Learning to code?

[Fairy-Killer]

There's also many universities that start teaching with c++ and use g++ as a compiler. If one asked me, I pity the poor souls that have to deal with the often undecipherable error messages and uninformative seg faults.

My 313 class got changed from Windows API to Unix... I swear half my time is spent compiling and running gdb to see where my code messed up. I miss visual studio so much.

[Eliseos]

There's also many universities that start teaching with c++ and use g++ as a compiler. If one asked me, I pity the poor souls that have to deal with the often undecipherable error messages and uninformative seg faults.

My university did this before they switched to Java. It was a pain in the ass to learn, but it helped drive home some good concepts like makefiles and the build process. If you just use an ide like vs you might not understand why you're getting linker and some other errors.

[sruon]

Master C, move on to C++, conquer world.

I don't necessarily disagree with anyone here, but if you're looking for an actual career switch, you're going to need a piece of paper that says you know how to do it. I wrote my first programs 18 years ago, but never went to school to "learn." Now I'm stuck working crappy jobs while I finish my degree, which for me has so far been a very expensive piece of paper to say I know how to do something I've been doing for years. Fortunately I only have about 8 months to go until I graduate.

Just be aware that, as has been mentioned, you're desire for a career change isn't likely to come cheap.

also this

[idklol]

So i'm looking for some opinions about my OP. Been researching my options as to getting into a university and getting a degree.

From what i've found out, the best way (and only one i've found so far) is to apply
for an "Access course".

http://www2.bolton.ac.uk/coursefinde...c-2f3290658373

Basically it's a 15 week course starting in January or September. The course is run by the university i'd like to do my degree at and leads onto this course.

http://www2.bolton.ac.uk/coursefinde...5-c62da4c4d8ce

I was advised that if i sort my shit out i can get straight onto the one starting January 2012 with the idea of starting the degree September 2012.

My concern is pretty much derived from what i've read in this thread. Lots of advice telling me to learn coding in my own time but is 10-11 months enough time to pick up enough knowledge to tackle a degree.

I don't wanna go ahead with it all, get there and then realise i'm out of my depth. It's a big commitment and i want to do it right. Already been down one wrong path and i do not want to make that mistake again.

[DNAval]

Please don't take my question the wrong way, but how exactly do people make Bots for FFXI or any other game for that matter.
I don't know anything about programming so I just been curious about how exactly they work...

I do use Clipper to walk thru people in jeuno and for the JA ability thingy 0wait, just wondering how exactly people modify game to do stuff like that, just the walking thru people is a mind blast in my head.

[Blasta]

Dunno if this is any help, but I did some programming before enrolling to Uni. I always tried to make too hard programs that were way out of my league. It's really hard to learn programming on your own, and now my mind is just blown how smart some of the solutions are now that I have some help. Definitely recommend some courses or school etc.

[sruon]

Please don't take my question the wrong way, but how exactly do people make Bots for FFXI or any other game for that matter.
I don't know anything about programming so I just been curious about how exactly they work...

I do use Clipper to walk thru people in jeuno and for the JA ability thingy 0wait, just wondering how exactly people modify game to do stuff like that, just the walking thru people is a mind blast in my head.

reverse engineering, you observe how the game works, how the mechanics do change the game from the inside, you modify values, see what happens, spend hours at it... You're only allowed to walk through people in FFXI because it is a planned interaction by the game. (i.e. GM Mode)

sorry for offtopic

[DNAval]

reverse engineering, you observe how the game works, how the mechanics do change the game from the inside, you modify values, see what happens, spend hours at it... You're only allowed to walk through people in FFXI because it is a planned interaction by the game. (i.e. GM Mode)

sorry for offtopic

that's just crazy, around 8 years ago i tried to get into coding, but Hello World was as far as I went.

[Amastacia]

There's only one thing I haven't seen come up, which shocks me.

Learn to document what you do. Then learn to document it better. Then learn to document it even better than that.

Document what you're going to do.
Document what you're doing.
Document what you've done.
Document anything that you're doing in an unusual way.
Document anything else that you're thinking about seriously.
Document some more.

Beyond that, Aurik is on the money, along with several others.

Oh, and just to reinforce... before you start spending money on courses, use some of the information available on the web and free tools to just do some simple stuff. You'll get a feel fairly quickly if the style of problem solving and basic methodologies that good code development require appeal to you.

