/digipen/ - DigiPenitentiary

>Using Python
>Ever

Git gud scrub.

If only Chris Peters were still here to save the day. Oh wait, Claude pissed him off with too much dumbfuckery.

>>1217
Without Chris, any hope for the Zero Engine becoming anything more than an education tool pretty much dried up.

At least now we no longer need to worry about Gabe Newell having a suitable successor at Valve.

>>1218
You say that, but I think you're forgetting how money-hungry DigiPen is. Making their own game creation tool that lets them a.) take a cut of profits on games made with it like the other engines do, and b.) take a cut of stuff sold in their The Void asset store like the other engines do = pure cashflow, why would they not want it.

>>1229
In order to do that, the void would have to work consistently. B every other update seems to break it.

>>1215
Oh hey, look at that, if you look at release notes they begin by listing breaking changes.

I don't know what more to say.

>>1236
They really ought to list them in the program before you update, though, seeing as how right now, it is exclusively a tool for student projects at DigiPen and not like a broad tool or anything.

>>1241
I spoke to one of my GAT taking friends. I didn't know it had an auto-updater, but apparently it does, and on top of that, before you choose to update, it has a dialog box which gives you those release notes.

Now maybe the school computers are getting updated before you get to them. That could potentially be an issue, but you can always just install the version you need on the sandbox.

HOW THE HELL DO I FIND A SPACE BY NAME NOW

WTF ZERO

>>1280

this.Space.GameSession.FindSpaceByName("Your fucking space");

>Removed Python!
Way to go, Zero Team. You removed support for a scripting language that wasn't hurting anything.

>>1283
OH SHIT

THANK YOU

FUCK YES BASED POSTER

>>1292
One of these days I'm going to get drunk and write a rant here about how Zilch is fucking stupid and the worst language ever created. They probably removed Python because now they want to do stuff that only their own language can do, but Zilch is so god-awful that it's going to ruin Zero as a product entirely. Why learn a real programming language that you can apply to other things when you can learn an entire language specific to just this one program? Yes of course much of the things you "learn" how to do in Zilch translate over into other programming languages, but the same can be said for GML and nobody in their right mind defends fucking GML.

If the Zero team had just used C# or Ruby or some common, existing language, it would make Zero a much, much better product. Instead, now they're stuck with this shitty, half-baked language that uses square brackets for generics syntax and has no subscript operator.

Fuck Zilch in the ass.

>>1283
And what the fuck is this remove-all-globals Nazism? Why can't GameSession be a global? Heck, call it Zero, or Game. Game.FindSpaceByName() makes perfect sense. How many fucking GameSessions do you plan on having running at once?

Consider this a lesson, which will come up in the industry.

1) Use source control. You can revert to an old version that doesn't use the new version of Zero.
2) Don't update to a new version with so little time left before a deadline. It WILL break your game, almost every time. The questions are, how badly and is it worth it?

Lastly, yes, it's crappy. Removing Python effectively breaks a large portion of the games at DigiPen. Zilch wasn't even integrated until last summer, so everything made before then is now broken. My Game team has to take extra precautions about which computers to open it on. A prototype I've been working on for a year is now broken…saved only by the fact that I had already decided to re-make it in Unity using C#.

>>1293
You're welcome, spend some time looking next time.

>>1295
There are many reasons, maybe they decided they preferred it that way. If you don't like it, don't fucking use it, or complain to them directly. It's such a minor nitpick considering how easy the solution is. But hey, maybe you want your glorals. Go ask them to make it a feature.

>>1295
I know Unity doesn't allow for globals, and presumably neither does Unreal.

>>1299
I don't mean my own globals you idiot, I mean why does accessing any functionality all have to stem out from "this"? this.Space.GameSession… instead of just GameSession… or Game…

At this rate when you want to manipulate a string it's going to be this.Space.GameSession.ZeroEngine.StandardLibrary.String or some fucking bullshit.

>>1304
What're you five?

Here's one reason: it's a logical progression. To access things parented to yourself you go to the parent. From there you can access the parent of that object.

Here's another: Although I doubt they actually do this or ever will, if they ever wanted/figured out how to do highly threaded components, giving you global functionality directly could be problematic. Now through properties they could probably make it work for both the "global" variation, and the current variation, but for whatever reason they chose this way.

