trystero49
Prince
- Joined
- Apr 30, 2012
- Messages
- 515
It's been a little quiet here, so I just want to ask if there's any movement on the whole "beta" thing. I have been using the reference a lot, and I have to say it is fantastic.
[Wiki] New Lua and UI Reference! Beta version
- Thread starter DonQuiche
- Start date
General Tso
Panzer General
+1000
ww2commander
Emperor
Got my vote as well. The thing is almost perfect and (IMHO) probably tested as much as possible to move it into 'production' status!
Yeah, sorry about that. At the point it was clear I could not fix the bugs because of my current workload (november), I should have removed the beta status and forgot after that. This is now done and the beta banner has been removed. If you still see it sometimes, hit Ctrl+F5 to force a full refresh on your browser.
Irkalla
ENTP POWWWEEEEEER
Any way in the future we can get functions by what parameters they take or objects they are passed upon in addition to their returns?
No modification can be done now that pages are edited manually. Now things should already be the way you wanted them to be.
JA_Lamb
Warlord
Whew, this work is stupendous.
The required learning curve is considerable for casual hobbyist modding. Also the jump from object to static coding thinking negates ones intuitive problem solving capabilities making one feel like "it's not worth the trouble", especially with all the "sandboxing" that firaxis is also engaged in.
Like having a Degree, then landing in France with low score, high school French and having to write a dissertation for the Sorbonne in six months!!
No wonder so many casual modders remain with CivIV.
The required learning curve is considerable for casual hobbyist modding. Also the jump from object to static coding thinking negates ones intuitive problem solving capabilities making one feel like "it's not worth the trouble", especially with all the "sandboxing" that firaxis is also engaged in.
Like having a Degree, then landing in France with low score, high school French and having to write a dissertation for the Sorbonne in six months!!
No wonder so many casual modders remain with CivIV.
ww2commander
Emperor
Nah...they are just as bad as each other. You wouldn't be a real civ modder unless you threw your coffe cup at the screen(s) at least twice from frustration at deciphering some cryptic lua or python error message!
trystero49
Prince
- Joined
- Apr 30, 2012
- Messages
- 515
WARNING! Error in file "C:\Some\Obvious\Directory\JustTellMeTheFileName\..."
You may be used to python but I think that Lua is actually a better choice for beginners. And while there have been a few big mistakes from Firaxis that may prevent newcomers to jump aboard (VFS should cause a specific and explicit error because it just desperately frustrated 99% of modders, stupid path truncation in error message, per-context isolation rather than per-mod one, non-Lua or read-only metatables, etc), all in all I think the general architecture is not that bad. The only real problems with Lua imo are its rotten documentation, its error management mechanisms, and its strings API. All of that being said, Firaxis did provide a decent tooling and environment.
I do not understand what you mean. In civ5 modding you spend your time manipulating objects.
I still have to find a scripting language I like.
Js, php, lua, python: I hate them all.
Ha ha, you cleverly put it.
JA_Lamb
Warlord
Ha mon ami, clearly I have not made myself clear on the point I'm trying to make. It is not the fault of the languages, non. It is the capacity of the human psyche or lack thereof to deal with change, that I'm trying to make explicit here.
My first encounter with a computer language was with FORTRAN as an elective, in a hard science course, which was an add on to the Applied Maths 101 requirement. Then later I ported to BASIC, then spreadsheets came out and I could do on VisiCalc all I needed for my profession in less than a tenth of the time, so left coding altogether, except for upgrading as needed to the various guises of Spreadsheets.
Real Life has a habit of distracting one from their entertainment pursuits you know. Much later I found that CivIV could be modded and made into a better historical model game. So there I started again, in my free time instead of watching "dumbed down TV" for all the news you don't need!!
In a couple of years I had slowly understood the following, the computer still talks in 0's and 1's, 'on' or 'off', programs still follow the basic logic "if.. then.. else" in some form or another for logic purposes, and still perform arithmetic commands in one form or another, although via different paths to the human, eg multiplication is an iterative summation etc, and programs/applications still have to be an algorithmic instruction for what to do next. Main Routines are still the main program structure, subroutines are calls to do something and return a result that is then used somewhere else, etc. etc. irrespective of what they have come to be called in the present under different languages.
So I learned XML, then a bit of python, as with my ancient basics I could more or less understand what each bit was trying to do and therefore expanded what I could do.
It really feels that I'm a Roman who is fluent in Latin, then I had to go to France and learn French and now I'm in Portugal and I need to learn Portuguese.
What I'm saying is that it requires considerable effort and that as human beings do not like change and re-learning what they consider "learnt", there is a dearth/shortage of capable imaginative modders who are willing to change their "medium" from CivIV to CiV where they are expert to where they are newbies.
