WOLFCODER'S PROFILE

But I would be willing to bet there are a few users who have attempted to use this and couldn't figure it out; this is aimed at them. All your manuals and text files are raw data dumps.

Those people need to be talking to me. Then I re-write the manual. The manual being hard to read is a bug.

I indicated in the first tutorial that this is "A beginner's guide to 20XX". My reference to putting things in "simpler terms" isn't specific to this tutorialpage and I didn't mean that you were using complicated words. Just the way the idea is presented will be a bit more simple.

Alright. Assume manual.pdf will never be written to be simpler. Assume you will update this tutorial so the information matches. Even with these two givens, this document is still relatively useless.

Why? This article is an explanation, not a tutorial. Read articles about 2003, you'll notice the trend for what constitutes a tutorial is a walk-through the construction of a specific case for either practice or the demonstration of some theory.

An actual getting started tutorial would have people getting started with their hands dirty and their clothes ruined. I don't just stand in front of my lab class and explain C to them, they have the book- I have them actually doing specific things on their computers, have them writing the code, asking me questions, and them turning in their product as homework.



Take a look at this document which is actually a tutorial. I walk you through actually writing an application that makes little dots spin around your video panel under Linux. I tell you exactly what to do and what to assemble, and explain why you are doing these things. The result is a product you have assembled yourself, and because of this, you understand more about the idea of how to write games under Linux.



A tutorial for 20XX would be something like "How to make a custom menu using the draw commands" where the tutorial walks you through actually making a custom menu with the draw commands, complete with pictures, screencaps, explanations and the like. You would have built an actual product that you could further modify to your curiosity and learn. THAT is what a tutorial is.

And hopefully now you understand why I have enough time to write a manual, an explanation, but not a tutorial and why I feel it is better for the community to do so.

This is actually longer than the relevant section in the manual, and don't forget the manual itself will be going through revisions. What will happen is that this article will become outdated very fast. It doesn't actually use any "simpler" words either and my engine already checks to see if you have at least shader model 2.0 and if not it switches to software fallbacks, so the shader compatibility thing is useless.

I know you mean well, but this article will create a point of confusion.


To all users, I recommend you simply read manual.pdf and e-mail me errata or confusion.

I know it's great and all, but 90% of this is just a copy and paste from the manual I wrote.

Of course it is and it would probably work better.

It's really easy to include, and I was going to add collision primitives so detection would also be built in (not to mention both would then be faster).