Revitalizing the Forum

[chili]

I've mentioned this before, but I have a plan to kick some life back into the old forums here. I really appreciate all you veteran regulars who have stuck it out with me here over the months and years, but I think I'm not alone here in feeling a bit of nostalgia for the heyday when posts would scroll off the front page in a single day.

Basically the thing that brings in new users the most was and still is the early series. Especially the stuff up to and including lesson 8. The problem is that now those tutorials are a little out of date, and while still perfectly valid, a lot of people click off the video right away when they hear that they need msvc 2010 or d3d9 because it makes the content seem dated (and in some respects it is, though the concepts taught aren't really dependent on any specific api or technology).

A revitalized series that is linked to from the original Beginner lesson 1 (linked with annotations / comment links / changed title etc.) should be able to draw a lot of new blood into the community. I have learned a lot about C++ and a lot about teaching programming and related concepts over the last few years, and there are a lot of annoying kinks on the original series (putpixel slow as fuck, dxerr.lib, so much more).

I'm also planning on launching a wiki that will document, index, and annotate the content for the new series, a twitter account for social media bullshit, a content management system so that people can submit creations with tags and users can search, comment on, and rate content the cataloged content, and other fancy garbage like that.

More to come when I have more time to type and think and eat. In the meanwhile, what do you guys think of my dumb plans?

[albinopapa]

Quite the undertaking, sounds fabulous. Twitter eh, that'll be a sight to see.

[Natories]

I think your plans are dead on! I love your series and your teaching methods however, as you say, if you want more people then moving on to DirectX 10+ as well as new VS for the beginner series is probably where it's at! I, myself, am a fan of the Win XP development, but I even have to be willing to get with the times if I want to do anything on new ops and computers. So, beginner series add more up-to-date (I hate saying that) videos for new ops.
The wiki idea is a fantastic way to make it easier for people to quickly search for items that they particularly interested in atm. I love what is in place right now, the stickies and program locations, but having content under the new series where "fancy garbage" is implemented would have new, and old, members here for a while finding answers to their questions.
This is just my opinion!
Natories

[MrGodin]

Well, for me, I like the forums. I have no "real time" friends who code, or even get the concept of coding, so this is my little community I can share my ideas, poke around for ideas and the like. My new project i would like to share but i feel its too large to post on here. I guess there is always Gethub lol. Anyways, looking forward to anew series and a new look.
Cheers

[albinopapa]

Well, for me, I like the forums. I have no "real time" friends who code, or even get the concept of coding, so this is my little community I can share my ideas, poke around for ideas and the like. My new project i would like to share but i feel its too large to post on here. I guess there is always Gethub lol. Anyways, looking forward to anew series and a new look.
Cheers

Or dropbox.

[BurakCanik]

As said before me, dead on! It sounds like a lot of effort though. Godspeed my friend.

[yoshiyukiblade]

First post!

I took a C++ course at my university, and learned how to program for the first time a little over a year ago. It wasn't until I was on winter break a couple months ago when I decided to get my feet wet with graphics programming. While on the search, I ran into your videos and easily found them to be the best from a learning standpoint. Now, having lurked here for a bit, I think this thread is a great opportunity to register, and to get my thoughts in!

I loved the idea of starting with a basic, naive approach, before gradually building up into the "proper" way of doing things. This is often how things are taught at school for many different subjects. So if you want to refresh your videos, keeping that teaching method is definitely welcome.

I think the most difficult problem you face at the moment is that beginners have to start with a framework that you already crafted. Now, having seen the early videos in the Intermediate Series (which were freaking awesome, btw), it's no wonder why you kept the details from the beginner. I recently learned from an SDL2 presentation video that the Windows and Direct3D API is particularly nightmarish to set up properly. This is kind of a strange situation where the beginner has to be surrounded by a bunch of advanced code that they can't read or touch for a while, but it seems impossible to avoid. That nagging feeling of "is this how it's actually done?" never really went away until I saw other tutorials following a roughly similar setup.

