So uh. Progress. :)

[mattykins]

I figured i'd let everyone know what i've been up to recently

I've been learning/coding in Python! I have a lot of projects going on right now.

Heres a list of some:

Completed:

Photo encoder: It takes a photo, reads the pixel data, puts it into an otherwise unreadable form unless un-encoded by the program
Snake/wyrm/worm clone, get longer when you eat apples, generic haha.
10 other genereic game clones lol!
Game of life - cellular automata!
Langton's ant - black square turn left, white square turn right (or the other way i don't remember )
Millions of little command line things like calculators and text editors

In Progress:
DemonRL (Demon the RogueLike): I'm a big fan of roguelikes and I have even bigger hopes for this game
Speed Cube: A platformer based on speed, bounce-slide-jump-fall-rinse-repeat-win, with a very easy to use map editor
A vim (standard linux text editor) clone
Roguelike dungeon gen(Will probably be put into DemonRL)
A call of duty zombies + wolfenstein 3D baby : ray casted psuedo 3d graphics with CoD Zombie style gameplay also with a map editor( I'm a big fan of community generated content)


I'm really loving python, its helped my programming a LOT. It ties into almost every language in some way and can be incorporated in almost everything. Its great.

Anyways i just figured that i would let everyone know how my programming/game-dev learning is going

[Jackolantern]

Glad to hear of all the success! Only thing I can say is be careful about spreading yourself too thin. I can understand that a lot of this stuff was likely just fodder while learning Python, but still keep it in mind

As far as Python goes, I respect it, but I honestly could not get into it after having to give it a try last semester in a programming class. I have just been coding in C-style languages for so...so...long lol that it is hard to change. One thing that really disoriented me was returning tupples from functions. No passing arguments by reference, since it isn't needed due to being able to return multiple values from a function. It really takes a different mindset to design complicated applications with that kind of earth-shattering change lol.

Also, it was hard for me to get used to a white-space delimited language versus a semi-colon delimited language (C-style).

[mattykins]

I agree with you on the tuple point and the whitespace point. And my only other complaint about python is the way it handles arrays (or 'Lists' in python-speak). The system works good for single dimensional arrays, but when you want to do a 2 dimensional array or a 3 dimensional one it becomes very lacking in control. There are modules for it like numPy but no native support is a definite downside. (I started writing a 2d array object in c++ to be used in python programs but then i realized it would probably be slower seeing how i would have to keep referencing that every time i wanted to use the array, and it would get even more slow if i wanted to iterate through the entire array)

[Jackolantern]

I actually never came across the need for multi-dimension arrays in my class, but as I think about it, I bet it would be tough. Python is just a strange, strange animal to me lol.

What IDE or text editor do you use for Python? My class was setup to use IDLE, but upon realizing that was some 20-year-old-looking garbage, I changed to using Komodo, because...ya'know...debugging, code hinting, line numbering and syntax highlighting are all things and are nice to have haha

[mattykins]

If i'm on linux i use vim or gedit, if i'm on windows i use notepad++ and the cmd for compiling

[Jackolantern]

Ahh. I am spoiled, and always love full-featured IDEs lol

[hallsofvallhalla]

I actually use or need MD arrays more often than I care to admit. They can be very handy especially in map design.

I have also found myself using python again with the Torque MMOKIT.

[mattykins]

halls, i'm finding it especially difficult when working on DemonRL, especially with dungeon generation it makes things a bit wierd. But also what are your thoughts on Python, do you like it?

jack, I haven't tried Komodo, is it good for python? I may give it a go

[Jackolantern]

It is great for Python! Granted, I am using Komodo IDE, their commercial IDE, but I think Komodo Edit still has most of the features I use, such as debugging, code hinting, automatic indentation, etc.

[hallsofvallhalla]

I love Komodo.

I have no real positive or negative thoughts on Python. I use it for the TMMOKIT for scripting and it works well.