Just a few years after Comanche was released I was sitting in a high school C++ class, content to explore the language with text adventures and RPGs. 3D graphics seemed vaguely mystical to me.
Next to me, however, was someone who seemed light years ahead of me. He had programmed his own voxel terrain rendering just like this. I had no earthly idea at the time how that was even possible.
In retrospect, he was not so much farther along, but he was passionate enough about game development to read books about these techniques and work out the details. I've always wondered what happened to him, and if he ever followed his passion to become a game developer...
Never get tired of writing this but people probably get tired of reading it - I played Gunship on the C64 when it came out, and about 20 years later I worked with one of the guys who helped write it, and he was IIRC 16 years old at the time he worked on Gunship (which humbling enough was my age when I was playing it).
We had Turbo Pascal taught by a math teacher, who read to us straight from a course binder and admitted to literally drawing the short straw in the teacher's lounge when they were figuring out who had to teach the computer class..
Hah.. our guy barely knew the material... My friend and I ended up teaching the recursion module to the rest of the class because he couldn't wrap his head around it.
I did c++ in high school in the late 90s. No teacher, just a textbook. The "teacher" for the computer lab just handed each of us a book and told us to show him something cool every day.
So I ended up doing bits of QBasic, Visual Basic, and C++ (since all three books were in the room, and QB was easier to generate flashy visuals with, as a beginner).
Our school actually had a pretty good programming curriculum for the time: Basic, Pascal, and C++. Unfortunately the instructor for all three progressed through the topics at an utterly glacial pace. As a result I would finish the assignment in the first 10 minutes and alternate between helping others and surreptitiously playing Master of Orion from my homework diskette.
Had a similar experience. VB class in HS was my first programming experience, but me and another guy finished the end of course project in the first month. It was a playable tic-tac-toe game. Instructor said if we made the computer actually play a side, we'd get 100s for the class. Took me a day or two to write an algorithm for it combining identical game states, the other guy spent a few days making an absurd mess of nested if statements to cover every possibility.
Spent the rest of the year alternating between making more games (a clone of Space Invaders and then the beginnings of a clone of Legend of Zelda) and playing an NES emulator, which the instructor overlooked. Probably wouldn't have approved if she'd noticed we had it saved locally in the school machine and the emulator was called NESticle, complete with an icon depicting a hairy sack...
My high school had a single programming class led by our Physics teacher. UCSD Pascal running on ancient IBM PCs. Having already taught myself Pascal 1+ year prior, it was kind of a waste, but I thought it would be a better elective than metal shop. I did all the exercises and the exam after the first week, so the teacher agreed to let me do whatever I wanted to on the computers the rest of the term as long as I wasn't disruptive.
On a side note, fast forward to today, I've taken up metal working as a hobby and kind of wished I had taken metal shop instead. Except for the fact that the highlight of metal shop in my year was when a bunch of knuckleheads ground another kid's teeth down in the grinder while the teacher wasn't looking. So, actually, yea I'm glad I opted for computer lab.
We had the art teacher teaching us how to fill a form on a Thomson MO5. He screamed when I entered some random data instead of the ones he told us to write because it could brick the computer. :(
Next to me, however, was someone who seemed light years ahead of me. He had programmed his own voxel terrain rendering just like this. I had no earthly idea at the time how that was even possible.
In retrospect, he was not so much farther along, but he was passionate enough about game development to read books about these techniques and work out the details. I've always wondered what happened to him, and if he ever followed his passion to become a game developer...