(At school, I remember having my to type "#include <iostream>", "int main() { .." and "return 0;" without fully understanding why. Once I learned about libraries, functions and arguments, my mind was blown when I realized main is just an integer function that can also take arguments for the command line. This is once instance of being around code I didn't fully understand, but it was rewarding once I learned a little more about programming.)

The next challenge is to gauge the skill level of the people that will stumble upon your first video. If I remember correctly, the first video said that no programming knowledge was required. I learned the basics at school before seeking out your work, so I personally think that having this foundation is vital. I think videos would flow better if it's assumed the viewer already has some knowledge about "if" statements, "while" and "for" loops. Basic knowledge about structures and classes are also nice to have as well. At the very least, the viewer should know how the files link together. All of this is literally what you can learn in a single beginner course (maybe two), so I don't think starting with these assumptions is too demanding. This kinda coincides with my first point about being surrounded by code you may not fully understand. The power and flexibility of loops and conditionals is hard to comprehend until you've used it in a wide variety of tasks. I do however like the fact that you taught the basics concurrently with graphics programming, but maybe that too much to take in at once. I'm not too sure though.

Ok, this is becoming a wall of text, so I'll stop for now. I've always been fascinated by the art of teaching, and your work is much appreciated. It helped me make that transition from console programming with plain text, to manipulating pixels in a window. I look forward to whatever you have planned for us. Cheers!

[rekvijem]

I think people are geting bored with HUGS and maby you should make pool to continue with HUGS or
shift to 3D.
In paralel do, as u said, revitalized series that is linked to from the original Beginner lesson 1.
Don't forget facebook for media.

[chili]

I think the most difficult problem you face at the moment is that beginners have to start with a framework that you already crafted. Now, having seen the early videos in the Intermediate Series (which were freaking awesome, btw), it's no wonder why you kept the details from the beginner. I recently learned from an SDL2 presentation video that the Windows and Direct3D API is particularly nightmarish to set up properly. This is kind of a strange situation where the beginner has to be surrounded by a bunch of advanced code that they can't read or touch for a while, but it seems impossible to avoid. That nagging feeling of "is this how it's actually done?" never really went away until I saw other tutorials following a roughly similar setup.

Hey Yoshi welcome to the forums! You hit on a pretty key point here for me. A lot of people complain that they don't want to learn a framework, they want to make their own engine. One thing I want to convey in the new series is that the framework is barely anything at all, and that it is necessary to enable a beginner course to have a logical and interesting starting point. People criticize that I should be starting with console applications, but I disagree. Even with console apps, the beginner is confronted with tons of concepts that they don't understand and just have to basically treat as a black box. Starting with putpixel lets you deal directly with the fundamentals of computing--numbers--in an easier to grasp manner. Text and string manipulation is better left for later in my opinion.

[yoshiyukiblade]

Thanks for the warm welcome!

Yeah, I was quite surprised by how generic the framework actually is, but it's difficult to convey that to a beginner. It depends on their assumed skill level. If they want to see is a fresh empty project from scratch turn into the framework, then I think you can assume they know some amount of programming. A complete beginner may not mind starting with a prescribed project file so much. Even so, getting a window on screen is anything but trivial unless you use a library like SDL2. That might be a viable alternative to interfacing with D3D and Windows directly, but a lot of the intricate low-level knowledge bombs you dropped on us will be lost.

I respect your position on console programming; it's a bit outside the scope of your videos. I wasn't aware that this was frequently brought up in the past. It's probably because the console is a common starting point for programming courses.

On a side note, I personally didn't get too much of that black box feel when learning C++, but we were taught with the bare minimal tools (the Linux terminal with VIM for editing and g++ for compiling). The black boxes that I can recall are library includes, using namespaces (which I don't use anymore), and the main function. Other than that, it was quite straightforward.