Student to Professional in (under) $1000, or "The Right Tools for the Job"

The Transistion
In the last 3 months, I've realized that making the jump from "Student" to "Professional" is quite a transition. The hardest part has probably been fixing that sleep-schedule and getting my body onto a 9-5 workday... Aside from less tangible things like time-management, and work flow changes, I've had to completely overhaul my toolset.

Now this may be something one doesn't really think about much as a programmer. All you need is a computer with a text editor, right? Wrong!..

Suffice it to say with my outdated hardware I couldn't even open the TSE demo's and I was afraid my 5-year old HDD's would die at any moment. On the software side, the commercial compiler that I didn't actually own, is no longer supported. This did not make for an efficient workflow

New Hardware
I'll try not to bore you with the details, but I've spent most of the time since everyone else left for GDC replacing this stuff. I had bought a high-end Pentium-IV several years ago, and had slotted in my own video card and HDDs so those were the main bottle necks. Here's the new hardware list:

Hardware:
2x 250gig Seagate SATA-150 HDD's
Adaptec 2-port SATA RAID controller PCI-card
2x 256mb DDR 400 RAM
eVGA - nVidia-7800GS
Netgear FVS318 Network Switch and VPN Firewall Router

The new harddrives are arranged in RAID-1 for redundancy (and improved read-times), which gives me peace-of-mind at night, if nothing else.. My RAM is doubled to 1-gig now. The 10/100 router will replace a hand-me-down base-10 switch.

The nVidia-7800 is the best AGP card available, and has made such a difference! As the back-ported "base-line model" the price is a cool $285 now. The card weighs in somewhere around 5 pounds, so it feels like your getting your money's worth too! ;-)

Forum Thread: What video card should I buy


Software:
TSE
Half-Life 2

I immediately went out and bought TSE. Haven't gotten to far into it yet but now I can browse my very own shader engine, at my leisure. I hear a new release is "eminent" so I'm going to wait for that probably.

Next I bought "Half-Life 2 Game of the Year Edition". This is probably the best-value I've ever gotten for a game. The box includes the original Half-life(that I never played) ported to the new engine, and a full edition of Counter-Strike SOURCE. All that aside it includes the SOURCE-sdk so I have another game engine to play with when I get to it.

Free-Software:
Microsoft Visual C++ (v.8.0 / 2005) Express Edition
Subversion

MSVC-EE
Well neither TSE nor SOURCE-sdk support older compilers. So I downloaded the newer MSVC-EE. On first-glance I actually like it better than MS-VC6 because it's stripped down and doesn't seem to get in the way as much. I haven't gotten too far into it yet, and it takes some hacking to make either engine forwards compatible to the 2005 compiler. If all goes well, I will probably buy Visual-Studio Professional 2005 so I have all the "right tools". It would be the first Microsoft product I've bought since Office-2000.

Forum Thread: What Compiler should I buy

Subversion
By now I have about 20 zipped and dated copies of different TGE-sdk's and no version control. Turns out my host ( Dreamhost already has Subversion installed. I've spent quite a bit of time figuring out how I can import all my different TGE work into a single TGE-repository. I think I've finally gotten it down but not without a fight.

SO since before GDC I've gotten very little development on Enviro-Torque done. Now, however, with faster (and redundant) HDD's, off-site version-control on a professionally managed server, a 100mb/s connection, forwards-looking compilers and SDK's, and the 'fastest video-card in the east' I'm expecting development to leap forward hardware-failure free!!! (knocks on wood..)

Total Cost: approx: $800.00


Thanks for reading,
Steven
www.stevengpeterson.com


ps.
Don't buy from Monarch-Computers, they billed my account same-day but didn't ship the "in-stock" video card for a full week. Based on several calls to customer-service I think it's only a handful of guys running a somewhat fly-by-night operation.

On the other hand Tigerdirect.com offered a great buying experience!