morganmc
March 2, 2016, 7:12am
27
Hi there,
I’ve posted on a few threads now giving newbies some starter advice, and one of the points I make are the evils of “complete” tutorials and marketplace assets. I would argue that newbies should not touch marketplace assets at all: they are for people who already know what they’re doing and just want to save some time by not reinventing the wheel.
A “complete” tutorial is one that shows you end-to-end how to make a fully working weapon, or a multiplayer first person shooter. Again, this is great if you understand the engine and just want to get some ideas on how to design and structure your code, but not if you want to learn the basics.
The problem with these things is that they encourage “black box thinking”: just write this code into this class file here and drop these animations here and it will all magically work! Problem is you have no idea why or how they work, so when you have issues you have no way to fix them, or to modify and extend them to suit your purposes.
To use an analogy, you’re trying to learn to cook by scraping bits from other people’s pre-cooked meals onto a single plate, and getting frustrated because the bits don’t taste nice together.
My advice would be to go back to basics. Learn in isolation how the different components work. How the camera is manipulated, how player movement is handled. Then use that knowledge to try prototyping your own weapon system and gameplay. You will get it wrong as first, but you will learn more from fixing those problems and getting something functioning than you ever could by copy/pasting bits of code that might as well be written in Chinese.
It will take you longer, but taking longer is better than never succeeding! Good luck.
You described the situation exactly, good analogy, but i ask you this…
Where do you get the information if not from these tools?
Yesterday morning at about this time I looked for help in getting a camera set up and while some guys came forward with a few tips I am still in the same place I was yesterday!
I slept 6 hours and walked the dog… other than that I was working on this!
So F frustrating!!!