I have been feeling bored with 3D game programming...I got so damn far on my own in just high school, more than most college students, but the intensity of it all just broke me down after a while...but then I started watching some interviews with John Carmack, and he was starting to talk about all of this technical stuff about optimizing stencil shadow volumes and re building binary space partition trees without regenerating vertices, and a 'general triangle re-optimizer', and I didn't realize how far I had come until I watched that interview and knew exactly what he was talking about. I wish game programming had ANY appeal left, because I basically just hate it now, but yet I've got SO DAMN FAR ON MY OWN. Nowadays you basically have to write a Doom3 renderer with all of the intense graphics stuff in order to have written something worthwhile (and, yes, I know of 3 people that are doing just that with much success) and it's just lost all of the fun, because now when I add something I don't think "wow, hey, that's neat" instead I think "wow, that sucks, I should've written something better, heck I didn't even INVENT this because somebody has already programmed this before...i suck"