Regardless it doesn't fucking matter because it's not like this is hard to do. Oh no! They moved functionality! Boo-fucking-who, I want them to use globals because I think it's better!

Fucking christ dude. I could see this in the opposite direction, because there you might not know the global exists! Of course, for the record, Zero.whatever still exists, the game session was taken off for whatever reason.

Oh, and why do you have to access things through this? Because they decided it was a helpful reminder to access members, properties, and functions through. Is it better? Meh, probably not. I like it a little better than arguing about leading and trailing underscrores, leading m and m_ and all that bullshit, but I'm sure someone is still having that argument so whatever. There's the reasoning, take it or leave it.

Also, obligatory slippery slope fallacy accusation.

>>1306
So what's the point of Zilch, then? Is it designed to be this robust language that programmers are supposed to use and learn from? Or is it supposed to be a language for designers, reducing the friction between designers and designing as much as possible? Right now, it's caught dead between the two, and it sucks shit for both camps.

>>1307

Zilch is just a language, just like any other. There are some minor ideas in there like any language made by anyone that are somewhat controversial.

Right now you're blaming Zilch the language for things Zero the engine is doing. They are made by the same people, but they don't have the same baggage. You can absolutely bind global shit to Zilch,

As far as it being either a language for programmers to learn from, or a language for designers to design, it doesn't have to try to be either of those things.

We have classes to teach us how to program, and for the CS students, Zilch can never replace what learning C and C++ does. I don't think Zilch will ever have features to allow pointer fuckery, nor will it likely ever have metaprogramming.

As far as not getting between designers and designing? I'm not a designer, I won't try to argue that duck-typing probably increases your ability to program faster. I will argue that it doesn't increase it as much as it decreases performance. Anyone programming for games should be able to work in a language like Zilch (if not Zilch itself.), it's statically typed, which allows a lot of optimization either during development, or during a release step. They hoping they can eventually allow a mode to compile Zilch using LLVM which will make it much, much faster, comparable, but not as fast to something like C++. So as far as "reducing friction" they're absolutely going to take a middle ground, where they make it a language that allows for as much optimization as possible, while also trying to be somewhat safe and MUCH faster at compiling. Zilch is not a difficult language by any means, Zilch itself should never be the problem unless you're looking for features they don't have yet like lambdas.

I will also not ague that Zilch doesn't have a standard library right now. It desperately needs one, but right now there are other things that need attention. They only just got in array and hash-map subscripting, and no one really even knows that it's in the latest version (like you).

>>1306
Look, it's after 2AM, so it's too late to go out and buy more liquor, but here goes anyways:

If Zilch is a language made for designers to rapidly design things with, then it sucks. Yes, some of these complaints are going to be about Zero's structure and some are going to be about Zilch the language, but trying to pretend that Zilch is made for anything other than Zero's own needs first and foremost is absolutely silly.

* Mandatory curly brackets and semicolons are useless and only make things more tedious when designing gameplay code. The former might be mitigated if the editor would auto-insert a closing brace and newline when you type the opening brace, but goddamn not allowing for one-line loops and conditionals is stupid.

* The language is too verbose. this.Space.GameSession.FindSpaceByName is fucking stupid. Yes, it makes logical sense; this is a component in a space, but Christ is that ever a billion characters to do a simple thing. Why isn't it something like Game.GetSpace("HUDSpace") instead? And if you're going to use "but maybe threading" as a defense, designers should never have to think about low-level things like threading. Why don't you also have them pack their Zilch structs properly too, while you're at it? They really should be thinking about member alignment! Don't want any cache misses!

* The fact that it even has pseudo-generics (even if it's only built-in ones and you can't make your own) is somewhat commendable, but why have them use square brackets, and then not have a standard subscript operator? Are designers not supposed to know what angle brackets are, or something?

* Whose genius idea was it to change the way things worked from how they were last year in Python to how they are this year in Zilch, with regards to library functions? Just because Unity puts their math functions all under a Math. namespace doesn't mean you have to, Zero. Remember in Python when you had Vec2s and 3s, and vector math functions were just member functions for those classes, instead of being all put in a "Math" namespace? Those sure were some good fucking times.

* It took me forever to realize that pre-increment works and post-increment works, and this is actually kind of genius, if initially frustrating.

