ID:72389
 

Poll: What is easier?

programming 40% (29)
making pixel art 30% (22)
Both are too difficult 9% (7)
Pff, difficult? i don't know the meaning of difficult. i PWN in both categories 19% (14)

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Respect to all those poeple out there who are able to make games using DM language..

I tried to create a world but failed misserably and not being able to go further than make the map, a mob and npc and a atk verb...

Believe me i've tried to understand that strange language but suddenly using M for the enemy or a P for something.. i just don't get it.. it's too weird for me.

I'll just stick to making pixel-art which i think is much easier to make anyways. just got your old fashioned paint and start drawing.

Programming is much, much easier for me.
It depends on how artistic you are. I'm a pretty good DM programmer, but my pixel art isn't that great (its not too bad if I spend hours on it and get advice, but that's not worth it!).
I've been programming with DM for 8 years and dabbling with computer graphics for 13 or more. I don't really do pixel art though, I just do whatever it takes to make the graphics I want.

I find them both to be equally obnoxious. I would like things to just appear out of my mind rather than having to be made.
I hope the people that voted the fourth option have or are about to come out with some good games!
Honestly Foomer, sometimes i feel the same way...
I find programming easier, although I don't call myself a DM programmer, pixel art however is not my game, I have no sense of creativity, I'm as profressionally dumb as it gets.
Haywire wrote:
I find programming easier, although I don't call myself a DM programmer, pixel art however is not my game, I have no sense of creativity, I'm as profressionally dumb as it gets.

I kind of have the same problem, except I am very creative. I lack the pixel art skills to fuel my creativity, though, so I'll stick to programming.
Aixelsyd wrote:
I hope the people that voted the fourth option have or are about to come out with some good games!

Already have... ;)

--------

But seriously, I agree with Foomer's sentiment... I see both of them as chores that need to be slugged through to get my ideas into reality...

I guess, though, that between the two of them, I enjoy making the art more, but it tends to be the most time-consuming aspect as well (for me, anyways)

As for M's and P's and whatnot, don't let that confuse you... They're just temporary names picked to hold a reference to another object/mob... Like a little box with a label on it that says "M", and you fill it with information about someone...

They don't have to be "M" or "P" or anything else, either... It's just common practice to use M, for instance, when the placeholder is supposed to be referencing a Mob... You could change it to whatever you want (like "attacker" in an attack proc, or "elephant" or "Q" or whatever), it's just a convenient little handle you make up to grab whatever object/mob it is referring to...

As an example:

proc
..Attack()
....for(var/mob/[whatever you want here] in view(1,src))
......[same thing you used in the brackets above].Defend(src)

......//See? You put in whatever label you want to give the target of the attack... Some people just use "M", or you could use "defender", or "victim", or "target", or whatever else... Then, when you program your "Defend" proc, you put in a little note (called a "parameter") that tells it to expect another proc/verb to send it a piece of information that will refer to a mob that has made the attack on the mob that this Defend proc belongs to...

..Defend(mob/[whatever; many people use M, or you could use something more descriptive, like "attacker"])
....src<<"[whatever you use above] has attacked you!"

....//So now, when you call the victim's "Defend" proc from inside the attacker's "Attack" proc, see how I added the little (src) parameter after the [whatever].Defend call? "Defend(src)" That little "src" in parentheses takes the attacker (the source of the attack/the Attack proc), and passes them into the variable you set up when you define your Defend() proc... The [whatever] in "Defend(mob/[whatever])" will now contain a reference to the attacker, and can be used to collect whatever information about them that you need in the Defend proc...

Hmmm, I guess at first it sounds more complicated than it really is (and I've probably made it even worse...lol), but once you start going, it'll start to make sense...
Now, why don't all the tutorials explain it like that... it would have been a lot easier if i knew P wasn't a default/standard name for victim :P thanks for clearing that!... you don't happend to have made a good tutorial now have ya? cause that would help me a LOT! XD
Thousands of years in the future, game developers will be whining about how hard it is to make games using their automatic mind-reading programming devices. "It doesn't read my mind right!", they'll say. "It gives me headaches! They need to find a way to make this easier. It's way too hard."
Pandora'sSecret wrote:
Now, why don't all the tutorials explain it like that... it would have been a lot easier if i knew P wasn't a default/standard name for victim :P thanks for clearing that!... you don't happend to have made a good tutorial now have ya? cause that would help me a LOT! XD

Unfortunately, no, I haven't written any tutorials (yet)... Though I've had the idea in the back of my head ever since I joined BYOND about 8 years ago...lol

When I first started using BYOND, I had very little programming experience (I had only made some things on a TI-86 Scientific Calculator in high school, and the programming language used in those things is nothing like DM or other modern languages, so basically, I started here with no useful knowledge)

And while trying to learn, I quickly discovered that the majority of the guides, tutorials, examples around here (even the infamous Blue Book) all seem to be written at a level just above complete beginner... Many of them seem to assume that the reader has at least some idea of what's going on...

So I've always felt that BYOND needs a set of really beginner tutorials... Stuff that explains everything in totally plain English, perhaps with little or no actual code at all...

And I've always had the idea that I'd write them myself, but I've never gotten around to it...lol
I totally agree, every tutorial i have read seems to think i know what a proc is ( i know know... i think XD) or that i understand what that weird new() is... i'll be waiting patiantly for someone( please SuperSaiyanGokuX ) to make a guide that really explains DM! even if it take another eight years =o
I can pixel and program , so can chris g1. I've started programming before I started to pixel so it was easy to pick up on pixel art.
Zaole wrote:
Thousands of years in the future, game developers will be whining about how hard it is to make games using their automatic mind-reading programming devices. "It doesn't read my mind right!", they'll say. "It gives me headaches! They need to find a way to make this easier. It's way too hard."

Fifty years ago, people had to program directly in binary and hexadecimal, and it's only going to get easier over time.
I take it Jeff hasn't tried one of the potential futures of programming, meta-programming.
In order to write a complete beginner's tutorial, I think you'd need to get a complete beginner together with an expert and have the beginner dictate what goes into the tutorial by asking the questions from a beginner's perspective, and then having a expert programmer explain the answers in a way that the beginner can understand.

Most advanced users can't remember what it was like to be a beginner to programming, I think.
Foomer wrote:
In order to write a complete beginner's tutorial, I think you'd need to get a complete beginner together with an expert and have the beginner dictate what goes into the tutorial by asking the questions from a beginner's perspective, and then having a expert programmer explain the answers in a way that the beginner can understand.

Most advanced users can't remember what it was like to be a beginner to programming, I think.

I wouldn't doubt that. It's also a very good learning experience for the teacher. I've always been surprised by how vague my grasp of certain concepts are when I try to explain them to other people.

In BYOND's case, there is stuff that can be done to improve the quality of the resources. For instance it seems that almost all tutorials don't cover things pictorially.
none surpass the beauty of f00l!
honestly that guy is insanely talented.
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