Okay, a lot to reply to today. =)

Quote:Original post by ostamo1
i would suggest expanding wrathlands....seeing how people are most familiar with it

Quote:]Original post by Kevinator
I'm glad to hear that you have decided to add more video tutorials.

Even though it sounds like a foreboding amount of work, I would love to see another RPG. As the above poster suggested, perhaps you could even work off of Wrathlands and update it to a graphical version. The reason I would like to see an RPG is that they seem to have a rich set of functions that requires the programmer to think about many different problems.

I for one will be eagerly awaiting your new tutorials. But I still have to finish the Wrathlands videos first!

Thank you for the suggestions. I had a hunch that another RPG would be popular. Although a complete 2d RPG would take a long time, I'm confident that a demo that shows off the major components can be done in an acceptable amount of time.

Quote:Original post by Boder
Where can I download the game?

You're the first to ask so I will post the .exe tonight on the bottom of the wrathlands page.

Quote:Original post by tikiwasabi
Hi,

Just thought I'd sign in and say that the video tutorials are great. Thanks!

And thank you for taking the time to reply. It means a lot.

Quote:Original post by giveblood
I don't know if anyone else suggested it already, but in future tutorials can you use a slightly larger font? Or maybe a smaller resolution. I have a problem distinguishing () for || and " for *, amoung other things.

I'm only up to #3 but so far its pretty good. Nice work.

-Chris

The videos are recorded in 1024x768. When viewing them in 1280x1024 (my usual resolution) I noticed this also. Reducing your screen resolution will fix the distortion that the video player creates to make up for the difference. I will be looking into different formats/sizes on how to correct this. The font size and type will probably have the biggest effect on this.

Quote:Original post by Sijmen
What codec are these videos compressed with? I'm using a Mac with WMP 9, which gives me an error message about a missing codec.

Anyways, video tutorials are great!

They are compressed using windows media encoder 9 using the standard windows media compression format. I capture the screen 10 frames a second with a bit rate of 86kbps. There are no fancy 3rd party codecs working so I'm not sure why it wouldn't work. Anyone else have an idea why it's not working?

Quote:Original post by Kazgoroth
I've only taken a look at the first couple, and I'm personally not really interested enough in the subject matter to watch all of them, but I'd have to say I think you seem to be doing a good job, and that what you're doing is a great thing.

Is it because it is a text based RPG and not graphical? What sort of genre would you be interested in?

Quote:Original post by Kazgoroth
Some more explanation of the thought process behind what you're doing would probably be good, but you're already aware of that, so I assume it's just something that will come with practice.

I have been thinking a lot on ways of presenting my technical reasoning for coding components the way I do and am open to some suggestions. I have thought about creating a complete technical document along side of the design document that I can go over as a sort of introduction to the project. It could also serve as a table of contents for those that want to jump ahead. As the game is 2D now, my audience becomes more intermediate so I think it will be expected.

Quote:Original post by Kazgoroth
Oh, as for people being skeptical, I can't really speak for the others, but I've never really looked at any video-tutorials for programming before, and I sort of doubted the medium would convey the information as well as a written article with examples - it seems to be a good way to cover the information though, and is probably excellent for those that may not be as able to get information from a purely text explanation.

Anyways, to summarise, keep up the great work, I'm sure a lot of people will appreciate these.

Thanks. I've read many articles and seen many open source projects that someone could easily pick up and learn from and that is why I was skeptical at first whether to even make some 2d video tutorials. As ostamo1 pointed out, there aren't that many game programming video tutorials availible and I think that maybe by showing a step by step video, people will begin to put the pieces together and begin to understand the whole picture.

Quote:Original post by Kevinator
How did you make the videos? What software did you use?

I used Windows Media Encoder 9. It is completely free to use and compresses video and sound quite well. However, I will look into other compression formats to try an make sure the majority of people will be able to view the tutorials.

Quote:

Quote:Original post by Kazgoroth
I've only taken a look at the first couple, and I'm personally not really interested enough in the subject matter to watch all of them, but I'd have to say I think you seem to be doing a good job, and that what you're doing is a great thing.

Is it because it is a text based RPG and not graphical? What sort of genre would you be interested in?

Oh, I actually meant that it's targetted at beginners, not a problem with the genre chosen or the fact that it's text based. I'm quite capable of writing my own game, but from what I watched it looks like your videos will be very helpful for those who still need to learn.

Quote:

Quote:Some more explanation of the thought process behind what you're doing would probably be good, but you're already aware of that, so I assume it's just something that will come with practice.

I have been thinking a lot on ways of presenting my technical reasoning for coding components the way I do and am open to some suggestions. I have thought about creating a complete technical document along side of the design document that I can go over as a sort of introduction to the project. It could also serve as a table of contents for those that want to jump ahead. As the game is 2D now, my audience becomes more intermediate so I think it will be expected.

A technical document might be a good idea. It would certainly give you an opportunity to explain some of the technical reasoning a little more, and it would also be good to provide some exposure to those who may not have come across such documentation before so that they might have a better idea of how to write things up for thier own future projects.

I thought it was sad that the very first line of code you wrote violated a standard (in C++ main must return int). But since nobody that matters cares about such things, and helping people is always good, you get my approval anyway.

Quote:Original post by Im_wasting_my_life
I also downloaded the binary and played with it some. There isn't any error checking in the code is there? The game let me type whatever I wanted and didn't handle it very well. Do you plan on working on the input system a bit to more to make it more tolerant to bad input? At least make the user put something valid in?

Yes I really skipped the error checking steps (especially on the name input) and will probably fix it later in a bug fixing tutorial. When I started, I had a goal to teach someone how to program a text based RPG. Focusing on this goal while designing as I went along, I ignored non-game critical error checking as I wanted to move fairly quickly without explaining the many possibilities that could happen at each point. Thanks for noticing as I do believe error checking is very important.

Quote:Original post by Im_wasting_my_life
Maybe for future videos you could put some time into planning before jumping into the video and doing most of the designing on the fly.

Exactly. I *must* do this for the 2d series to ensure the videos stay within a topic scope and to produce a more stable final product.

Quote:Original post by smart_idiot
I thought it was sad that the very first line of code you wrote violated a standard (in C++ main must return int). But since nobody that matters cares about such things, and helping people is always good, you get my approval anyway.

Violate a standard? Yes.
Sad? I don't think so.
Why? because like you said, nobody cares. It's a video tutorial teaching beginners how to program a text RPG in a console window. It's not even a standard to write a game in a console window. :)
Will you change it? If someone really cares.

Thanks for all the feedback. I'm glad people are critiquing my work as it lets me know what is important to the viewers. To those that have questions on specific videos, I have opened my forums and will personally answer your questions.

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