* The fact that Zero exposes tons of internal structs and doesn't let you use them is ridiculous. I wanted to do some complicated shit that involved storing Transforms, but whoops, you can't, because only Zero can instantiate Transforms, nobody else.

Zilch is having a tumblr-level identity crisis, in my opinion. It is a language that should be very simple and frictionless to pick up as a newcomer to programming, but also sustainable to be useful long-term for designers to use to design gameplay code with (especially if they still plan on taking Zero commercial) (but at least because it's all GD students use after sophomore year). Instead, it's not as simple and easy-to-use as Ruby, Python, and Lua are for designers, straight-up. I know that the point of making a new language like Zilch was to allow Zero designers the ability to do all the cool compiled code shit they wanted to do with Python, but all the while giving them full control over exactly how everything works, but instead of taking the opportunity to make a truly great programming language for designers, they made a lobotomized C# that is just as verbose but with a fraction of the power.

I am a sophomore BSGD who had plenty of experience with many different programming languages before coming into DigiPen. I had never used Python before first semester, though, and after getting over the whole whitespace thing, found it fairly pleasant to write code in for Zero (despite some weirdness like auto-generated code in the editor having semicolons at the end of lines and such). Switching to Zilch has made making games in Zero harder for me, and not because I'm resistant to change or whatever. Python was a fully-featured general-purpose language, and Zilch is this Frankenstein monster that has minimal functionality. Python (and the way the library functions were structured back then) was simpler and less verbose to write, yet had all the crazy power that an established language is expected to have (pretty sure I did some lambda [or whatever the python equivalent is] bullshit in my GAM100 game to solve one specific problem). Even as an experienced programmer, I often find myself fighting Zilch and the way the Zero libraries are set up.

I wouldn't feel so adamant about this is Zero wasn't otherwise a pretty fucking awesome piece of software with amazing potential. This is why I've based my GAM200/250 engine off of it, as well as my own personal engine that I'm working on. I just really think that the Zero dev team is not thinking about the designery-types at all when they design the forward-facing language stuff.

All of that said, the new Area component does seem super smart http://zero.digipen.edu/VG1/Area.html

>>1309

Zilch may be somewhat guided for Zero's own needs, but it's not as silly as you might think. Several teams are using Zilch, because unlike Python, or C#, it doesn't suck at performance, it's really easy to bind, and actually attempts to cross-platform. Now you can get one or more of these things, but it's not easy to get all of them. Python's performance is not good. For our games? Probably, but I like to think towards the future. Binding? C# isn't bad if you depend on COM, but fuck that. Cross-platform? Well Python is king there. Zilch isn't consistently tested there, but it has been tested at various stages. If it starts hurting a team, they'll likely fix it pretty quick.

So no, bitch about it as a fucking whole, but recognize which pieces should be attributed to where. You're a goddamned programmer, so fucking act like it.

Mandatory shit you don't like for some reason: They're considering removing the requirement and allowing you to use Python-style whitespace shit. I fucking hate it, but there you go. Ask them and they might do it. There are a lot more important things before that, but it's a chance.

What the fuck is it with people and bitching about character counts? Who gives a fuck? You want to legitimately bitch about something with this type of design? How about the fact that you have to indirect a lot? That's a problem that actually matters. I struggle with this in my own engine, I could just make Engine global, but then, I don't want people to have to access it all the time. It's a sort of discouragement measure. If my designers ask me about things I put there I want to know about it because I may want to rethink it. Ultimately, I'll likely make it global in the next iteration, but it looks like with Zero they either decided to switch it to the current method after having it global for whatever reason, or they just forgot to bind it in Zilch. Ask them for the feature back. Seriously, if they didn't do it for design reasons they won't reverse, it would probably take like 20 minutes at most to implement. And they might actually do it!

As for threading, it wasn't supposed to be some grandiose defense, I even said myself they could likely figure out how to wrap it. And I was talking about Naughty Dog levels of threading. I'm not sure you'll ever be able to hide that sort of threading from designers. It might be possible, with really goddamn fast copies, or some serious trickery, but I haven't figured it out yet. As far as padding goes, that's supremely extraneous for where the language is right now.

Re: Generics: I actually don't know how that stuff works. As far as I know, you can't actually program using generics, I think, like you suggest, they're just there for the containers which are likely built in to the implementation. As far as the syntax goes, do you really give a shit between [] and <>? Really? Come on, bitching for bitchings sake.

