Paladin of the Pegasos
Posts: 1677 from 2003/2/24
From: po-RNO
Quote:
Zylesea wrote:
I suggest not to visit such courses. Either they are rather scientific or practical but usually too narrow minded (bound to industry standards).
But your goal is Hollywood and MorphOS. Not java nor C++ with .net and not even Rust. Hence, learn from and with hollywood/MorphOS coders.
Hollywood is really straight forward, the handbook and examples really do most of the job. Go into the examples, define some goals that you want to reach. IMHO the most complicated stuff in Hollywood is building advanced table based functions.
But you don't need that for a starter. You can just write ugly spaghetti code - not nice (and of course not really recommended) but it works and you learn quite a lot (for example that structuring the code is eventually the better approach...).
Although if you don't know practically anything about programming, or just your own spaghetti style from some experiments, these kind of courses could still be useful to learn some better practises. They should be good for learning to write in better style from the start and teach some basic things right.
I once took a university course for Python coding, and I would think it would be a really good to get some coding habits better from the start. Python is a scripting language like Hollywood, and it certainly teaches you to format your code in a proper way, because Python relies on indentation in its code blocks etc. I made a graphical minesweeper clone as the final exam on that course, and later on I even ported that game for Hollywood :) It didn't need that much modifications at the game engine, mainly just remembering that variables don't become local automatically on Lua/Hollywood and code blocks need some command to end them, and small differences in table definitions etc, but the main structures stayed pretty much the same. Graphics engine couldn't be ported as directly, but in fact it was much easier to do in Hollywood, because it's originally designed for graphics coding and offers "everything" in built-in functions.