I, for one, loved the idea of computer programming right up until I went to school for it. I'm better off for what I learned, but the most valuable thing I took away besides a piece of paper is that the problem solving aspects appeal to me a lot more than the rote work. Thus, I'm now a sales engineer, because I get to keep solving problems, get to keep designing systems, get to keep my integrity, and don't have to sit in a box and code. I can still make little programs to solve problems for myself if I need to, but it's on my own terms and my own schedule.

[Senoska]

Dunno if this is any help, but I did some programming before enrolling to Uni. I always tried to make too hard programs that were way out of my league. It's really hard to learn programming on your own, and now my mind is just blown how smart some of the solutions are now that I have some help. Definitely recommend some courses or school etc.

I wanted to add my own thing on to this. I started programming in 2004ish and didnt get serious about it until 2006. However, every last bit of code I know and use is self taught. I find what the best thing to do is to find a program you'd like to write and work your way looking up how to do things. For example, if you want to automate a website from a program, look up "How to get a website in c#"(or whatever your language is.. basic idea still applies.) Eventually you'll find a class that suits what you want so you look up "httpwebrequest c# example" then keep modifying your search "httpwebrequest c# post string" or something. Basically, find a program you want to develop that -IS- outside of your skill level and just work at it until you find a solution to the problem you're stuck at. Learning Hello World is pointless, make a program that actually does something. My very first two programs were a LS DKP system and right after that a Japanese injection method for US gamers in FFXI before the IME plugin for windower existed, and I had absolutely 0 coding experience going into it. I just googled my way through it until I understood.

This is how I got started, and by looking at other people's code, I managed to piece together what is happening. If you have an understanding of objects in programming, then you're 70% of the way there. The rest is syntax which is simple and learning classes and seeing examples of how they're used.

edit:

that's just crazy, around 8 years ago i tried to get into coding, but Hello World was as far as I went.

You're just retrieving data from memory and changing its value to something else. As someone else noted, its a feature added to the game by the developers for gms to clip through people. If there is a boolean value or something that gives you GM mode, setting that value to true will give you no-clip through people. Likewise, position hacks are just retrieving the position of the player and changing it. This is really bad on SE's side since who the fuck keeps this data stored client sided, but I digress. Basically what you do is start with a number to search in memory, search for that number which will give you a huge list of returned values, change something that would affect that setting, and refine your search even more.

IE: If you're looking for player position, lets say XYZ, if you want Y, stand at the bottom of a hill and search for just random numbers. Walk up the hill a little bit and search for numbers that have increased in value. Walk down, search for values that would have decreased. Keep doing this until you have narrowed it down to a few values and change them via walking and see what the values do. If you change the value, something on your screen should change as well which will tell you that you have the correct value. Find what piece of code is writing that to memory which will give you an address and an offset which will let you edit this code regardless of when the program was loaded (closing it removes it from memory, reopening it will reassign memory values, so you have to know where the values are going to be stored in memory ahead of time and how to reference them IE: pointers and offsets.) Type up some basic memory altercations in code and bam you're done.

This method works for everything. Want to know what/who you have selected in a game? Select something, search, select something else, search again, etc etc until you find the value of what it is you have targeted. Hence some of the early bots. Later bots (Nasa, for example) were packet injection bots which would inject some code (Typically...) into FFXI that allowed it to highjack, edit, and call certain methods when they're called by the game. So the packet for Spawn mob would be hooked by Nasa and start the timer to send the packet for provoke. I should note I have not had my hands on Nasa to look, but this is typically how these things work.

[Blasta]

My very first two programs were a LS DKP system and right after that a Japanese injection method for US gamers in FFXI before the IME plugin for windower existed, and I had absolutely 0 coding experience going into it. I just googled my way through it until I understood.i

Yeah it is by no means impossible and you should make a program that you actually 'want' to make, but I do want to stress out the fact how many quit cause they are trying to bite more than they can chew. Of course this depends on the person and what kind of program they are doing. In your case its safe to assume that you were into XI and the programs were going to be useful, so you had more of a reason to complete stuff.

By the way, does anyone know good websites that have 'programming tasks' cause I'm running ideas :q <Inspiration drain>

[Senoska]

How do you guys combat spaghetti code? I find that no matter how well I document a program or plan something out, I always run into an unforeseen problem with some type of class and have to go about fixing my problem a patched-up way that always seems to lead to massive amounts of spaghetti code. I've started maybe 20-30 projects that have been doomed by this because I get frustrated and typically abandon the project.