Re Transforms: It's surprising how easy it is to lock people out of instantiating things. If you really want access, ask them, it's two lines to add class instantiation.

I never used lambdas in python, though I did use their dictionaries as jump tables. That shit was nice, but nothing I couldn't do in a slightly lower level language. And don't be a fuckin child, "Frankenstein monster"? Visual Basic.NET is a Frankenstein's Monster, and it's fucking great if you don't care about beauty. So yeah, it's not as full featured as Python, you should know that going into it. You can still use the old version if need be. They're not doing a commercial release yet, so it shouldn't surprise you that their custom language isn't quite up to snuff. It's getting there, and it's pretty cool for what it is. If it had a standard library, I'd probably replace Python with it for my person uses.

And you're right, they're probably really not thinking about designery-types. They're programmers, that are pretty damn good at their jobs. But they're getting better about it. Right now they're on a big push to allow people access to more things, so that people can make their own tools. If you find a pain point, they want to listen and either explain why they think you're wrong, or try to help you workaround it, or if need be fix it on their end. They've got a few designers up there, but it's not the whole school, so go and talk to them.

>>1309
Spot on.
I would just add that the reason the zero team doesn't think of designers is because they severely lack designers worth their salt in there. I feel truly sorry for designers because of the way the school gets to bully them and rob them of their money by forcing them to use zero and zilch, leaving them virtually unhirable unless they go against the school and out of their way to use a real engine and familiarize themselves with a real language.

>>1312
tl;dr
>you're right, they're probably really not thinking about designery-types. They're programmers
I'm a programmer, so I can put up with a ton of bullshit in programming languages. That doesn't mean it has to be that way (see: Jonathan Blow's new language), but it means that I'm a programmer, so it's kind of expected.

I'm also a designer. Writing HTML sucks. Jade ( http://jade-lang.com/ ) is a million times better. When designing things, it's a million times easier to sketch out what I want in Jade than it is to do so in HTML.

Haven't you been listening to the one thing GAM lectures are actually useful for, about making your engine as easy for designers to use as possible? It's not because designers are babies and you have to make things easy for them because their brain hurts if things are too hard (although there is that at this school, too). It's because every millisecond you can shave off of a designer implementing a thing is a millisecond you're allowing them to do more design and iteration. I'm not even going to go further into this because it's clear you don't care about it and don't believe me.

>>1313
Hit the nail right on the fucking head. This is by and away the biggest problem with Zilch.

>>1315

I've said time and again, ask for the goddamn features. I cant change Zero or Zilch for you, I can explain some things, from my viewpoint after talking with them a bunch.

Your idea of putting up with a whole bunch of shit twith programming languages is hilarious to me. Zilch isn't a bad language, its maybe not the best one out there, but its not fucking rocket science.

Jonathan blow himself says that his problem with languages are never braces and semicolons, because it's just a holy war. They exist because they are helpful constructs to define scopes and statements. Without them the compiler has to guess, or you have to define whitespace as something that matter .

Which is fine! Like I said, they're considering the feature.

I always ask my designers to tell me what they want changed, and if they want something reasonable, I go do it. So, yes, my goal is to always make software people enjoy, because I enjoy watching them do cool stuff with it.

Zilch is very incomplete, as is Zero, if you want features, go ask for them.

As far as the argument that all of our designers suck or something, they can use whatever they want for their game, and I know at least one person using Unity for their GAT projects. But I'm not sure if that depends on what class they're in. If they really thought they should be using unreal, unity or cryengine, and it would make them better, they should be doing that.

I like using alpha and beta stuff to make it better. Especially while in school, because I can learn a lot from doing so. It's not for everyone, and I can understand why it might be frustrating.

>>1316
As far as I'm aware you are no longer allowed Unity for GAT240/250.

>>1316
Designers aren't allowed to use anything other than Zero Engine in GAT classes until 315, which is a 2nd semester Junior Year class. BAGD's WERE allowed to use Unity in GAM152, but now that's taken away (many teams decided against it because they knew they would be forced to use it again in GAT240, 250 & 251)

BAGD's can use it in GAM200/250 so long as they don't team up with anyone outside the program…otherwise an all designer team (BAGD's and BSGD's) can do so in GAM300/350. If I want to team up with any RTIS or BSMSD's, I wouldn't ever get a real opportunity to learn Unity or Unreal at DigiPen. It HAS to be done outside of school entirely…or shoot yourself in the foot trying to learn a new engine and scripting language while trying to make your first ever 3D games (in 5 weeks).

