Don't you hate when you just lose all interest in what your doing?
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For my birthday (June 28) I got two programming books. One of which was called C# and the .NET Platform. It's quite the lengthy book, about 1200 pages. I read through about 700 pages before I started to lose it all. I thought learning Windows.Forms would be an interestign experience to go through. I was wrong. It started out ok but once the book got into GDI+ I just found no good use for it. Today I skimmed through the chapter on Windows Forms Controls and saw SOME use but I just can't get back into it.
So I decided to check out MDX. I've used SDL and a little bit of OpenGL but no DirectX whatsoever so I thought it would be fun. I later realized that there was barely documentation on MDX. Found no tutorials within the hour timespan I was searching.
What should I do? Go to DirectX with C/C++? Make another SDL game? I hate these programming slumps :(
The worst programming slumps I ever have come when I realize that I have tons of languages, tools, and algorithms at my disposal, everything I need to say what I want... and I have nothing in particular to say.
Stop learning how to make things and start making them, is my advice.
Stop learning how to make things and start making them, is my advice.
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Quote:Original post by twix
Stop learning how to make things and start making them, is my advice.
That's the thing though. How would I go about making a text editor or something? I know how to make a textbox, toolbar, status bar, and a menu but I wouldn't know how to implement a save function of the sort or different algorithms that they would contain.
Quote:Original post by Ekim_GramQuote:Original post by twix
Stop learning how to make things and start making them, is my advice.
That's the thing though. How would I go about making a text editor or something? I know how to make a textbox, toolbar, status bar, and a menu but I wouldn't know how to implement a save function of the sort or different algorithms that they would contain.
Who cares if you don't know how to do it? Why should you let that stop you? If you spend all your time doing things you know how to do, you'll be a boring person. [grin]
If making a text editor is something that interests you, just start making one! Think of the features you want it to have, and start putting together a prototype. Then when you run across something you don't know how to implement, ponder it deeply, search the documentation, and the answer will come to you. [wink]
i agree. in fact, id say start a decent sized project, but not an impossible to finish one. i started working on my dream RPG (albeit in 2D with much less features then my true dream) about 4 and 1/2 months ago. progress is coming along pretty nice. i think i remember you from a while back, you posted about wanting to make an RPG and people named all these things and you said "forget it". i say go for it. i havent planned out a single line of code for my game, and right now its spanning across 50+ files and over 10,000 lines of code. the architecture for the game is pretty slick too, i might add, considering i didnt plan any of this ahead of time. havent had any seriouse road blocks, at least not yet....
about the text editor. dude, just start coding the parts you already know how to do. when you get stuck, do a google search or come back here for the answer. there have been some huge hurdle's ive had to over-come which i had absolutely no clue on how to even approach, untill i thought about it for awhile, posted here, etc. things like pathfinding, player/npc dialogue tree's, collision detection, loading maps, etc. each problem has been a major thing for me, seeing as how they are all very complicated things on their own. just take it One Step At A Time.
I learned gui with win32 and msdn. It really has all you need in forms of docs and examples. MS did a good job there and I would say that the docs are too wordy for my taste but redundancy is there so you can remember it easier. You should try some win32 programming and then after understanding the msg loop and window procedures to see how the system works underneath I think .net will seem easier. It's like when learning C instead of C++. C++ is a bit harder to learn because it has all these other things that are flying at you at 150mph at the same time. Like some MFC wizards and macros that you have to learn what they mean. Too much stuff to grok at one sitting. Simple api functions are the way to go for your first gui app. Just a simple window with a text msg in the middle for example. Then you can add a button and events. Fun stuff :)
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Oh god I hated the Win32 API. That's why I chose C#. No more 200+ lines of int WinMain(HINSTANCE hInstance, HINSTANCE hPrevInstance, LPSTR blah, int CmdLine) or whatever crap that was. And for those of you wondering, I realized my problem was that I was doing everything programatically and not using the Wizards. I started to make a text editor than failed because I don't know anything about System.IO so I decided to skip past the Windows Controls chapter and learn about the IO namespace. Things are going fine now. After this chapter is ADO.NET. Good fun :)
I would like to point out that c# has nothing to do with win32. Just to make that clear. C# is a standalone programming language.
No pun intended ok.
No pun intended ok.
I am having the same problem as you at the moment. Just recently I completed a chess game in C++ using Win32 and DLL's (Well, its bug ridden, but the functionallity is all there). This was my first reasonably sized project (roughly 2000 lines of code) and probably the only project that I have actually neared completion on.
Anyway, I decided that I didn't like win32 and now I'm learning C#. I'm about 140 pages into Petzolds "Programming Windows with C#" and it's starting to frustrate me. This is probably because I want to do something with the language, but instead I am just learning about it all the time. So right now im considering starting a project and just learning the seperate parts as they are needed.
Hehe, the only problem now of course is deciding what the project is gonna be.
Anyway, I decided that I didn't like win32 and now I'm learning C#. I'm about 140 pages into Petzolds "Programming Windows with C#" and it's starting to frustrate me. This is probably because I want to do something with the language, but instead I am just learning about it all the time. So right now im considering starting a project and just learning the seperate parts as they are needed.
Hehe, the only problem now of course is deciding what the project is gonna be.
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