13 hours ago, JoeJ said:
If someone want's to get a good guitar player, would you say: "Oh no - don't listen to Jimi Hendrix - that's old! If you listen to that, you'll never learn to play properly!"?
Keep your audience in mind.
As someone who actually has played a bit of guitar, if a beginner (refer to the current forum and thus current audience) was wanting to start out with Jimi Hendrix songs, I would probably advise them to hold off on that until they had a better grasp of the fundamentals of playing a guitar, and come back to that wish later on when they were better equipped to deal with it.
Likewise, old Quake code might be a treasure trove of knowledge, but it's not something I would recommend to people starting out for the purposes of learning. There might be other valid reasons for looking at it (e.g. curiosity), but that's not the topic at hand.
An analogy closer to your Jimi Hendrix example would actually be a beginner wanting to make a huge MMO, like World of Warcraft. It's great to have goals and ambitions, but realistically that's just not a good plan when you're starting out. We generally don't advise people to start with their dream project; rather we suggest they work towards it with smaller projects to gain experience and knowledge.
If a kid wants to learn how to read because they see you reading Tolkien book, you give them something like "See Spot Run" to start with, not "Silmarillion".
5 hours ago, JoeJ said:
I could also say there is no major progress at all - music theory has not recieved a major update since the 70s, code is still based on C. CoD is still a simple FPS. It's subjective, so all angles should be pointed out.
No. Something being subjective does not mean all angles need to be pointed out.
The quoted part is disingenuous at best, and since it is, I don't understand where you're going with it. If this is the line of reasoning, then we might as well shut down any attempt of discussion on almost any subject by going "well, that's your subjective opinion, I'm going to ignore you because it doesn't fit my truth". Yes, you could say that CoD is simple, but if you do, don't be surprised if developers strongly disagree with your opinion and call you out on it.
If someone talking to developers/programmers claims CoD is simple, I would either expect them to be able to create a game indistinguishble from CoD within say a month or two, or to (at least when communicating with others) realign their definition of "simple" to the one shared by the rest of the world -- that "a game requiring hundreds of millions of dollars, hundreds of developers for several years, working on an existing codebase they can expand, improve and reuse" is not, in fact, "simple".
If someone asks about their 4 year old nephew wanting a simple and easy game to play, we don't need 400 pages worth of discussion of what constitutes simple and easy. At that point, people would be going "well, Dark Souls isn't actually difficult, you just need to be careful and think", "<puzzle game X> isn't hard, there's not even any enemies that attack you", etc.
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