» About

As a programmer having code, downloads, sites everywhere, I wanted to merge all my projects into one site. This site would become my own small "knowledge base". My Visual Basic optimization site "VB Fibre" had regular downtime and errors as well when it was hosted at a free hosting provider. Second, the e-mail address problems became quite tedious. Every year the free mail host would stop it's business, or start asking money. With my own domain these problems would be completely gone.

Also, I wanted to have a site where I could host some of my screenshots and other images without using the bandwidth from those free webhosting services, like where Quadrant Wars is hosted. These services often use lots of poups and flashy banners to generate some revenue, and I did not want to have that with my own private site.

In October 2003 the site finally came online.

Since the start of Persistent Realities a lot has happened. Many subsites can be found under this domain. For example the site for YALG, Yet Another Laser Game or my Weather station which is wired to a computer to make all kinds of graphs. VB Fibre has expanded quite too, and even contains an inline ASM (assembler) section about mixing Visual Basic and ASM.

Please review the terms of use and site policies here. The author of this site is Almar Joling. Currently 23 years old and living in the north of The Netherlands.

I started with programming when I was about 13, in Visual Basic 4. After a while I knew the language pretty well and started working onsome small applications and even participated in some small contests, like the game programming contest of VB Explorer (see "Pinguin" in the code section)

Meanwhile I started to experiment with HTML to work on some sites. Later I worked on ASP, PHP, (N)ASM, ASM combined with VB (see VB Fibre), and now I'm in the process of learning C++ while creating a game together with DirectX. I prefer to learn new programming languages by simply playing around with it, and use a manual when needed.

I've spent a few years on RentACoder projects - A site where programmers can bid on doing some certain work. I've worked on various programs there like Instant Messengers, or tools that extract information from certain sites and inserting it in a custom database. My score is quite good there, since I became a 'Top Coder'. Right now I think the site is too crowded with programmers. People demand huge sites for an apple. So I'm not participating there anymore, unless someone invites me to an interesting private bid. Those are still welcome! For what it's worth, here is my RentACoder Resume. 32 Excellent ratings on 32 projects.

In the 7 years that I have been programming, my interests often went to the game programming. In 1998 I started on, Quadrant Wars, on contests like the earlier mentioned VB Explorer one or the GameDev.Net's "Four elements contest" (See 'Elements of Nature'). Right now I'm working on a 'Western game'. A RTS game that is set in the American 'Wild west' period, using C++ and DirectX9.

I have worked with DirectDraw, Direct3D "Retained Mode" and DirectGraphics. It all started with the DirectX5/6 typelib for Visual Basic which Patrice Scribe made.
My wish is to eventually try to become a game programmer at a game development company. This is also the reason why I'm working on my C++ now. C++ is still the industry standard language when it comes to game development.

Next to game development I can also be found doing all kinds of other programming. Things which aren't mentioned on this site. Recently I have developped a full functional Web spider in PHP, spidering the web nice and clean following 'robots.txt rules', and putting everything in a Xapian database to create a simple web search engine.

Currently I'm working on another web project, which involves website statistics. But different than the usual ones.

www.persistentrealities.com