I am sure you've noticed that we're all learning from a handful of you advanced gentlemen who like tinkering here. Really look at the names they re-occur at most of the sub-forums, yourself, wHoward, pazyryk, KillmeMore, Thallasicus, Gidemon, lemmy101, and a few others. The_J, Lopez, who was all fired up when CiV first came out, etc. have not jumped. Read some of the early posts in C&C, and you'll see the attrition rate is actually phenomenal.
What is happening is that a new crop of youngsters is slowly developing here and because they don't have any invested "time and ego" in the previous Civ iteration are willing to invest themselves in the new medium.
As always there are more findings happening here as the modder numbers increase, for instance see here: "New improvement art! You don't need to replace civ5artdefines_landmarks.xml - Civilization Fanatics' Forums" where pazyryk found a way to directly inject art in the database.
This is a great leap forward, however it may need someone like you or wHoward to go see what they've done, and work a callback system for the rest of us mortals to use this method.
BTW they seem to have half confirmed a consistent crash cause that occurs in the game. It seems that whenever a farm is changed to another landmark, the game CTD's. The dll is out, is there a fix for such an animal?
The point I'm driving, is that there are new ways for old Modders to learn, not all are willing to invest more time to learn them. This has nothing to do with computer languages, they are the leaves of the tree, the tree is human nature and that is not codable, we're still partially "free agents" and it requires emotional capital to invest the time and effort to learn something new.
There I am again on a soapbox giving lectures to explain what I meant that "there is a steep learning curve required for casual modders to learn in order to be able to mod with satisfactory results for themselves".
For instance, I wish to be able to give to any unit that has been "wounded" in battle and healed or killed another unit a Promotion of "Blooded". This promo does nothing of itself, but once the Unit reaches a certain level (3, 4, 5) another Promo kicks in the "veteran" which is a combination of a number of promotions as veterans in real life are more capable in a variety of areas and are able to learn and survive better than greenhorns, irrespective of the greenhorns "learnt" XP, and also increasing the XP received from any action these veterans engage in. For you and people at your level of competence, maybe 15 to 30 minutes from start to finish, for me, anyhing from 15 to 30 days if I'm lucky. The veteran and the greenhorn!
Thank you for reading this voluminous explanation. Maybe some Marketing exec. at firaxis should also read it and call back Jon, as from the base code of CiV vanilla one can easily see where that young man was going. But again I digress. Merci et bon anne.
My first encounter with a computer language was with FORTRAN as an elective, in a hard science course, which was an add on to the Applied Maths 101 requirement. Then later I ported to BASIC, then spreadsheets came out and I could do on VisiCalc all I needed for my profession in less than a tenth of the time, so left coding altogether, except for upgrading as needed to the various guises of Spreadsheets.
Real Life has a habit of distracting one from their entertainment pursuits you know. Much later I found that CivIV could be modded and made into a better historical model game. So there I started again, in my free time instead of watching "dumbed down TV" for all the news you don't need!!
In a couple of years I had slowly understood the following, the computer still talks in 0's and 1's, 'on' or 'off', programs still follow the basic logic "if.. then.. else" in some form or another for logic purposes, and still perform arithmetic commands in one form or another, although via different paths to the human, eg multiplication is an iterative summation etc, and programs/applications still have to be an algorithmic instruction for what to do next. Main Routines are still the main program structure, subroutines are calls to do something and return a result that is then used somewhere else, etc. etc. irrespective of what they have come to be called in the present under different languages.
So I learned XML, then a bit of python, as with my ancient basics I could more or less understand what each bit was trying to do and therefore expanded what I could do.
It really feels that I'm a Roman who is fluent in Latin, then I had to go to France and learn French and now I'm in Portugal and I need to learn Portuguese.
What I'm saying is that it requires considerable effort and that as human beings do not like change and re-learning what they consider "learnt", there is a dearth/shortage of capable imaginative modders who are willing to change their "medium" from CivIV to CiV where they are expert to where they are newbies.
I am sure you've noticed that we're all learning from a handful of you advanced gentlemen who like tinkering here. Really look at the names they re-occur at most of the sub-forums, yourself, wHoward, pazyryk, KillmeMore, Thallasicus, Gidemon, lemmy101, and a few others. The_J, Lopez, who was all fired up when CiV first came out, etc. have not jumped. Read some of the early posts in C&C, and you'll see the attrition rate is actually phenomenal.
What is happening is that a new crop of youngsters is slowly developing here and because they don't have any invested "time and ego" in the previous Civ iteration are willing to invest themselves in the new medium.
As always there are more findings happening here as the modder numbers increase, for instance see here: "New improvement art! You don't need to replace civ5artdefines_landmarks.xml - Civilization Fanatics' Forums" where pazyryk found a way to directly inject art in the database.
This is a great leap forward, however it may need someone like you or wHoward to go see what they've done, and work a callback system for the rest of us mortals to use this method.
