William Denniss (CEO Tank Software) - Programming Autobiography
Founded in April 2001 with the purchase of the TankSoftware.com domain
name, Tank Software hosts a collection of software, including several
fun games, and some useful applications. It is mostly the work of William
Denniss (founder), however other contributions are accepted. Will's first
program was made at the end of 1997, in the form of a Visual Basic Black
Jack game, followed the next year by Tank Commander (first edition appearing
on the CASIO graphics calculator in a BASIC derivative, and then ported
to QBasic). The first versions of these programs were actually made without
the use of arrays, something that was quickly changed when he leant of
them, but as you might imagine the black jack source code looked worse
than a dogs' breakfast. 1999 saw the addition of only 1 program, another
DOS QBasic program Naughts and Crosses, with its unbeatable computer mode!
(This is true, and was tested by setting up a match between a dumbest
computer who uses completely random moves, and the smartest (unbeatable)
computer. The match was then played, with a staple on the enter key, and
when looked at the next day, over 20,000 rounds had been played, with
the unbeatable computer either winning or drawing each of them.). In 2000
the language of Java was added into William's repertoire, courtesy of
the UQ subject Introduction to Programming, lectured by the legendary
Rodger Duke. However only Labyrinth was completed, as in second semester
2000, Will's mind was polluted by Databases. At the very end of 2000,
and the start of 2001 however he fired up Kawa, and started again in earnest,
making a few changes to Labyrinth and the creation of the java version
of Number Translator. With his understanding and skills honed, he started
work on his biggest project (and one he had wanted to do since summer
1998): WillPang. This so far has been his biggest project, and has been
completed to a stage at where the single-player mode is fully operational.
The only thing not complete or stated at this stage (early 2002), is the
2-player mode, which may be added some time later. 2001 saw the addition
of many excellent programs such as The Bleating Game, Morse Coder, A Simple
Quoter, Tank Commander 2, and WillPangGBE edition, written in C, and compiled
into Z80 Assembler code (for the gameboy). After a bit of a lul at the
end of 1001, while he pursued his 3D animation hobby in the form of The
Bleating Sheep, 2002 is looking promising with work being done on the
three-dimensional (using OpenGL for java) java game: Tank Commander 3,
where the battlefield is viewed from a completely different perspective:
1st person.