Jolt Country

I've been playing around a bit with Blender, the open-source Swiss Army Chainsaw of entertainment tools. With the ability to do 2D and 3D games, create animation and even edit video, it's an extremely powerful platform alnthough its extreme complexity does offer some drawbacks.

Somehow I think Blender is more like a professional tool intended for professionals to take complicated problems and provide a solution for them, not for ordinary people to do ordinary things.

I bought some books on how to use it including a Dummies guide, watched a few videos on introduction to Blender on Youtube, I've tried my hand at making a few models, and I've even converted some I did months back using Trimble Sketchup, which is much easier to use.

I'm wondering if doing a game - specifically an FPS - with Blender might be a bit of overkill.

Blender was used in the creation of this game which just snuck in at the end of 2015 to become Ben's Game Of The Year 2015, Except For Rocket League Obviously.

So I highly recommend it! 1 out of 1 games I've tried that were built with Blender are fantastic!

I don't have much to add, other than some general advice.

I think that if you don't learn a programming language (such as C++), and instead choose to use an IDE, you're basically stuck with some of the creative choices of the author of that IDE, good or bad.

Also, you'll lack the ability to tackle some of the more difficult (mostly unanticipated) problems that occur during programming.

However, despite the above, I do intend to learn to use HUGO (just because I like it), so feel free to consider me a hypocrite.

--Erebor

What?

Erebor wrote:I don't have much to add, other than some general advice.

I think that if you don't learn a programming language (such as C++), and instead choose to use an IDE, you're basically stuck with some of the creative choices of the author of that IDE, good or bad.

"IDE" means "Integrated Development Environment." Microsoft's .NET platform provides an IDE for Visual Basic and Visual C++. Brackets provides an IDE for combined PHP/Javascript with real-time debugging when used in combination with a web browser. Lazarus provides an IDE for Free Pascal. Eclipse provides an IDE for Java and with plug ins, for other programming languages.

Just because there is an IDE for your work environment - or in the case of Hugo you can cobble one together - does not necessarily mean you are not doing programming in crafting a solution using that IDE.

Erebor wrote:Also, you'll lack the ability to tackle some of the more difficult (mostly unanticipated) problems that occur during programming.

However, despite the above, I do intend to learn to use HUGO (just because I like it), so feel free to consider me a hypocrite.

The HUGO adventure game system is a programming language. That it provides a lot of features and an include library to reduce the amount of programming does not override the fact that for any non-trivial game in HUGO you will have to write some code to handle some things in the game.

The fact you declare data structures and map specifications to define rooms, objects and commands to be typed in, makes it no less a programming language. The most widely used programming language in the world is probably neither C nor Java, but one of the oldest programming languages in existience: COBOL. And a large part of a Cobol program is specifying record formats, and in the case of programs designed for interactive processing under IBM's CICS and TPF mainframe environments, specifying the format of data sent and received to the customer terminal during a transaction, whether that transaction is at an ATM machine, a credit card point of sale terminal, a web page or a telephone.

That a large part of a Cobol application involves specification of data formats and structures does not in any way lessen the fact that writing or maintaining Cobol is still computer programming.

And don't let the ease of doing things in Hugo hide that fact either. Hugo is well suited to solving the problem of developing a parser for interactive fiction and to a large degree out of the box, handling the processing of those parsed commands.

Although I did one on contract - Jonsey paid me to write Patty Flinger as a proof-of-concept that you could develop other games than interactive fiction using Hugo - it's still a specialized application domain and I don't think it is suitable for writing a general-purpose game such as an FPS. For writing command-line or even object-click interative fiction / adventure games it fits the problem domain perfectly.

For other types of games, not so much.

Alright, this has to stop.

Welp, someone's bloody colon apparently agreed with you.