>>1325

Sucks that they've done that, but are you really trying to say picking up C# and Unity is harder than making a shitty engine and proof of concept in 5 weeks?

>>1329
I was talking about for the GAT classes, not the GAM. In GAT we have 5 weeks to make an entire game from scratch. Learning Unity while doing that is a foolish waste of time.

>>1333
I suppose, but if it really would make you that much more efficient, why not learn it over the summer? I mean, we can argue that the school should allow you to use things like Unity or whatever from the get-go, but we all have to pick up various tools anyway. I really can't imagine it being so different that it's that hard to pick up when you're already got experience with a somewhat similar engine. I can understand not wanting to learn it during a GAT class, but shit man, if it'll make you that much better, pick it up during game jams or something.

>>1335
I can and plan on doing this. But that's not what we were talking about. We were talking about whether DigiPen affords us opportunities to learn/use Unity, and my answer was that, no, it doesn't, unless we don't join a cross-discipline game team. Otherwise we are required to use Zero or a custom engine until Junior year, in a class that we wont have time to learn it.

I don't technically NEED DigiPen to teach me anything I'm learning here, I could figure this all out on my own. I'm PAYING $100k + for them to give me the skills I need to succeed in the work force.

>>1337
There's an argument to be made there, but you also have to consider that an undergraduate degree is there to teach you a broad range of whatever you're studying, even at DigiPen. We join undergraduate programs to learn enough that we can then take our skills further on the job when we have to be put to the task of learning the actual pipeline our jobs use. That's generally what these types of degrees are for and geared towards, although DigiPen is obviously much more trade-schoolish.

Now certainly, as you've said, you're likely not going to be using Zero right out of school. Even if they release it publicly by then, it will likely not be a serious contender and the chance that you get hired to work in it is slim. And certainly, were they requiring you to use Unity, you'd likely have a better shot a jobs that focused on Unity. But lets not pretend that working in Zero is going to completely fuck you if you choose to go that route. The only way I could see that happening is if you somehow can't pick up the new language or engine design whatever job throws at you. So many companies out there roll their own that it's practically expected to run into that sort of situation.

Blizzard only recently moved over to the component based scheme Unity and Zero are using. Valve writes damn near all of their shit in C++ as far as I know. Unreal is some weird hodgepodge of C++ and Blueprint, a visual scripting language, but thankfully the open sourcing is leading to efforts to bind in real languages like C#.

It's not like you'll get out there an your Unity experience is going to land you some guaranteed Unity job. Would you even want that?

>>1339
"teaching" is not an excuse to force people to use the piece of shit that zero and zilch are. They aren't a more valuable learning tool than literally anything else out there and more often than not they stand in the way of learning. For example, if you are a designer in a GAT class you should be learning, working on and being graded on your DESIGN skills, it's a DESIGN class after all, but right now its more an alpha test zero and the non-existent and wrong documentation class, which is bullshit and something designers should be fighting for. They are being robbed of what, $25k with the classes that force them to use zero? Not even DigiPen teams are willing to hire the designers DigiPen is putting out right now, that should be a big red flag.

And yes, your Unity and Unreal skills can, have, and will continue to land people jobs everywhere, even over a 4.0 DigiPen grad if that person only knows zero and zilch, because employees that don't need to be trained and can be productive right away are always preferred, specially on short term positions.

DigiPen is a SCHOOL, they need to TEACH you what you need to know to go through it and be successful afterwards, instead of hindering and crippling you by forcing shit like zero and zilch down your throat because they need alpha and beta testers for it. You shouldn't, ever, need to go through entire summers of independent learning just to be able to get through DigiPen or be on a game team, if you do, DigiPen has failed to provide you with what they promised: The basic learning.

>>1337
nice get dude

>>1340

Shrug, get enough people in your program to petition to allow for Unity use earlier on. It's really the only way to get what you want.

>>1304
You don't even need to say this.Space.GameSession.Whaterver.
You can simply say this.GameSession.

Also, two words: Static. Variables.
They are a thing now.

>>1347

Hey, look at that. Good job dude.

(And yeah, statics yo.)