BTW they seem to have half confirmed a consistent crash cause that occurs in the game. It seems that whenever a farm is changed to another landmark, the game CTD's. The dll is out, is there a fix for such an animal?
The point I'm driving, is that there are new ways for old Modders to learn, not all are willing to invest more time to learn them. This has nothing to do with computer languages, they are the leaves of the tree, the tree is human nature and that is not codable, we're still partially "free agents" and it requires emotional capital to invest the time and effort to learn something new.
There I am again on a soapbox giving lectures to explain what I meant that "there is a steep learning curve required for casual modders to learn in order to be able to mod with satisfactory results for themselves".
For instance, I wish to be able to give to any unit that has been "wounded" in battle and healed or killed another unit a Promotion of "Blooded". This promo does nothing of itself, but once the Unit reaches a certain level (3, 4, 5) another Promo kicks in the "veteran" which is a combination of a number of promotions as veterans in real life are more capable in a variety of areas and are able to learn and survive better than greenhorns, irrespective of the greenhorns "learnt" XP, and also increasing the XP received from any action these veterans engage in. For you and people at your level of competence, maybe 15 to 30 minutes from start to finish, for me, anyhing from 15 to 30 days if I'm lucky. The veteran and the greenhorn!
Thank you for reading this voluminous explanation. Maybe some Marketing exec. at firaxis should also read it and call back Jon, as from the base code of CiV vanilla one can easily see where that young man was going. But again I digress. Merci et bon anne.
I agree with DonQuiche, coming myself from civ4 modding I found that the change (Lua, SQL) are very good and makes things much easier once you've climbed 2 steps: how to deal with the Database and how to deal with the file system.
JA_Lamb
Warlord
I don't disagree, all I'm saying as do you, there are new things that we must learn. And that human nature tends to dislike change. It's not the languages, it's the time and effort of re-learning that I was pointing out.
Irkalla
ENTP POWWWEEEEEER
What error messages? Only time it gives you an error is during compile, during runtime it doesn't give squat
It's not that bad, sometimes Lua gives an error message (in lua.log) during runtime (most often it's something like "trying to perform an operation on a nil value". But sometimes it doesn't give a message indeed.
Also, Lua is not a compiled language (well, it's compiled to a bytecode when running, but from the user perspective it works like an interpreted language), so it can't "give you an error during compile".
ww2commander
Emperor
I can't remember some of them, but I have been presented with some 'one off' error messages in lua.log that leave me scratching my head. Most times it is triggered by some unrelated typo elsewhere than creates a cascading effect on the code.
And of late, I have had the phantom message issue plague my scenario to the point I have had to redo things from scratch to try and identify all bugs.
@JA_Lamb
Thank you for this detailed and pleasant to read explanation. I get your point: the technology switch discouraged many civ4 modders to come to civ5 because they had to relearn an altogether different platform. Hence why the civ5 modding community started small and had to later gain modders coming from different horizons.
Thank you for this detailed and pleasant to read explanation. I get your point: the technology switch discouraged many civ4 modders to come to civ5 because they had to relearn an altogether different platform. Hence why the civ5 modding community started small and had to later gain modders coming from different horizons.
FramedArchitect
Reluctant Modder
My own experience is something like the event horizon of a black hole. I never did any Civ 4 modding, and as a complete novice to any type of programming I find manipulating the database excruciating, and altering game-play with lua pretty much impossible.
I do what I can but I perceive there are whole universes of modding I will never be able to access. I suppose knowledge of one's own ignorance is some kind of "reward".
Civ4 experience does not matter, the crucial point is that you do not know programming and as long as you do not, you will suffer so many restrictions in modding for every game. And there is nothing that games developers can do about it: there is just no viable alternative at programming.
But it's wrong to say that you will never be able to overcome this: you "just" need to learn programming. Let me be honest: this is very hard in the beginning, you need to get over a large cliff. However, once you get the basics, once you are able to write simple algorithms, suddenly this becomes a smooth slope and you find yourself with the computer being a gentle teacher, reporting obvious errors to you, and letting you quickly chain trials and errors in order to understand more complex mistakes. Once you are on this smooth slope, programming becomes one of the easiest and most convenient thing to learn by yourself.
That being said, civ5 and other games are not the most friendly environments to learn programming since you need to bother with other considerations and since figuring out how to apply the most basic programming course is not obvious. I suggest one first use a dedicated tool where he will be able to perform simple exercises not related to modding to get over the aforementioned cliff (it should take 10 to 100 hours depending on the individual). I am sure that basic courses typically suggest such tools.
FramedArchitect
Reluctant Modder
I totally disagree with the sentiment of your message. Though I appreciate your confidence in your fellow man, I do not think every person is able to learn and excel in programming, just as I don't think every person is able to learn and excel in sports or art or oratory. We are limited by our biology, though possibly not in our aspirations.
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