Your AHA! moments

[Collective Foal]

Post any sudden Eureka! moment you have or had in the past. For example:

 

Today during Spanish, I discovered the solution to my problem of being unable to initiate a conversation. I was looking over my quiz (16/20) and I asked one of my friends, who was already having a conversation with another friend. Now, mind you, jumping into conversations randomly is incredibly awkward to everybody. But when I asked her for help, she turned her attention to me for a second and helped me figure out the answers. Then we continued talking about people and then Dr. Who. Now wait a second.

WE continued talking

 

Holy shit! It dawned on me about 2 minutes later, I JUST JUMPED INTO A CONVERSATION SEAMLESSLY! SWAG!!!

 

So that's my AHA! moment. Have fun!

[Blue]

3D Programs are tools, not canvases.

Computer Graphics is a technical discipline, not an art.

 

Took me five years to realize that. Almost always, it's not "Turning paintings into interactive pictures" but "Converting 2D art into a dynamic 3D medium". If that sounds boring, complicated and unintuitive, that's because it is.

 

It made me cry on the inside a little too.

Edited December 1, 2011 by Guest (see edit history)

[Pinkie Pie]

I have lot of 'Aha!' moments, but they're more like 'ohhhhhh' moments.

 

I tried for 15 minutes to get a ball down off my roof with longer and longer sticks. Then I went and threw an even smaller ball at it and it fell off.

 

Oh and I said 'Aha!' somewhere in there.

[Jek Jek Roo]

Hmmmmm I can't remember.

I had lot of them in my life.

 

Those the biggest ones which I wont forget:

 

When I noticed Doug TenNapel is a creator of the Neverhood and also Earthworm Jim. I was like "Holy Shit, it can't be, no way, OMG..." only vecause I thought those are totally diffrent things.

 

And when I read Robin Atkin Downes made a voice for the Medic. I was okay with that, but when I found he also was the Prince from The Warrior Within, my brain exploded full of joy. I used to be a big fan of Pop games so...

 

And when I finally got the Pazaak rules. I was like "AHA! Oh so that's how it works!"

 

On the early days when I started listening to OST music: Oww so Harry Greggson Williams composed the music both for the Chronicles of Narnia and Sindbad! Aha, that's why they are so similiar xD"

[Axeldeath]

When I learned how to play Caravan in Fallout: NV, damn that game is nerdy. A collectible card game within an RPG >_>.

[Jek Jek Roo]

When I learned how to play Caravan in Fallout: NV, damn that game is nerdy. A collectible card game within an RPG >_>.

 

Teach me, please!

[Axeldeath]

When I learned how to play Caravan in Fallout: NV, damn that game is nerdy. A collectible card game within an RPG >_>.

 

Teach me, please!

 

http://community.eu.playstation.com/t5/Fallout/A-Wasteland-Guide-on-How-to-Play-Caravan/td-p/11753499

[Lord Sinister]

I get a lot of these 'AHA!' moments with programming, often because the problem can (at least seem to be before it's sometimes revealed to be something stupidly obvious) hard to solve that the moment of the solution being revealed, whether I'm kicking myself or thinking 'FINALLY I'VE GOT IT' it's still 'AHA!'.

 

One moment I was thinking about was where I was using something in the Windows API to get the time, and was passing the time back as a wchar_t pointer I think it was, from my time function (which was kept in its own separate source file with some other functions). Except when I tried to access the value I'd returned, it appeared to be just junk. Random memory. Useless. This confused me repeatedly, so I stepped through the code line by line. According to the VS2010 debugger, the variable had the right data stored RIGHT UP TO when I wanted to access it or do anything with it (including copy it). The moment I did anything with it, it became useless.

 

Eventually the problem was revealed to be the time function. The variable I was returning was created in the function. When the function concluded, the variable created in the function was presumably junked, overwritten, cast in to the void, whatever, it was useless. Because it was a pointer, anything referring to that variable also became junk because they were all pointing at that same piece of memory. Something like that, it's been a while since this event.

 

Anyway, the solution was to declare the variable outside of the function as a global variable in my miscFunctions source file. It may seem obvious now, but damn, that thing took me HOURS to work out what the problem was. Very much an 'AHA!' moment!