Are you guys hardcore coders? Do you love to code into the wee hours of the morning? I'm just curious to know if the stereotypes of game industry programmers is accurate.

What's the longest coding session you ever did?

I would say I've done at least 11 if not more 24 hour coding sessions. The almighty deadline rules over mortal lives, it cares not for your sleep or your sanity it just wannnttss.

But in all actuality I find its more productive for me to work standard hours with a lot of short healthy breaks. I know playing a 20 frag round against bots in quake 3 kept my sanity through some long hauls. The best coders I know are also smokers ( I'm not ) and someone was trying to link it to the fact that the breaks they take to smoke help them keep a healthy pace between work and rest for their brain.

So, some smoke, some goto the bathroom, I prefer to kill things to give myself a break =)

11-12 hour sessions are common for me over the weekend. Usually when I find something interesting to entrench myself in. Last time it happened, I got interested in the Separating Axis Theorem, for advance collision detection in my games for 12+ hours, it was crazy XD.

Well, I may not be as seasoned as some of you (yet...), but the longest session for me was 6 1/2 hours. It was one of the last projects for a C++ class last semester and I was struggling on overloading methods....

In all seriousness, it will be those long nights in the near future that will help me to master my craft!

I think I pulled a 24 hour session the day I finished an Assembly Language version emulator of a 1940s era German Navy Enigma encryption machine.