Greetings all,
I've been in and out of the BYOND community for years now, and I have to tell you it's fantastic to see it still growing, and the program itself has progressed amazingly.
My quick question for you guys is this...
I've spent most of my 'coding' life working on C (Sometimes but rarely C++) codebases for MUDs. Obviously, some of you know what this is, some of you don't.
What I've always wanted to do with my MUDs, but a telnet client would always make it difficult w/o custom fonts, but is to incorporate Audio and Icons into the game. So essentially, it's still a Text based MUD, but now gear may have icons, players, and music will change from zone to zone, battles, etc.
Now I don't want to ramble on, but I guess my question to you guys is this..
Would you recommend learning BYOND by going with a Text-based MUD game, or do you think I would grasp it all easier if I went with a game incorporating the graphics?
My level of BYOND programming knowledge is limited, however I've played with it enough in the past to have a decent understanding of how it works. I just need to learn all of the built-in procs, etc.
Guess I'm an experienced programmer, but newb to BYOND game creation... itching to make a good game, just not sure how/where to get started. (Obviously, from the tutorials posted, which I've looked over recently and plenty in the past)
Hope to hear from some of you soon, thanks very much.
Andrew / Phate
I think you can manage either way - DM tends to default-graphical so if you go all MUD you'll need to figure where all those defaults are and deal with them. If you're writing a MUD you kind of need to handle things like movement yourself in some ways (have /area objects that have stuff in them, when you 'north' or whatever figure out what /area that is and Move() into it.) You have to stick a bunch of built-in stuff together in a way that's really easy, but depends a lot on having some knowledge.
On the other hand learning how a lot of this stuff works will be a boon if working in other DM projects - it's stuff you do have to learn. You get to not have to deal with complex graphical crap. Text MUDs are an area where DM really shines with it's text-macro features that people don't give much credit (because they're just there and they just work). Basically my big recommendation is that if you go the MUD route, I would really recommend looking through the various movement built-ins and how they interact with each other so you can glue them together properly. client/North() and friends, Enter(), Entered(), Exit(), Exited(), Move() and the 'contents' and 'loc' variables are probably the big ones here | |
I think it depends on what you want to make. Go with that without a doubt. In the end though, learning is doing! Unless you go code something after you read, you haven't truly learned it, at least not in the beginning. Coding and Fixing will forever be your true mentor. Debugging can teach you a lot, if you just stick to it and figure it out.
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As presented in this topic(excellent for this post, actually). Most people grow or learn bits of programming from trial and error. That's a HUGE part of the learning process. There are still the few out there that go through and read everything then simply try to mimic what they learned, but I don't find that appealing due to the much slower pace and the lack of originality that presents. You SHOULD read up on reference material to know what things do, but you shouldn't look up tutorials and try to mimic what is done for what you want. Everyone is different, you can have 1001 different codes that do essentially the same thing. Millions of different codes that tweak something into something slightly different for what that one individual want for that one game.
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I appreciate the help. Trial and error is typically how I've learned over the years. MUDs made it easier by being able to pick a code base you liked, and just work from there. With this, each game could look completely different. It's like going from one codebase to another. Same language, different methods of writing it. So I guess I was mostly looking for a program similar to, or in the same direction as, what want to create. I see plenty of links to useful things, I'm about to start checking out right now.
And to clarify this, I want 0% of my code written by others. With MUDs, I preferred to do things alone. Makes for a longer process, but It's how I like to do it. But I do like having friends/groups of people to ask for reference/suggeastions etc. | |
Outside of that; The DM Guide and Reference are good to start with. There are a few good tutorials in the Tutorials & Snippets section, too.
Then there are frameworks and systems you can use in the Demos & Libraries section, if you don't want to put all the work in.