Difficulty in 3d Programming

I remember about eight years ago trying to wrap my mind around 3d graphics.  It took me months to finally make a wireframe model of a rotating fan.  I remember a few years later finally understanding enough to make a 3d castle with very poor graphics, and that took me an entire semester.  It is amazing how things that seem trivial now were so very difficult before I had as much knowledge on the topic.

I could code up a wireframe model of a rotating fan in a matter of hours.  Well, I would be using my ABLE library which has a few graphics functions made already.  From scratch, it would probably take me all day, but that is much better than the month it would have taken me eight years ago.  As for the castle, I can make it in a week's time.

Now I am trying to understand and implement real-time ray casting for better 3d graphics.  Since none of the graphics libraries I am familiar with support it, I am coding it from the ground up.  It has taken me an entire week to finally get a basic understanding of how it should work, and I wonder how much longer it will take me.  Furthermore, I wonder if, ten years from now, I will be able to accomplish the task in a matter of hours!

For now, though, I will ponder how to shoot a virtual ray through the viewport from the eye to the objects in the scene.  Next time, I will already know.

Hopefully soon, I will be creating a game of some sort.  Of course, that depends on if I can get the frame rate of the raycaster to a reasonable amount.  I don't know what the plot of the game will be yet, but the graphics will be awesome!