Artist Vs Coder
BlitzMax Forums/BlitzMax Beginners Area/Artist Vs Coder
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| Hi there, I'm a really visual kind of guy, having been a paid artist for many years. I could manage amiga blitz, blitzbasic and blitz3d, but blitzmax is a bit too much. Maybe I just don't like how it works. It's too coder-friendly and not artist-friendly. Maybe it appeals to a certain mindset. To combat this, I need the damn thing to look pretty and be organised mentally for me. As a creative person, this means function folding, nice colour schemes etc... you might think function folding and colour schemes are pointless, but artist minds DO think and react differently to coders. Any chance of bearing this in mind when you make the official ide, BRL? |
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| So let me get this straight. You beleive that a colorful IDE with function folding would increase your ability to understand the language and become a better programmer? I doubt very much that we will see anything spectacular as far as the Max IDE goes. It would be good if we did but at the end of the day if you want an IDE that has everything for you, colour schemes, function folding and all the other goodies that make an awesome ide then you're going to have to spend a little money for that. I would suggest Protean. |
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| I like visual blits and think it would help a lot too. Just have to wait for it to come out. MUCH easier to understand and find your way around code with those kinds of IDE's. Not having too much trouble with Bmax though, and I havent coded for a long long time |
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| protean has a blitzmax version out. |
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| I think function folding and colouring is not limited to being useful in the minds of artists. I think the majority, if not -all- people, benefit from it. Just that programmers instinctively know programming is not generally pretty and... complain less, I guess? |
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| Well I have always managed to understand Blitz3D stuff better with function folding. I can keep track of everything in the same huge include when most are happily folded away! I don't see why the default IDE doesn't have this. Seems silly. |
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| I'm waiting for Visual BlitzMax, and I suggest you do the same. It's a great little ide with themes. Actually mark's wouldn't be so bad if he just spent more than 10 mins on them and gave us a few features other than compile and save.(Talking about the b3d one. Bmax one isn't even out yet officially..) |
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| I have visualblitz, but there's a bug which causes typing to become really slow in large files when function folding is enabled. The author doesn't seem inclined to fix that bug either... shame cos I really like visualblitz myself. He told me over email he was gonna do a blitzmax version but I have no idea if I'll have to pay for it all over again... certainly not if his crappy function folding isn't fixed :) |
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| try Macromedia Flash MX. BlitzMAX is essentially a programming Language, Flash MX is more of an Authoring program, Much more visual, much more Artist friendly. Actionscript is actually pretty good as well. No use trying to make BlitzMAX something it is not. BlitzMAX already achieves it's goals (as I interpret them) of being an easy to use, easy to learn programming language. That said, Protean IDE looks great. |
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| I tend to agree in part with Mr Skunk. I am also quite a visual-focussed person and while I don't entirely mind the current IDE and it does a reasonable job of providing a simple environent to program in, it is little more than a basic editor and doesn't really have any features that take the effort and struggle out of programming. For someone who is visually artistic I think you like to focus less on the technical functional style of programming and prefer that programming be an art form where everything is graceful, complimentary, harmoneous, etc. I think it would help me as an artistic person to have an IDE which not only produced a more comfortable and appealing visual style but also was more in-tune with the kind of creative flow that I like to work in. I think that more artistic type people tend to be more sensitive to and affected by subtle things like a visual appearance because they have more brain-wiring inclined to see things in an orderly, beautiful and harmonized way. That means your IDE's gotta be pretty, it's gotta flow well, it's gotta provide tools to simplify having to get technical, etc, so that you can remain being artistic in a more abstract world rather than having to get into the (to be honest) frustrating experience of trying to get a technical programming language to do what you envision. I think there are other types of people who are not so artistic in this way and think of themselves as more of a programmer than an artist even if they are able to intellectually come up with clever solutions and sophisticated designs. I think they come up with these from mental processes and thinking more than from some kind of `vision` as is the case with more artistic people. And you see these programmer types creating games with crappy graphics because they just don't have the flair for the graphical side, and similarly maybe the more artistic types don't have the flair for the in's and out's of programming. Different people experience the world differently and the more closely mapped a creative technique is to our natural way of working, the better we get along with it. I don't know that Blitz Max is worse in any respect than previous Blitzes. I used BlitzBasic 2 on the Amiga and it does seem that with the addition of OO techniques and some other changes, there is a learning curve with BlitzMax, but it's not too hard. Having said that, in general I am frustrated with programming languages because they are usually too close to how computers work and not close enough to how human's work. Even a language based on Basic still requires the creative person to `come down to the level` of having to interpret and translate their vision into something that can be expressed in the language, which is too often a very convoluted and frustrating task. So I think such people could indeed be helped out by a more abstract interface, even higher-level than Basic. The suggestion of creating stuff in Flash is interesting, although we all know that Flash graphics is not very quick and for me at least, I still like to have all the flexibility and processing power that software development gives you, as opposed to the much fewer options and capabilities of web-based software. Anyway, that's my rant. I agree with you Skunk, but at the same time BlitzMax is okay. I am probably more 50/50 programmer-artist. |
