The Programming Podium

A general chat area, here you can post anything that doesn't belong in another forum.
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VikingBoyBilly
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Post by VikingBoyBilly »

Yeah, it is kind of a drawback to have to open a wad with DOOMbuilder just to edit an ACS file. Does the file actually have to be within the WAD being edited to do this? If so, that would suck. I do remember Deepsea supporting editing scripts outside the wad file, but it was via notepad with all its lousiness, so why bother?

I confirmed my theory on SLumpEd as a reliable method for script editing. But in order to do this, you have to put the script's text file IN A WAD and edit it from within the wad, then export it back out to be able to compile it when you're done (I made some alterations to the ZDefs file, so compiling it within SLumpEd probably wouldn't work...)
Shadow Master
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Post by Shadow Master »

I'm fluent in C and C++ as long as you don't hand me code which either uses bitwise shifts or inheritance from template types.

I also learned Perl recently (which I must say, it rocks). I also know Bash scripting.

I was once forced to learn Java at university.

I also learned C# long time ago, but "managed" programming is not of my liking, definitively.
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Malvineous
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Post by Malvineous »

Ha, yes, I was forced to use C# for a project a little while back and I can't stand all that managed stuff either: "Now don't you worry, we'll take care of the scary compiler for you." Yeah, if only you could do that when it breaks.

Well I started programming in GW-BASIC when I was 6 and graduated to QuickBASIC a few years later. Since then (I'm now 24) I've become familiar with Pascal (which at least made Delphi slightly less painful to use), Perl, PL/SQL, and recently Python. Picked up other things along the way like UNIX shell scripting, assembler for various platforms, used Haskell and Java at uni, and use JavaScript a lot at work for web site and XUL development.

Using C at the moment (since the Linux kernel is in C, and wow their coding style is so different) but my favourite language by far is C++. All those templates, inheritance and metaprogramming really make your head spin, there's so much to learn, even when you're an expert!
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VikingBoyBilly
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Post by VikingBoyBilly »

Malvineous wrote: Well I started programming in GW-BASIC when I was 6
You were programming before the 2nd grade? :eek
That's impressive :)
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memsys
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Post by memsys »

i would like to learn to program but there are so many languages and buying a book is hard because there are so many [from good to bad and easy to hard] plus most are pretty darn expensive

c++ seems nice [altho i have no idea im a :dopefish when it comes to programming]
maybe not to start with but maybe eventually
(i used to be ME!)
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Commander Spleen
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Post by Commander Spleen »

Malvineous wrote:I started programming in GW-BASIC when I was 6
Wish I'd had that opportunity. My earliest chance to program was when I was about 8, using a Vic20 [the power supply melted because my pet galah had chewed through some of the power cable and I tried to preserve a program for a few hours, not having a disk drive]. Over the ensuing years I had access to my cousin's Commodore 64, but only made fairly simple programs.

The first time I got my hands on Quick Basic wasn't until I was 10. In 1998 I was able to take a C course, but didn't have access to a compiler until many years later. It was about 2003-2004 that I really started coding in C, finding a copy of Turbo C and shortly thereafter DJGPP. Allegro has been my library of choice for game development, and that doesn't look to be changing any time soon.

Since then I've learned a lot. I've ventured into C++ gradually, only recently getting into object oriented programming. At the moment I'm learning to use Qt and figuring out network programming.

I tried Python recently, and was quite impressed by many of its capabilities. But it's far too high level for my liking. Java never really interested me, though I did experiment with it a bit. Maybe when there's a complete open source implementation of it I'll give it another whirl, as the number of platforms it can reach is very tasty.

PHP, MySQL and CSS have been added to the list over the past two years or so, and after many web projects I've got them fairly well handled. The main problem is in the design, it seems to prove difficult for me to create usable layouts and convenient backends. Rather the opposite to other languages, where I can easily design what I want a program or game to do but have difficulty coding it.

Unfortunately, despite (or perhaps contributing to) my presently limited ability, around here I'm pretty much the best programmer I know of.

I'm pretty close to pushing forward with some of my game projects, which have mostly been held back for the past half a year while I figure out how to implement networking capabilities and useful particle engines.
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Malvineous
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Post by Malvineous »

Oh yeah I forgot about PHP! I like that for command line scripting too (not just web stuff) because it's so easy to use. Like it has all the nice bits from C++, JavaScript and Perl all rolled into one.
VikingBoyBilly wrote:You were programming before the 2nd grade? :eek
That's impressive :)
Actually I was in second grade at the time. Mind you, at that age they weren't great programs, but I still have them all on floppies and it's fun to look back and see what qualified as worthy of being kept.

My fascination with "classic games" started early though - according to the dates of my Hocus Pocus MIDIs, I extracted those when I was 10. I still remember writing the QuickBASIC programs to extract files like that too, they were painfully slow because I was doing it in a for loop one byte at a time... Those were the days when I could extract these funny "IMF" files from games like Duke II, and although I suspected they were music, I had no idea how to play them. If only I'd known how easy it is...

Ah, nostalgia :-)
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Post by ckguy »

Malv, you've got me beat! I started programming on an old TRS-80 Color Computer 2 at age 7. I then graduated onto GW-BASIC, then QBASIC/QuickBASIC. Then I discovered Euphoria which is an awesome language that no-one's ever heard of before. In high school, I took C and Java classes. They were cool, but I've never really gotten into C for my own projects, and I don't see myself ever writing in Java again. Not that it was a bad language, we just didn't click. For a while I toyed with getting good at Python, but the lack of a tidy system for making exe's you can distribute put me off. Sometime along the line I got into an assembly phase, which was lots of fun. (It was genuinely fun, I'm not being sarcastic!) PureBASIC is a fairly recent addition. My most recent language is PHP, which is sufficiently C-like that the main issue I have is forgetting to put the $ in front of variable names, especially those of loop indicies.

Uhhhh, this is probably it. There were a couple of other mini-phases, like fucl and Turing machines.

Man, this makes me want to dig out my GW-BASIC interpreter and start wallowing in nostalgia. See you guys later. :D
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