Bad tutorials...

#1

Does anyone besides me, hate spending hours looking around for tutorials… only to attempt them, and they don’t work… even if you followed it to the letter?

I don’t know how many DirectX tutorials… how many OpenGL tutorials… god… even plain Vc++ tutorials i’ve attempted, but when i try to compile it… it won’t because of several errors… only to go back and proof read the code you just typed up, and make sure you put exactly what they did… and even following the setup directions… its really friggin annoying… shoot… even the tutorials that ship with the dx9sdk don’t work, when you open their sample code… set up things the way it says to… and try to compile it, build it and run it…

#2

I know with my limited use of VC++ ( Artist doing a Game Dev Course had to learn a little programming. ) that you can write exactly what the guy sitting next to you wrote and you can get errors. Coding Tic Tac Toe I rechieved numerous errors. Getting a copy of the code from my neighbour which had compiled fine it would still bring up errors when compiled on my machine.

I ending up getting about 5 programmers sitting round my PC to figure out WTF had been going on. Eventually they found the problem deeply hidden in some of the VC++ settings menu’s. I would suggest asking somene else to check and compile your code to see if they get errors. If they dont, I would ask if they could come check your settings.

#3

true true, but it still pisses me off though heh…

anyway…
don’t happen to know some good tutorials on DirectX would ya?

trying to write up a tiny program, that will let me display a mini game level i’ve created in 3ds max… (just the level, no other models…) and let them walk around, and see the terrain, and how the lights/shaders are setup…

the ones i’ve found about this, don’t seem to work… not even for including a simple 6 sided cube… with 12 faces(tri’s) and 8 verts… custom texturemap/uvs…exported into directx’s .x format… the sdk for DX9.0b comes with sample code, that imports a complex tiger model, but by looking over the code, and reading over the tutorial in the doccumentation, it doesn’t say anything about adding code, to display multiple faced objects… it just has a loader that opens the .x file, and one to load the texture…
i did some playing with the code… the file compiled fine, no errors, but when i executed the .exe, the window loaded fine, but didn’t load and display the cube i set to include…

i’m pretty new to C++ programing… so i’m not sure if i’m even doing things right or not…

#4

calm down … about the first thing to do is check whether the tutorial and the IDE/compiler you use have changed significantly in the period given … somtimes just some old functions/libraries/whatever are used and it is up to you to find the real deal … I for one generally don’t expect that what I see in a tutorial will work in the first place

relax :beer:

#5

No, sorry. We only coded console projects, the programmers are working in DirectX now & we’ve ( artists ) moved onto Maya ( been trained in 3DSMax and still preffer its interface).

They’re working from the courses curiculum, so I cant really share that.

#6

Writing tutorials is a lot more difficult than people think, as it requires a lot of knowledge of technical writing, and how to present information. For example, a lot of people don’t realize that people have a hard time reading “wide” sentences or “long” paragraphs. These are the kinds of mistakes that make tutorials hard to follow, and almost ensure that other (worse) mistakes are being made. Furthermore, it’s very difficult to catch your own errors, especially if you’re editing electronically (as opposed to printed pages.) Just my 2 cents.

#7

That is a major annoyance. IDE’s should come with the ability to check library and include paths, then prompt to search. Having to go in to Tools, then Options each time you sit at a new machine, or open a solution with a bad reference is a pain.

Some tutorials seem to fail due to hardware or OS differences. In those cases versioning is a problem due to multiple levels of interfaces. I feel bad for the programmer whose work got steamrollered by an interface change they couldn’t anticipate.

Getting the latest version of the compiler for Java and C++ helps a little. Older versions of VC++ made you bleed through the eyes before the build worked. I’m kind of liking VS.NET 2k3.

#8

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