Ijon Tichy wrote:
Edit: I'm going to hijack this topic a bit.
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20:19 <+ijonditchy> I will never understand why people find ACS so hard
20:19 <+ijonditchy> it's as hard as you're pushing the engine
20:20 <+ijonditchy> if you're lying within the normal confines of ACS, it's piss-easy; on the other hand, if you stretch the boundaries to the snapping point (oh hi), things get a good deal harder to handle
20:20 -!- You're now known as ijontichy
20:21 <+ijontichy> and even then, the hard parts come from staying within the hard walls, the technical constraints
20:22 <+ijontichy> most of the issues in the forums turn out to be someone forgetting something (at least I have) taken for granted
20:24 <+ijontichy> if you're taking on huge projects completely tangential to the purpose of ACS (like me), you garner more sympathy, since good coding techniques are basically necessary if you wish to be able to manage your code
20:25 <+ijontichy> those coding practices can be read in a book, but they're ground in through experience, where you find out WHY those practices exist
20:25 <+ijontichy> those need experience, obviously
20:26 <+ijontichy> but for something like doors opening in sequence when a player has a certain item, well, that is directly in the main purpose of ACS
20:26 <+ijontichy> but you never see anything like that on the forums
20:27 <+ijontichy> it's always the simple, trivial errors, that cause odd effects when you make them - I most likely have never seen them
20:28 <+ijontichy> never advanced coding help
20:29 <+ijontichy> is this just a natural thing, a symptom of the division between programmers and non-programmers?
20:29 <+ijontichy> 'cause I have no idea
Any insight on this?
I think ACS is so easy to use that people who have no idea about any basics of how a computer works think they can just hop on and make stuff.
I was tempted to post in every ACS thread that had a trivial problem something like "Spend a week learning an actual programming language and then come back to this".
Plus most people who actually are programmers know how to do pretty much all the advanced things since ACS limits us a lot. Thus nothing really interesting comes up.
My favorite area is optimization (like why or why not to use Newtons method as on the ZDW), but I think you and the dev's are the only people who would ever be interested in that kind of stuff -- and probably no one would use it or care anyways.
Sometimes it's even worse with people who compress/screw the crap out of their code so its unreadable, like
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case 4:hUDMessAGe(s:"whatSUP111",1,
2,3,4,5,0
)
;
Yes I saw someone who coded like that :( I told him I couldn't help him because I was not assed enough to decipher and fix the mess
It's like unintended obfuscation that's readable...
Maybe I've gone off topic from your off topic, my bad if that's the case
PS: Pushing the boundaries is the most fun thing about ACS :)
Though it is frustrating with some things that just can't be done