuffVids
or how the pattern music from Chris Hülsbeck was composed with tracker software or what is CPU, RAM, ROM, resolution, Color depth, fps, sprites, parallax scrolling, floppy disk, workbench, how to copy secured software with XCopy.. and so on. We were growing up as digital literate while playing games. We felt like a small elite of freaks nobody else understood what and why we were doing so much with that "box" (i heard often that word from my father if it was late and i'm still on the Amiga.. that was at the same time the dark side of computers de-socialization because nobody really knew how to handle the new addicting medium). My best friend learned programming on a C64 and bought also an Amiga after he saw my excitement for the machine again and again.
To me computers meant
Freedom!
freedom to escape to new worlds and create all things you can imagine and have much much fun! Whether you programmed, played, drawed or composed something.. computers had endless opportunities it was a great leap forward from a technological and cultural standpoint!
It was so different in comparison to the things we had in the past. I think it produced a total new meaning of life for many people like me. To be honest in the early 90ties i'd used computers mostly for gaming and related activities but that should change soon.. and i knew there was more but up to this point i had no idea what i really wanna do for more serious reasons.. i was too excited exploring the hundreds of games, apps and demos..
small anecdote.. one day i dived into a game called Twinworld by Ubisoft. I'd tried that game a few times before but died always after the first world. At that day I started somewhere in the forenoon and i was very concentrated and went smooth through each level. It worked like a breeze. The game designers had implemented some nice gimmicks, like the growing beard of the hero in the water world, a atmospheric and well suited soundtrack and fantastic looking graphics with varied level design. I was excited how easy i reached the final stage at that day.. after 6 or 7 hours i think, the credits rolled by i was so proud and satisfied and also excited how well i performed that day..
Twinworld by Ubisoft - picture from http://hol.abime.net
The Amiga died soon because of pirated software and bad marketing by Commodore (bad reputation for just gaming) and finance decisions and the PC took the lead. We changed our hardware and also our software but the positive mindset pro computers remained. I saved 5.000 bucks for a 486 DX2/66 system with mystical VEGA graphics board. Look today what you have to pay for a regular gaming PC, far less than 1.000 bucks. But i thought not twice at the time, i MUST have that PC and i worked hard for the money. My parents taught me that i have to work for it and i'm thankful for that experience. I was wired to the scene now. But everything changed and some nostalgia remained, because the PC's had far less sound capabilities for example and there were far less cool 2D games..
In 1993 i was in a Abitur class DOOM arrived our floppy drives on 4 1.44 MByte discs. Everybody knew it was a groundbreaking new 3D game never seen before.. and HELL IT WAS! We played that until our hands were so contracted that we barely could move our fingers.
Doom Logo, picture from wikipedia.org
Now i was a student and had learned how to write code, worked with Excel and Word and many other tools and followed the 3D scene with games.
small anecdote.. at the university it was around 1998 i think the computer pools were perfect to do LAN battles. Duke Nukem 3D and Command & Conquer were the rage at the time. The administrators were also so excited that they most of the time accepted our sessions after the lectures in the evening. One called "Waster" as nickname had always almost twice as much hits in Duke Nukem 3D as we.. not funny! The admins were just intervening if we downloaded too many MBytes of data at once. It was a very short period of time because i was interested in more serious development after a while..
Gradually my interest in gaming diminished up to a point where i stopped it completely at least for a time. I recognized more and more the rule based concepts behind games and how they create the addiction with a well thought out reward system to adress our lowest instincts. Another more important fact was since the Arcade revolution in the 80ties and great 16-Bit era with much more refined graphics and sound and the new 3D genres like egoshooters and also the real-time strategy genre the industry has gone mainstream just to recycle the genuine game concepts of the past again and again for the masses. Shooter after shooter popped out with the same mechanics a little tweak here and there and enhanced graphics.. but nothing really appealing to me! Duke Nukem 3D was already a imitation of Doom with some new features like the LAN mode.
My younger brother Gerd introduced me to 3D Studio R4 and showed me how 3D models can be created. It was around 1999. It was interesting but at that point i don't know what the real benefit should be to create some models inside that complicated piece of software.. but i got a sense it may be important in the future..
3D Studio R4 - picture preview by Youtube author: valcaron
It was in my first semesters a the university and we had a course for factory planning. After all the paperwork, finally we had to create a 2,5D (yes NO 3D) layout for all the equipment with a software called CADKON. Uhhh.. as i saw that piece of s...oftware from the past which produced isometric views with green vector lines on a black canvas of our careful planned factory i instantly asked the question:
What? That's so horrible! We live in the year 2000 and there must be software who can do much better than a few ugly lines, right?
I refused to use that piece of software because it was incomprehensible why i and my fellow students in the group should waste their time with such outdated things. AHH! like a spark and i remembered .. 3D Studio .. it was nearly two years ago and my brother was now used to model and render. The entrepeneur awakened in me. On the next weekend i talked to him, explained my idea to do something in the course to show it can be much better.. the problem was.. i was not able to use 3D Studio at the time and it took a whole afternoon to convince my brother to do the work for me.. but it paid off like magic. We talked about the process, what was lacking, what could be impressive to show in an animation and so wie wrote a storyboard on one page he would realize.
