Each time I want to apologize for double posting, there ends up being at least 1 post in between the first one, and the one I'm typing! haha! So THIS time, I won't even assume I'm double posting.
SLJ, I guess it's just a talent of mine, everyone's good at something. To be perfectly honest, and this isn't intended to sound the way it probably sounds, I have people telling me I'm brilliant all the time, but I don't really feel like I'm extra smart. To me, I just feel like I'm surrounded by a lot of dumb people, and I'm just normal. Haha, if you knew the people I work with, it would be hard not to think they were stupid. I have a theory actually. For many programmers, I think they come up with the code as they are writing it. This means they have to occasionally stop to figure things out, or they code themselves into a dead end, and they must go change things in other places that no longer work correctly, now that they've been adding to the program. There are times that I do that, but the vast majority of times, I have almost completely written the program in my head before I ever sat down at the computer. I'll take a shower, do the dishes, or unload trucks at work, and I'll fill my head with pages upon pages upon pages of working code. When I finally do get to the computer, I can just type it out as quickly as you could type out a paragraph you had memorized. A great deal of code can be typed in a relatively short period of time this way. What actually slows me down, is if I keep sitting at the computer after i've typed out what I had in my head. The new stuff I come up with isn't up to the same standard, because I think I focus too much on typing it since I'm actually able to. When I can't be at the computer, it forces me to work out all of the kinks automatically, so I don't waste time coding bugs. I've written entire games, from memory, that didn't have a single bug. Haha, I'm still new to audio games, so my coding skills aren't quite that good yet.
I don't have a game engine, no. I could make myself one, but I think that would bother me. By typing it out from scratch, I don't have to worry about old code meshing with anything I thought up while I was away from the computer. The most I ever do, is copy and paste in a few functions that never really change. Loading maps is a good example, and I just grabbed that from Temporal since these maps load in the same way.
Believe me, I will continue to work toward some super cool, massively multiplayer online world! haha, that would rule!