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What _why describes is half the problem. (Maybe a bit more than half.) In the Good Old Days, you could take your Spectrum/Amiga/BBCmicro/C64/whatever, and (1) w
by gjm11 18y ago
What _why describes is half the problem. (Maybe a bit more than half.) In the Good Old Days, you could take your Spectrum/Amiga/BBCmicro/C64/whatever, and (1) write a program that (2) did something comparable to the games you could buy. (Less polished, sure, but not a million miles off.)
Nowadays, #1 is harder because there's no programming language bundled with the system, because it doesn't drop you into a REPL when you boot it up, and because the programming languages you can easily get hold of don't have nice easy facilities for graphics and suchlike. That's _why's point.
But of course #2 is harder too, because modern PCs are capable of all sorts of astonishing 3d moving graphics and stuff, and the games you can get for them exploit that. But that stuff is really difficult for a novice, and poorly supported by learner-friendly programming languages, and really difficult to do well even for experts.
So, for most people, the amount of gratification you get from writing your own code is less relative to what you get from just using other people's software, even if we solve #1 comprehensively. So the motivation to learn to program is less.
(Of course, there's a small minority who fall in love immediately with the very idea of programming. But it is a small minority.)
- eli 18y agoGuitar Hero is an incredibly popular game and requires no 3d graphics or full motion video. I'm pretty sure I could write Guitar Hero in Python. (Oh wait, someone already did! http://fretsonfire.sourceforge.net/ http://fretsonfire.sourceforge.net/)
- bd 18y agoExactly, lack of motivation is a big deal. Games these days have crazy production values (GTA IV took 3.5 years, 1000 people and $100 million budget). I know, there are also some very good indie games, but you have to be very creative to be able to compensate for a lack of production values. Not everybody is so multitalented. One possible solution is to get into programming by modding existing games (instead of starting from scratch). Many cool games have very good scripting engines (for example Unreal, Civilization or Half-Life). If you mod an existing game, your work is incremental, you can play with all these expensively produced assets. There is an instant gratification when you see some change in the game world made by you. Additionally, your results are immediately understandable to your gaming buddies.
- cabalamat 18y agoI know one of the developers on GTA IV. He says it cost $5 million.
- bd 18y agoLeslie Benzies, producer of GTA IV estimated costs to be $100 million. http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/scotland/article3821838.ece http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/scotland/article382... Maybe your friend was doing just a port on one of the platforms? That could be in the ballpark.