A good example of this is with the threadpool in .net. For what ever reason, they decided to make the threadpool static so you don't always have the amount of threads if you want to be able to do something. This turned into a major problem with some software I'm doing where I need a whole shitton of threads to be executed.

I'm working within a plugin system (IE: Each plugin contains a http call designed for a certain site. Such as pulling information from amazon and putting it on a blog, just as an example. The plugin has a central "Run" method, when that's called, it needs to go out, do what its going to do, and notify the main thread that it has executed.)

I managed to do this with reflection, delegates, queues, and lists, but the obvious problem of locking comes up. So this turned into a massive clusterfuck that looks like this:


I've let it run for about 200,000 iterations without any exceptions, but the code is so goddamn ugly, and honestly I have no idea how else to implement this due to locking. This should have logically been something simple but now has turned into a bunch of mismanaged crap with any reduction in said crap would be equal to redoing the system entirely. How do you guys typically go about fixing this? I'm not sure if I just don't plan out enough, or this is just a short coming of .net. I'm honestly not sure about the solution to this in something like C++ or even Java.

Sorry for the digression.

[Viena]

Design paterns.

[aurik]

This is why a formal education is useful.

Coding is easy. Software engineering is hard.

[Takedown3]

I did 4 years of programming in college and after iI graduated I ended up in biz dev for 10 years with a bit of data analysis mixed in for advertising and marketing solutions. never really touched my degree or used any of the skills i picked up in C(++), VB, java, coldfusion(lol), php. The only thing I make use of on a daily basis is my SQL knowledge and even that is only used to build queries for phpmyadmin to pull data from the DB and create reports.


All of my skills are so out of date now I would hate to have to try to learn any of the new shit that has come out in the last decade. In fact if I were to go back to school (never gonna happen) I would go for a biz degree in marketing/advertising and take a bunch of tech classes on the side (if I didn't already have the background I have now)

[Zhais]

Coding is easy. Software engineering is hard.

^


This is something I've actually had to battle with at work... I'm very much for good design of new code pages, and a lot more structured approaches. Most everyone else... not so much. Seeing as how they come from web programming in VBScript, it's hard to get them to change over

I always run into an unforeseen problem with some type of class and have to go about fixing my problem a patched-up way that always seems to lead to massive amounts of spaghetti code

I always try to actually fix the problem by rewriting classes where I can, when I can. Spaghetti code if it needs to be a fast patch out to users, followed by a full more 'correct' fix later on. Spaghetti code is so very much unreadable by an outside observer (or even for yourself later on). I always stress about making my code understandable and readable lately. Seems to be helping

[Khamsin]

Once upon a time, when I was starting college, I was deciding between programming (something that I had been doing as a hobby already, starting with qbasic, then C++, then perl and php, and most recently C#, never really got into stuff like vbscript) and civil engineering. I chose engineering because I can always program on my spare time, poorly documented spaghetti code it may be, but I can't exactly do civil engineering on my own.

Despite how shitty the engineering economy is turning out to be (10 years later, I'm already licensed and have been an engineer for many years now), I still don't regret the decision. As fun as programming seems, its only fun to me when I can do it as I please, in my own way, on my own time. I just feel that if I formalized it, got certifications for every letter of the alphabet, and made a career out of it, it'd suck the fun right out of it for me and I wouldn't enjoy it anymore.

Just be sure that if you want to do this, become a programmer in the game industry, that it won't lose it's magic for you. Programming is fun, games are fun, so programming in the game industry should be fun right? I hope so.

[Fairy-Killer]

Well... Had the interview today but was not asked any technical questions... I might have an interview with Intel soon so that one would definitely give a good idea of what to expect from a computer company.

[aurik]

Just be sure that if you want to do this, become a programmer in the game industry, that it won't lose it's magic for you. Programming is fun, games are fun, so programming in the game industry should be fun right? I hope so.

Only if you like working twice as hard for 80% of the pay. You need to REALLY love games to develop them. Next 2 weeks we are expected to put in 75hrs each yay.

[Correction]

Just be sure that if you want to do this, become a programmer in the game industry, that it won't lose it's magic for you. Programming is fun, games are fun, so programming in the game industry should be fun right? I hope so.

Troll post? :D

link removed

http://unsubject.wordpress.com/2011/...s-game-is-fun/

Pro tip: go work in the real software industry if you want a challenging software engineering job where you don't turn into a slave for from 3 months to a year every project with zero career stability.