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| I have just gone and bought protean :) I really don't like the beta that much, but it's got folding and seems to be up to the task. Time will tell which IDE I will use. I haven't got a mac yet so perhaps thats why I was forced to purchase an IDE because the win32 ide is in an absolutely hopeless state. I plan to get an ibook because they are quite frankly, adorable :) |
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| Actually I'm noticing a lot of similarity between blitzmax OOP and 3ds max and its OOP methodlogy. If I get stuck with a problem in blitzmax I look at it in 3dsmax terms, and how 3dsmax handles types, functions and variables in the modifier stack, and subobjects ets, its all very much like visual programming with types and methods etc. I actually don't like flash at all and prefer adobe's live motion for anything involving animation, for me the timeline controls of flash are not at all intuitive. Might be my having grown up with film and video editing tools. I like folding functions as it compresses your code into blocks and allows you to quickly get a feel for what your doing without scanning 100's or 1000's of lines of code. it cas the autocomplete drop down command lists that mean you don't have to look up commands all the time, and can quickly choose the right one and know it will be spelt correctly. also the schematic view on the side means you can quickly see the the layour of your code at a glance, the media being used, and the lines down the sides would be useful for debugging if there were debugging tools in Bmax lol. It's just so much better than the current IDE. I've been seriously considering protean but its too expensive and I need to upgrade my computer next month which takes priority. So I'm hoping for a nice $15 Visual blitz release soon. It's nice that VB currently has presets for B2d, B+, B3D and assume it will simply have another preset for Bmax coding. here's hoping it's done soon :) |
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| well visual blitz currently has a bug (for me) that makes typing response slow down to a crawl when function folding is active. I have no idea why this is, but it only occurs on large documents. |
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| I guess I lean way far on the coder side ... I memorize what the code looks like and can quickly find my place even in 10's of thousands of lines of code usually just by scrolling the page. The only thing I really do like is to have the type and function list of the old IDE. |
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| I believe protean was 25% off recently. Unfortunately the $ is really weak right now and everything seems damned expensive when converted so I'm going to have to wait and see what gives first :) |
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| I used BlitzBasic 2 on the Amiga and it does seem that with the addition of OO techniques and some other changes, there is a learning curve with BlitzMax, but it's not too hard. You had an easy transition, then. BlitzBasic2 was more advanced in many respects to B3D/B+. I have no idea why this is, but it only occurs on large documents. Function folding is not actually as trivial a task as you might think to implement into an editor. I'd wager the author of VB settled for a method that is very reasonable on short sources but not so great on longer sources. I'm with Jeremy, I've always been nothing of an artist so I definately fit more in the programmers side of things... I never had any problems scrolling through 100s of lines of code in the Miggy days, except for the fact it was just plain annoying. Function folding is great for that. |
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| Time will tell which IDE I will use. I haven't got a mac yet so perhaps thats why I was forced to purchase an IDE because the win32 ide is in an absolutely hopeless state. That's not really a fair comment considering that Max is not even officially available for the PC yet. The Windows IDE was thrown together quickly to let us get our hands on an early beta... |
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| I thought BlitzMax was a programming language, not a drawing/modelling package :) What does artist stuff have to do with programming languages? |
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| Ash, it's the way 3dsmax was designed, sounds silly. But the whole thing is done in an OOP modular fashion, actually 3dsmax itself is more like an OS, where every function is a seperate module. This concept seems to have passed onto the actual use of max, simple example being the modifier stack. In 3dsmax you have a modifier/history stack that works a lot like types. you get a stack of procedures applied to a entity, that contains a list of variables, anything that is modified at a lower level of the stacks history is passed on through to the higher level modifications. It's really hard to explain, but the entire working of max and how you interact with entities in 3dsmax works this way. If I get stuck it helps me when learning to code, if I try and imagine I'm modeling a program visually in max and see it in my mind in 3dsmax terms. Might not make sense unless you use 3dsmax, but the way it works really isn't that much different to my experience with Bmax. I havent used another design application that works quite the same way as 3dsmax, doesn't work quite the same if I imagine I'm using photoshop for instance, probably because PS is a lot more linear, and you cant control global variables in quite the same way lol. Wonder if any other experienced 3dsmax Users know what I'm talking about? |
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| Yep I know exactly what you're talking about :) However, maxscript OO does seem more forgiving and easier. It even has try/catch like blitzmax... I remember a year or so ago I asked mark if it would be as simple as... a = CreateSphere() a.x = 10 instead of positionentity... Thats the kinda OO I'd love! |
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| I know 3dsmax (going to school learning it now), so I know what you're talking about. |
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