Thinking about tutorial for July
It's getting time to decide what kind of tutorial I'll make this month. I'm considering something about meshes. Chime in if you have any thoughts!
Comments (7)
If you are going to do a mesh tutorial, how about combining it to earlier tutorial like creating procedural minimap for maze or perhaps making a fractal meshes.
I prefer to keep tutorials separate. Keeping them isolated means changes to one don't influence others. I can tell you that is a really good thing. Having said that, if I reach my next goal I will create series and I might just follow up on Maze with some neat stuff. :)
*creation and manipulation
I would love an tutorial on programmatic meshes (creation of manipulation). And I second the motion on better refactored examples (even as a second "fixing" of the first tutorial)
I will focus on meshes then! And see if I can combine it with Scott's curves suggestion. What kind of refactoring do you mean?
Random braindump follows: =) I'd love to see tutorials that cover game saving / reloading and drawing curves (things like animated paths on 2D planes, etc). Seems like there are very few useful resources for that. One other thing I would love - I really enjoyed the Maze tutorial, but I felt like I ended up with a Maze class that was somewhat "godlike" - it had a lot of logic for instantiating and configuring other objects in the system. I have yet to find a good pattern for breaking up that logic when components are initialized at runtime (e.g. loading a saved game, procedural generation, etc).
Curves are a neat idea! Combined with meshes, I could do some basic lofting. Concerning Maze, it is the "god" when creating its contents, as that's its job. It depends on what you're doing whether it makes more sense to put it in one place or split it up. For the tutorial, being straightforward is key. Maze builds the maze. It starts really simple, then adds a little thing, then another, thing, and so on. It's like prototyping, building as you go. The journey really is more important than the final result. It doesn't reach the point where it gets so big that you have to stop, design, and rebuild. And in fact lots of systems never reach that point, even when shipped. You feeling is natural, but you have to temper premature design with pragmatism. Saving and loading is a really broad topic and not at all a consideration for the Maze tutorial. To save and load its game state, all you really need is a seed and the player's position and orientation. You don't need to store the maze, just recreate it from the same random seed. Of course, the more dynamic content you add, the more involved it gets.