So, I'm curious, why is that there is pretty much no interest by most users to ever really learn programming and instead either copy and paste or move things around until they work?

I don't mean to be arrogant, I just really don't understand how many senior users with years of Gamestudio experience have no idea about some of the very core fundamentals of programming. Is it because it just works without and the pain is not high enough to actually get around and figure out how the puzzle pieces truly fit together? Just not enough time? No idea where to start?

Maybe it's just because this is not a hobby at all for me but my day job, but it seems just in general the people who make games are pretty clueless most of the time. Not just Gstudio, but also wildly successful indie developer out there (hey Notch!)

I personally believe it is maybe, because you don`t have to learn it for develop amazing games, because there are a lot of helps like templates etc.

These Person are pragmatists, in my opinion which are not interested in programming, but are interested in a good result.

(but I dont Count myself to These People)

, depends on what you mean 'learn programming'. Do you mean how to program good games? Or maybe a step futher how programming and computers really work?

For me personally, I am mostly interested in making fun & good games/simulations. The programming is for me is the means and not the goal. Though sometimes I have fun with programming too, like with messing around with AI or such.

In general though I try to force myself to sometimes read something about a game design topic or more about programming. But that is to train myself in making better and more fun creations, so here too it is for me not the goal but the means. And my interests lies more in learning through doing (but not as a headless chicken just changing stuff till it works , I do want to understand why something works and why something else does not work) and reading through other people's questions and solutions (like on a forum).

I don't want to speak for other devs, especially mobile devs or Unity users because I'd be accused of being a 'hater', but for my personal experience, I've always wanted to be a game designer, not a programmer.

But...to be a game designer, you must have a game behind you, and if you're all alone...you don't have a choice except learn how to program, model, animate, skin, draw and compose...Don't forget the marketing stuff, writing, video editing, fund raising and all the paperwork and legal stuff for a company.

I do try to learn new things, as we discussed a few years ago (you and me), but in the whole picture...its just a drop in a lake...

But, generally, people are lazy and they prefer just to point out what they want the game to do. And they end up with the same kind of games, featuring the same kind of gameplay and graphics, and nothing new for the user.

I'm sick of generic RPGs, shooters that just shoot at people and the ton of driving games that cant catch my eye quite easily as NFS did in the old days...

Programming requires careful planning, forethought, good knowledge not only on the syntax, but on methods and work-arounds to accomplish something that hasn't been done yet. But, very few people experiment, and thanks to them we have Battlefield 4, Occulus and World of Warcraft (old, but still the biggest...can you imagine?).

Lol, don't get me started I have a lot of anger in me on that subject...

I'm not even sure where I fit in the programmer/hobby divide. You along with 3 other people I PM with, have fielded many of my questions beyond the cut/copy/paste method I begin learning with.

I know I have a large gap in my programming langue and computer science knowledge. And I know I enjoy the try-test-repeat of learning the way I do. I am learning through simulation. But I have learned much about langues and logic design by now. Because at some point I changed to wanting to know what things did and why they do, instead of what code snips achieve what effect.

A quote is most likely my best explanation.

And a blind person might tell you that vision is totally overrated because they never had it, doesn't mean that's technically correct. These people that want to do more than just playing around but refuse to learn are not pragmatic in my opinion but stupid and shoot only themselves in the foot.


That's fair, I guess. I'm not saying people aren't allowed to have different interests or specialize in different things. It's just weird to see people who are set out on making games but then refuse to put the required effort in. It's like someone who wants to cook some great meals and then ends up ordering a Pizza and calls it a successful day.
But yeah, it doesn't sound like you fall into that category.


Sorry, I can't follow you here. Are you saying that these products (of which one is a hardware product) are the result of programmers not being able to experiment?


I'll leave my opinion out on that one, but you may want to look into what an actual game designer at a big company does. If you are lucky to ever get that job, it'll not be a fun one and you won't have the freedom you are hinting on wanting. Also lot's of meetings with guys in suites.


Eh, to be fair, everyone has to start somewhere. Everyone starts with copy and pasting at some point, the real question I'm wondering is what is stopping some people from wanting to step further and being able to actually leverage the tools at hand. You don't fall into the category of people not wanting to learn, after all your questions are "Why are things that way" versus "What's the code to do X?"

I'm saying that programming is hard, and even if there are 100 000's programmers working at once worldwide, only a handfull actually try to go beyond what they've learned, and I'm saying I'm grateful such people exist. Most people only know the syntax and thats it.
You probably dont find it that hard, me neighter. But to a newbie, or someone who hasnt even seen it yet, programming looks like egyptian symbols...you see what it is, but you dont know what it means.
You know exactly what I mean, but you choose mock me
And btw, the hardware product that I mentioned has a lot of programming in it. Just like your washing machine...

As for the game designer job, I know very well what it means. I dont play designer... Dont think I'm one of your newbies

You seriously have forgotten me! Unbelievable

"What's stopping you from actually learning programming?"

maybe some of them could be true:
- laziness,
- the false dream of easy success in game development,
- low amount of time spent on this hobby,
- thought to be not needed, wrongly,
- low motivation for learning hard,
- no braveness to design a complex game requiring complex programming (start small, and remain small...),
- getting stuck at visual design,
- with 3dgs/lite-c it is very easy to create basic stuff that just works, resulting in instant happiness, but a bit hard to manage more complex systems, which is difficult as we can see the lack of advanced lite-c tutorials (but you can find pieces of gold by searching the forum),
- going crazy because what is true for C or C++ might not be similarly true for Lite-C, and sometimes no information why,
- the new visual programming system

^+1

I personal have(had) changed in my evolution of coding. Three larger changers came in commenting, creating call out functions and building organized libraries to include in projects.

These changes are(were) my signs of a movement to programming design and not game result designs.
I can ask how to make a panel slide right from left to center of the screen. This might be a few lines of code. Next time I need this code, I could look it up in my project code. However, these days if there is a base function that can be applied over and over, I would take this code and build a call-out function.

Anyway, that isn't making sense. First you create game results, next you change to creating functions that can be used in any game, finally you start to bundle functions into libraries for all your projects. That is a evolution of making a game to designing programming with the engine. What the next step in learning to be a programmer is, I have no clue. And that is what stops me from moving on to it. (Aside from the fact that I had a long vacation from programming and need to reacquire my before mentioned skills.)

@Sid I had ask when you where working on the other engine, if you would every create a course that was "Learn to Program in c/c++ through video games." If you notice the tutorials here are aimed at teaching results focused goals. We learn that we can us pointer to achieve a selected result and that further it can possible be used in similar result focused tasks. Questions of programming are not really spoken of here. I get asked often in pm's "How to animate a player model." and I am not a programmer like you, however, the question should be "how do I design an animation machine that can animate any character." Furthermore I should be able to answer in design langue and not code lines.

I'm rambling ... Sorry
Mal

The more I learned about programming and professionally working, the less productive I became in developing games (for fun). I remember years ago when I hacked together fun little games in a weekend, not possible today.