Talk about anything

Nerdzmasterz

I'm thinking they should have a hacker game on it. Program a robot to retrieve objects, hack into security systems, and stopping a psycho from destroying the world as we know it.

Here's my thing- so many times, I have heard about "how hard it is to code".

Um...

What's so hard about print(6 + 8), or get_node("Button").show()? 🤔

Wolfe

Nerdzmasterz I also never tried making shaders, it sounds difficult.

Nerdzmasterz so many times, I have heard about "how hard it is to code".

Um...

What's so hard about print(6 + 8), or get_node("Button").show()?

Nerdzmasterz Back in Unity, I guess I was pampered. I could buy already-made shaders and use post-processing with a few clicks.

If I can code a shader, surely you can do it too. 😛 My current avatar is a metaphor for my programming journey.

GDShader has one foot in Godot philosophy and the other in conventional syntax, making it friendly to write but also more relatable to common code, resources, and examples than GDScript. I think the beginner-friendliness of learning to create shaders in Godot has been seriously understated -- there's this false sense that it isn't as simple as (or simpler than) other tutorialized features or techniques in Godot.

Online resources about shaders exist, but for whatever reason it hasn't sunk in that Godot makes them about as easy as anything else it does.

fire7side

Boy the tab key is kind of strange when entering code. You press it and the cursor disappears and the code doesn't appear to indent, but then when you post it, it's indented. Just have to get used to it I guess.

Nerdzmasterz

I don't even indent. I just hit enter to make new lines as needed, and then select the whole code and use the insert code button. It indents automatically.

Pixophir

Got the solar panels for my new place today. 3 out of 26 were broken. Hope i get a replacement without having to seek legal advice. Will see tomorrow.

Is it hard to code ? I am not a good coder nor have I ever officially learned or studied this, all self studying. I am currently porting an opengl renderer of mine (terrain lod stuff) to vulkan. Want to see if I can ever combine this with Godot, since Godot makes integration so easy (from what I read). With deferred rendering and Vulkan this should not be too impossible, though there are some things to solve. Deferred because there is no spoon .. errr mesh in the LOD version I have, so not much lighting and effects can be done in the geometry stage where positions are calculated, just vertex normals.

Apart from that it is trivial stuff, no abstraction, no platform indenpendent things, just straight plain C++, I even can look up some Vulkan recipes on the web, but yet, I find Vulkan to be an incomprehensible mess of lose ends. Did you know that because they run out of identifier names or realized that certain functionality needs a new internal treatment for things like structures of functions they start to enumerate them, like "vkVeryLongAndObfuscatedFunctionName2". Does "industry forged" mean "fy indy developers" ?

Just realized that I am a bit on the negative side today. Nevermind ... :-)

Think I go out for a couple of cold ones in a bar by the harbour.

Nerdzmasterz

We all have bad days. 🙂

I taught myself to code as well, so I know a thing or two about it.

The catch is that it is possibly not the learning that gets you. It happened to me, it happened to Thomas Brush, and that means it could easily happen to anyone.

I'm not saying this to scare you, but to warn you to never quit, no matter how things get.

What causes the problem?

When you start off, you are unsure about anything. After that, you learn more and more and get excited- and it feels amazing. Once you reach the peak of learning to program, however- not understanding everything but knowing enough to program with little help- the excitement fades, and you sort of plunge into this... depressive state, I guess? It's awful.
If you manage to endure that, however, the downward spiral eventually flattens. It won't be like it was, but you won't hate your game engine anymore.

At least that's how I would explain it.

Other than that really bad state, coding is surprisingly simple. 😃

cybereality

Coding is actually not difficult. It takes a long time to learn, but conceptually it is simple. You ask the computer to do something, and it does precisely what you ask. The issue is that most people don't understand the question they are asking. If you know exactly what you are asking, then translating that to a computer is straight forward.

Nerdzmasterz

Another factor is to decide what programming language you want to learn, and that would influence what you can program later on. C++ is incredible in its power, but also used more in lower-level game engine building. There's nothing wrong with it, of course, in AAA companies, they most likely use C++ to build their own game engines or whatever. Other companies prefer Python or C#. The medical field, for instance, uses Python- most likely because it's simpler to understand and it gets the job done so they can focus on more- or more important- things than one certain program.