After a few weeks my brother Gerd presented me his model.. and what the heck he'd done! First he imported the bad model from CADKON as DXF then he reworked everything, materials, light, geometries and made some really fantastic animations for a forklift in ego view, which showed the optimized material flow and also a Flyby at the factory site (we'd discussed in the storyboard before). He even modeled a fire pond with a sky reflecting material. I was amazed how well our project worked out and imagined what my fellow students and my professor would say if they see this. My brother rendered and cutted all the scenes to a video, i think we did also labeling for the CD.. and then the day of delivery had arrived. I explained my professor what i'd done because we don't accepted the bad CADKON visualization. He smiled and loaded the video..
CD label and screenshots from the rendered video 400x300 pixels 5min length, 2001
and guess what? He was amazed! he said something like "Mr. Riedel that's fantastic!". Back in the lecture room he gratulated us for the extra work and he smiled and we smiled.. we were a proud group of people as you could imagine..
small anecdote.. After a few days i met my professor again and he turned to me and said "Every time i'm in my office at the PC i'm watching your video!" I was grinning and happy..
What i'd learned from that?
1st
don't accept the current state!
2nd
convincing other people can do magic things!
3rd
special abilities matter!
After that experience i got a sense what's possible with such software and how others can benefit from the results. From that moment on it was clear to me i can do that by myself and even better! I want do that by myself and will learn to use the software! It wasn't long that my professor ask me to work with him in planning projects and so i was even more driven to LEARN THAT SOFTWARE! It would be the most intense learning years of my life. I dived into 3ds Max (former 3D Studio)
small anecdote.. the managing director of the office i was accommodated for a few months announced one day that he offers free LAN playing sessions for all employees of his company after work. I was not interested because i was burning to learn all the tools and skills to realize amazing products and i remembered the time at the university where we played LAN games 3 years ago. It was just outdated..
3D STUDIO MAX KINETIX DEMO 1996 - video by MoisesManBR
, Inventor, photo editing, video cutting, got a work notebook with a (at the time) powerful GeForce 1 graphics board and all the necessary software. I worked and learned like crazy. 3D worlds popped out daily after a while. It was a steep learning curve driven by the urge
I can do everything in 3D!
Learn and Burn!
Do what you love to do!
It ended up that i'd done planning projects in foreign country, visualization for a few big companies and also started several projects in freetime like a game development for a 2D game rendered from 3D models,
2D game Hoowaball - all backgrounds and game elements rendered with 3ds Max, 2003
a video conferencing software and other 3D related things. From each of the project i learned a lot, to use new software, manage myself and get more responsibility with growing experience and abilities.
small anecdote: It was one morning after a long night of mouse clicks and writing and i was quite tired and hungry. I was in the kitchen and opened the fridge to take some eggs for a protein rich meal. One of the eggs slipped off my hands and smashed on the ground. In a fraction of a second my brain decided to tell me UNDO press UNDO serious! .. i laughed about myself for a few seconds.. and as i'm writing that i'm laughing again :)
The Total Discharge
But.. i was a bit too fast.. and i burned out like the brimstone of a match.
I'd never had such experience up to that point. It started with the feeling to know everything and ended in a complete stop of all projects and works for a week without any feeling of guilt or responsibility. It was just a natural reaction of my system after that hard ride.. and i continued my journey after the rest.
Eventually it lead me to found a new company with people also driven by the urge to improve something and to bring value to the world. With visTABLE® i realized my dream to let people create their own worlds, to be more specific factories in 3D with a library of high quality model assets.
real time 3D visualization visTABLE®touch
a small anecdote, you'll see the picture above?.. it was around 2006 and i was in Stuttgart to realize the model for a research institute. It took around 3 weeks on-site, hotel and office and finally we took it to our planning system. I remember i was working late at night with a co-worker.. delivery schedule was next morning.. we were the only in the building and worked on hundreds of models.. finally when the sun roses and the work was almost finished we welcomed our cofounders in the morning.. strictly accurate i welcomed them.. my co-worker was lying right in front of the door in the office.. sleeping on the hard ground.. he was simply exhausted from the night hustle but it was done! Somebody was perplexed as he saw him and asked "He really sleeps?!" i answered straightforward with a grin "Yes he do!" :)
My journey in 3D continued into the field of Virtual Reality and to sum it up, the following video describes very good what i feel is possible in 3D and VR or what had me driven from the beginning..
World Builder (HD) - video by BranitFX and Lucamax Pictures
Currently VR goes mainstream with the consoles and PC especially Playstation VR and i think soon (a few years) we see much more appropiate hardware for that field which will immerse ourself like HELL! Just like me with my first LCD video game ;) .. if you got enthusiasm for a thing mature technology is not the most important thing, it's more the belief or i say feeling that something is great, because i think VR is still in it's infancy but is already great fun!
Cheers my friends!
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unmarked pictures/animation from giphy.com, pixabay.com