VB Programmer

[Caliga]

Hey guys, ive been an admirer of your work for some time now, i used to play warzone back when it was first released by pumpkin years ago on the PS1. Im a student studying programming in college, been learning VB6 for the last year now.

I would like to offer any help that i can to the project, as i would love to see this project grow and grow! Im only moderately skilled in visual basic and alas i have absolutely no skill in C++. But if theres anything at all i can do, even something small i'd be glad to help. Im also lightly skilled in using 3D modelling programs (silo, C4D, Maya) and creating graphics using photoshop.

Im probably going to be absolutely no use to you whatsoever, hell im probably even posting in the wrong section But feel free to mail me, or add me to MSN if i can be of service.

[email protected]

[kage]

well, certainly you can work on tools that some might find useful, and we'd be glad to accept them, but vb is pretty much as windows-only as you can get, and even on windows, the vm is pretty buggy, so any tools you write to fill a gap with vb would only help some of the users here (lots of us use free software besides warzone, with some of us using exclusively free software), thus such tools would probably get replaced with portable equivalents later on anyways.

[DevUrandom]

Buuuut: PieSlicer is written in VB6 and Watermelon is working on a replacement tool... So maybe you can link with him or maybe try to port PieSlicer to Qt or wxWidgets (so it becomes crossplatform)...
(PieSlicer is the modeling app for the Warzone mesh format called PIE. So your skills with modeling apps might be of use here.)

[Chojun]

Stratadrake wrote most of the tools that we used at NEWST to create the 1.11 and 1.12 mods for warzone.  He was only skilled in VB, and did a good job on them.  So your VB skills might be quite useful for creating tools for Warzone.  Certainly they are needed.

But for a personal recommendation (having just graduated from the University of Utah in Computer Science), I'd strongly recommend dropping any work with VB and start with a more procedural (and powerful) language like C.  If you get C down well you will be able to branch off to C++, Java, and C#.  In my experience, languages similar to VB (PL/SQL, Perl, Python, etc), although powerful, are really only used by IT for ancillary tasks.

In short:  Learn C and learn it well.  Students who had their foundation in Java suffered in the upper-division courses because Java really is programming with training-wheels.  If you learn C then you'll have the foundation to learn advanced computing concepts.

Just some advice from someone whose been there.  This thread hijacking brought to you by Chojun.

[Caliga]

Thanks for the advice chojun, i start college again aftewr summer break in a few days (10th of september) and i think this year is where they take our traning wheels off. Were getting a mixture of C/Java traning. So looking at what you have said, maybe it would be a good idea to do more personal study into C. Id love to be able to actually contribute something that actually appears into the actual game! C looks quite daunting i must say, the syntax is not as freindly and obvious as VB6 but i guess that its like taking a step upwards. Does anyone know if there are any FMV movies that have been made for warzone resurection?

[Chojun]

I don't know how your school's curriculum is focused, but at my school, for one of my classes I had to implement malloc() (a memory allocator) from scratch in C.  The students that began with Java really, really struggled on that one.  Here is a segment of code from my assignment:

Code: Select all

	//If the adjacent block doesn't have enough space, then the one after it might
	//By converting the epilogue to a char *, we can treat it like a value and do
	//a less-that comparison on the memory addresses
	else if (NextBlock(adjacentBlock) > (char *)g_epilogue && IsFree(adjacentBlock))
	//if ((NextBlock(adjacentBlock) > (char *)g_epilogue) && IsFree(adjacentBlock))
	{
		tempSize = SizeOf(ptr) + SizeOf(adjacentBlock);
		killBlock(adjacentBlock);
		setHeaderFooter(ptr, tempSize, 0); // ALLOCATED);
		adjacentBlock = NextBlock(adjacentBlock);
	}

	//If the epilogue is in front of the adjacent block (IE, it is the last block)
	//The heap needs to grow a little
	if ((void *)g_epilogue < adjacentBlock)
	{
		int minimumSize = ((size + 15) & 0xFFFFFFF8) + 8;
		int sizeToGrow = minimumSize - SizeOf(ptr);

		sizeToGrow += REXPAND;
		sizeToGrow &= REXPAND;

Anyway, find a good C tutorial.  The basic stuff is really easy to understand.  Try to learn pointer arithmetic as soon as you can, and you'll be set, especially for a carreer.

Interestingly, my company has an office in India.  I had an interesting discussion with my manager.  It would seem that all the tech/programming jobs are going overseas to India.  However, he says, programmers in India generally lack low-level and systems programming skills.  He said they had a problem finding anyone over there with enough skill to work on their system-level stuff, and couldn't, so the India office does mostly RAD-type stuff like Macromedia Flash, VB, etc.

So long story short, learn C and you'll be a pretty valuable asset in a world that is moving toward slow, easy to program languages.

[kage]

i think the only *useful* (for discussion) similarities between any of vb, perl, python, ruby, etc are that they're all at least partially interpereted, and all loosely typed.  most of those languages are just as programmatically flexible as c (not counting assembly), and run fast enough on the cpu that for, very honestly, 80% of the global problemspace, c/c++ aren't even worth considering given the much higher development and debugging time for the average programmer. also, from a language mechanics perspective, at least python is more "useful" than java, but certainly each have their niche areas.

[lav_coyote25]

anyways... ::)  whatever he is able to do ...he is able to do...  learning as he goes will be an accomplishment.  lets leave it at that. ;D

[2_Late]

My I maybe rude and offer unsolicited advice?

It was still BASIC when made the switch to straight to C++(Looking back, I'm glad I skipped basic C. C++ still lets you do the same thing, but by default it's very strict on some thing. C would let you make mistakes and just trust you know what your doing). I you are better off switching straight to C++ or maybe C#. All the versions of BASIC, including Microsoft Visual BASIC, are meant to be as learner friendly so you can get the basics down without having certify on seven 700 page manuals before you say "Hello World"

Don't worry so much about making the transition, granted learn a new systax is not always fun, ("Err! I knew how to do what in BASIC, but how do I do that in C!") but best thing you can do before switching from BASIC to any other language is to make sure you know the basics well enough to explain them clearly to someone else. The rest is just a downhill battle of learning: "Ok, now how can improvise that in C, and what is the recommended way I do that."

For example, for me at least, was I had to learn PRINT became the command "#include " & "cout <<". Where as PRINT in basic had done a few steps for me, I had a great deal more control in C++ or learning GOTO was a no-no in C. C knew what to do with it, but for a few reasons it's to be avoided, at almost any cost.