I guess another question is, how much time are you willing to spend learning? IMO, GDScript would be the easiest, followed by C#, and then C++ is the hardest. It simply doesn't use words that are... English? A lot of it seems to involve symbols rather than words.

cybereality

Nerdzmasterz Another factor is to decide what programming language you want to learn

Programming languages are for humans, not computers. This is another misunderstanding. The computer only understands binary, but there is almost no human that can write anything even mildly complex in binary. So the programming language is for us to understand. So pick the one you are most comfortable with. It also depends what you are doing. The language to write a shell script, or a GUI app, or a 3D game, or browser plug-in, will obviously be different. But it ultimately doesn't matter. I just pick the best tool for the job. As I've been coding for so long, I can start a project in a language I've never seen before and it's not an issue. I already have the program designed in my head, so learning the syntax for a new language can be done in like 2 or 3 days.

duane

Programming is a lot like filling out tax forms. There's some simple math involved. You're encouraged to do things the "right" way, but it can be very rewarding to be innovative... unless you screw up. And, most of it is boilerplate that shouldn't be necessary, but you're dealing with a big, dumb machine, so you have to fill it in.

cybereality

And, like filing your taxes, all you have to do is read the documentation and follow the directions.

Pixophir

cybereality

I think this post was underappreciated. Formal languages are for humans, and you choose one depending on what you want to accomplish and what the environment demands.

Example: just like it makes no sense to go to East Africa with a Japanese spell book, one won't approach Linux systems programming with C#, not ony because it has a garbage collector (sticktongue) but also because you'd expose a free/libre OS to MS's grace of licenzing. That'll never pass the maintainers. You want the language the OS is written in.

Interrupt me if I talk nonsense, for Godot, it's either GDScript (or C# for the guys who are used to Unity) and C++ (or C, Rust, ...) for the low level stuff.

As a hobbyist one only learns a language by actuaoly using it, making "all the mistakes waiting to be made" (Tartakover).

Happy hacking :-)

Nerdzmasterz

Another nice thing about coding is that the basics will pretty much be the same for each language, just with different syntaxes. For python, Hello World is print("Hello, World!"). For C#, console.WriteLine("Hello World!"), and C++ is cout << "Hello World!" << endl;.

Bimbam

Nerdzmasterz Another nice thing about coding is that the basics will pretty much be the same for each language, just with different syntaxes. For python, Hello World is print("Hello, World!"). For C#, console.WriteLine("Hello World!"), and C++ is cout << "Hello World!" << endl;.

Don't think this is a great example, as the first two are using pre-existing functions to print console output, while the last introduces the concept of streaming operators with the potential prerequisite knowledge of overloading.

C++ just never easy.

Your point is largely true though for most high level languages which abstract a lot of the fluff.

cybereality

Well, printf() (from C) still works in C++, and, surprisingly, in Objective-C as well.

Nerdzmasterz

I never said C++ was easy. I still struggle with it. 😖

Okay, I will admit it- I don't use C++. I like its power, but I don't have the time or desire anymore to understand it.

Erich_L

Nerdzmasterz I like C++ because it's explicit about all the things that is implicit in scripting languages. A lot of times while I'm learning C++ I'll go "ah, yes... of course of course this exists and that's how x works." Also, I've got to say, the more I learn unreal the more I'm impressed with Godot's editor. It's just.... so well done!

cybereality

Actually, my new plug-in, Godot Space Mouse, was the first thing I ever wrote in C. I've spent a lot of time in C++, and there are a lot of similarities (C code is valid C++ code), but actually C is kind of nice. I think they made C++ too complex for no good reason.

DaveTheCoder

cybereality I think they made C++ too complex for no good reason.

The original concept of C++ was "C with classes". It's interesting how much complexity that one change caused.

Nerdzmasterz

Excellent! Like I said, though, it's just not for me. It's processing speed is incredible, which would be the only reason I might try it ever again. I've gone down the road of studying it several times to absolutely no avail.

Pixophir

Nerdzmasterz

If C++ is not your thing but you ever need to do low level programming, have a look at Rust. It is quite the contrary, doesn't trust the programmer at all and thus forces a discipline that C++ (or even more so C) doesn't.

Which one can like, or not :-)

Edit: I couldn't get Unreal 4 to run properly on Debian Linux. Got it downloaded (a hulk of a download) anbd compiled and it started, but every single step cost minutes, and I couldn't get an IDE integrated which is pretty much a prerequisite to be able to make use of the api. There was no help, though others reported similar problems.

cybereality

Yeah, the Unreal editor is pretty bad from a UI standpoint. I mean UE5 is an improvement in the design, but the workflow is similar. Like really common things like getting a reference to an object in Blueprints are not clear. Can't remember the exact flow, but you have to select the object in one window, switch windows, and then press a specific button. Like this is possibly the most common thing you will do when making a game and it doesn't make any sense.

Unity used to be good, when it first came out. But they've been adding stuff non-stop, new menus, options, buttons, but not removing the old stuff, or doing a complete refactor. It's really messy. Yeah, it works, and it's better than Unreal, but there are just way to many menus.

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