Well lets not get too off-topic fellas.
Mind you we could open a new thread called "Eric and Yuriy debating about degrees and programming education that I'll never receive at this point in my life."(I'm joking of course... not about the education part though...
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Basically what I want PGD to provide for tutorials is something above what you'd be taught in high school for basic Computer Science which teaches you everything from good ole printf all the way up to the blisteringly daunting lessons of function() vs. procedure() and the like. We don't need to teach programming it's self, but I would like to teach how to program things that can be used to make fun and creative games. To do this from a basic level and go up to a novice and then an advanced game developer's level.
So far we have only novice and advanced. There is a disconnect from the beginners to the people that have been here a while and it shows when those beginners go away and don't return. So it's important to bridge that gap and get more beginner tutorials out there. A part of that problem is that some of the older more advanced guys forget how to think small and simple. Or that it's just plain boring for them and don't want to bother.
(WARNING: This is where I start to get ranty...)
The trick to this however is not to simply teach Delphi or Free Pascal or any specific APIs, but to actually teach game programming. I don't think there has been a single new "game programming" article on PGD in years. (That was a challenge tutorial writers, yes!) Programming ideology, project management, API/library specific features or how to setup ____ dev tool maybe, but not one single game programming tutorial about game programming.
In fact the last game programming tutorial I read beyond my own Artillery game tutorial (which I never did finish I hate to,but have to admit) was the one about creating a platform game by Alexander Rosendal (our very own Traveler), but that was done years ago and I don't think they are up anywhere anymore and definitely not updated to today's current libraries or dev tools.
We need tutorial writers that write about making games, not making software theory or talking about how to implement some wacky new software language concepts just added to Delphi. Not necessarily to make specific genres, but often just to explain a concept such as faked physics in games or using tile maps, object detection or path finding. These can be applied to ANY game genre and don't need silly advanced programming methods like generics, ducking or object model
...and they get a beginner INTERESTED in programming games not giving up on all the weird stuff we're talking about in the forums.
The advanced stuff is great, really, but not when we don't have anything for newcomers to grow off of to get to that level. I just don't want to entertain much advanced stuff anymore for a while. Not until we have some good solid tutorials that will bring in and KEEP those new Pascal programmers that want something out of PGD. We've failed them and we need to fix it.
Flipcode was pretty cool, but at least we still have NeHe!
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Originally Posted by WILL
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