Tutorial Writing Competition

[code_glitch]

Yup, I figured you might say that... Although I'm with you on SDL for beginners, all I am saying there is that it may be the easiest to learn, but in my case (and a few others I reckon) who have made their own libraries, its just a tad annoying to remember

high school student just learning CS

Now that is indeed good news, I will assume they know how to set up their environments, or we could write some tuts on those I suppose, because it is a pain to include into your own tuts TBH.

Although in my case, I got into game programming by C/C++ tutorials (and a book) and then picking up FreePascal and working stuff out. Ie. I learnt how to program games while learning a language and porting examples and techniques over. It only took 2 years to get where I am, and I don't regret a minute of that experience: I can read C/C++ and program games in pascal at the same time so yay.

Can't help but take extra notice of the 'tile based games' - I've just been down that road and have the scars to prove it. I walked into the scene with a faulty rendering code and buggy tileset management. All in all it took 2 days, and 58 bug solutions to get it working properly. Without performance tweaks - I doubt many beginners are going to want to go through all that. Although I could grab prometheus and have it done in say, 8 lines?

[WILL]

A tutorial on How to set up Lazarus for Mac or... JEDI-SDL for Delphi on Windows, Mac & Linux or Lazarus on Windows, Mac & Linux would be great too. It also could then be often referred to by other tutorials that use JEDI-SDL as a base for graphics and such. This is good practice in tutorial writing. You want to teach one thing typically not everything else leading up to it as well.

A C to Pascal 101 could be a good topic too. For those that know C, but would rather code in Pascal. A C/C++ to Object Pascal tutorial would be even more interesting too. Though I think you could end up getting carried away and end up with a whole book in the end.

Mostly what we want are tutorials that just teach simple concepts that will take a person with basic programming knowledge and start them into making games.

[dazappa]

@code_glitch I think it's just that I don't like VB's editor as well; it's not wysiwyg at all, it's "press button for bbcode" which is unintuitive, but I know a lot of other forum software that does it too so I can't complain much.

Pascal tags. We need them again!

I think that's a nice idea for a tutorial Will, but I hope everyone doesn't do the exact same type of tutorial!

Also will, Lazarus + FPC is much easier on the Mac now. I was able to simply install fpc -> fpcsrc -> lazarus, then run Lazarus and recompile it. (It almost works out of the box, but for some reason in .9.30 a recompile is still necessary or it will never find the Interfaces unit. This seems to be because it thinks the unit is outdated or newer than itself or something odd like that)

Oh well, I think I'll end up writing a couple of tutorials anyway in the near future, and submit the one I like the most for any contest that may spring up.

[chronozphere]

I feel like writing a tutorial on tool development. Each medium/large project needs tools to support it and to let other users create new content/maps. I'm working on my Spline Editor now so I can use my experiences to write an article that will give you some insight in how I did it and what kind of approach is best to get a nice extensible map/content editor working in no time.

Does anyone else feel like writing an article? I'd like a bit of competition...

[code_glitch]

Hehe, that last post by WILL about writing everything leading up your tut only just hit home... I think it would indeed help if I did not have to include links to basic pascal stuff, setting up an IDE, compiler and runtime also... It is a bit of a pain and yhou do lose focus from what you want to write about when you have to include lines to try and cover every eventuality. Any volunteers on how to get everything working up wo and including a basic sdl test program? It would help a ton with my pong tutorial.

Oh and, chrono (cant spell the rest right, sorry ) if you want some competition, how many articles can you publish before Pong goes live? It might take a few weeks of fine tuning my odt file on my HD (no offence, but I cant to extended writing in the online editor) since all but the most insignificant bugs and gameplay issues have now been solved. Looks like you get the first in new gamedev tuts soon WILL

[dazappa]

SDL headers are included in the FPC/Laz distribution, so it's as simple as including it and putting the libs in the directory where your binary is. (and then of course, having a basic code structure for it)

[code_glitch]

And if you only use FPC not lazarus? Kind of like I do... for everything... Although on windows you need the dlls and in ubuntu and other linux distros you will need to install the libsdl-dev and libsdl packages to get things to run and compile...