Programming Tutorials, (C++ Tutorials)

General Feedback & Requests
24

[=arbopa;224282]
Ah, forget I said anything. Clearly we have hit the point where even coders need their hands held to figure anything out. Best of luck with that.
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You seriously are going to tell all of us that you would honestly send a friend that just recently learnt coding, straight to the documentation, without any explanation on your part ? I highly doubt that.

I don’t even think you realize who this thread is aimed at… It’s not aimed at you or I, or people with experience…it’s aimed at the beginners. I mean, I too can go into the docs and engine and figure pretty much anything out, i created my c++ slate ui, in a few afternoons when there was 0 slate docs. of course we all have the ability to do this, but that isn’t the point…

do you realize how large UE4 is compared to other engines ? Do you realize for a beginner looking at the doc, that’s probably highly intimidating. They barely know how to program c++ and then they get sent off to a gigantic text book, at you know their first thoughts ? probably "Do I need to know all of this ? " “Whats all this ?” “WHY???”

It’s not about hand holding, it’s about scope, beginners and learning. Take for example the C++ tutorials for the battery power game, no fault to epic, but that tutorial is literally, do as i do exactly. It does nothing to really explain what’s going on in the engine or behind the scenes, or really why they are doing it. A friend of mine who just took a cs class, tried following that tutorial and got lost and decided to learn blueprints instead first, because in his words, “at-least in the blueprint tutorials there are parts of them where they explain parts of the engine, granted not that in depth, but far more than the c++ ones.”

**If asking for better tutorials is asking for epic’s hand to cross the street. Then don’t leave my side, momma epic.

**
[=;224292]
I come from the old school methods of C, G++ & GCC. We made due because documentation was lean and we didn’t have a choice otherwise. Times have changed and this isn’t the 90s. There are allot more solutions available and not enough time to power through them. Some people will always want spoon-fed, but that’s not what I am seeing here. The Unreal API and methods can sometimes be confusing, and there is nothing wrong with asking for better documentation. Coding is not an elite club anymore; it is much more accessible and that’s not a bad thing.
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Quoted for the truth.

25

[=arbopa;224282]
Ah, forget I said anything. Clearly we have hit the point where even coders need their hands held to figure anything out. Best of luck with that.
[/]

Of, for the love of , really?

If you want to get into an “in-the-old-days” ******* match, there’s a decent chance I can go toe-to-toe with you - I wrote my first line of code in 1980. And… I walked uphill barefoot through the snow to get to a computer in order to write that code. I can “In my day” with the best of them. :slight_smile:

And yeah, I am perfectly capable of reading API docs, looking through code, and figuring out how stuff works the hard way. I’ve done it many times. But with something as complex as a game engine, it is neither the most efficient nor the best way to be spending programmer time. I do it when I have to (I’m doing it right now with the new AI perception stuff), but that doesn’t mean Epic shouldn’t be striving to make learning easier or that programmers are somehow less capable for wanting some help wrapping their heads around more than 2 million lines of code.

26

On the private secret beta days, we had little documentation and no source code and we got stuff done ! I got everything on how UE4 c++ works by investigating the samples and tinkering.

27

[=;224292]
I come from the old school methods of C, G++ & GCC. We made due because documentation was lean and we didn’t have a choice otherwise. Times have changed and this isn’t the 90s. There are allot more solutions available and not enough time to power through them. Some people will always want spoon-fed, but that’s not what I am seeing here. The Unreal API and methods can sometimes be confusing, and there is nothing wrong with asking for better documentation. Coding is not an elite club anymore; it is much more accessible and that’s not a bad thing.
[/]

It takes quite a bit of time and resources to compile the Unreal Engine from scratch on my system. Granted its a few years old. Extrapolate that back to the 90s, one, you wouldn’t even be able to compile it with specs back than, but for arguments sake lets say you used your multi-HDD array as swap space and made it a batch job like in the olden days, it would take probably weeks.

You did not work with anything as complicated as this back then. Every body walked uphill both ways… What is being produced with UE4 is simply breath taking compared to the cave man times of the 90s. Rocks and sticks and mud, that’s what i remember playing with unlike your lasers and such.

edit: oops, meant to the kid, agree with you sort of, still super programmers back than worked on analog stuff where they literally could see the Gates flipping on and off (just kidding). Still its like working on a car from the 80s, anyone can literally go in them and play around and fix stuff and see how stuff works. You physically see everything that’s happening with almost straight correlation of cause and effect. Try that with a modern car, its just sealed compartments, no fixing, you just replace sections mostly. Old mechanical watch vs solid state chip LCD watch.
The old programmers had it very easy in a way.

28

[=;224363]
, meant to the kid,
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How very ignorant.

[]
The old programmers had it very easy in a way.
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Yeah, because having zero documentation, and no internet to look things up made everything much more simple, and easy to accomplish. :rolleyes:

It is about the thought process and knowing how to find info and figure it out.

29

[=arbopa;224432]
How very ignorant.

Yeah, because having zero documentation, and no internet to look things up made everything much more simple, and easy to accomplish. :rolleyes:

It is about the thought process and knowing how to find info and figure it out.
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I might have come across a little rude. I apologize, however, again, go checkout any branch of UE4. Yes, concepts are always the same, but it was also simpler times back than. And the UE4 tools and documentation are not up to task fully yet. UE4 is very awesome. Part of having so many limitations back then was that things were simpler.

Just for you, to get your memories of golden times a reality check…

$ git clone --verbose --shared Mirror_UnrealEngine 4.7
$ cd 4.7
$ git checkout -b 4.7 4.7.0-preview-8
$ cd Engine/Source

$ let sum=0; for filesize in find . -name *.h -o -name *.cpp -printf "%s "; do let sum+=$filesize;done; echo Source Code size: $(($sum/1024/1024))MB
Source Code size: 81MB

$ cd /cygdrive/c/Program\ Files/Epic\ Games/4.7/Engine/Source/

Stripped of non-material to game development sources.
$ let sum=0; for filesize in find . -name *.h -o -name *.cpp -printf "%s "; do let sum+=$filesize;done; echo Source Code size: $(($sum/1024/1024))MB
Source Code size: 56MB

We did not have to internalize 56MB of sources back than for a project. Not some simple API to discover at all, there are entire fully fleshed out domains.

edit:
$ git checkout -b 4.0 4.0.2-release
Source Code size: 43MB

30

Example usage of each function would be nice, like the system that exists on MSDN.

Obviously they have a ridiculous over-sized and over-budgeted team to put that kind of documentation together, so I wouldn’t expect it soon, but I do think it should be on the radar. I honestly have never found the API documentation very useful at all, it’s often much better to just find an existing usage of a function and work it out from there. TBF if it weren’t for 's tutorials on Wiki on some of the basic getting started stuff, I wouldn’t be half as comfortable in code as I am now.

Bonus points for doing this with the example projects too. ShooterGame is such a bloody good resource but the code notation is pretty sparce, the online system in particular is horrible to try and decipher for noobsters like me :smiley:

31

[=;225019]
TBF if it weren’t for 's tutorials on Wiki on some of the basic getting started stuff, I wouldn’t be half as comfortable in code as I am now.

Bonus points for doing this with the example projects too. ShooterGame is such a bloody good resource but the code notation is pretty sparce, the online system in particular is horrible to try and decipher for noobsters like me :smiley:
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Yeah same here, really got the ball rolling in the beta for me for sure.

I agree the online system is particularly horrible. Figured out the bp no problem, the c++ variant … not so much.