This section allows you to view all posts made by this member. Note that you can only see posts made in areas you currently have access to.

1

Game Dev and Gaming / Looking for education on a budget?

« on: Nov 25, 11, 04:16:58 PM »

After we actually got the HE toolkit in-hand, our team realized how unprepared we are to tackle even the basic design components to create a truly spectacular game.

Recently, Stanford School of Engineering released the entirety of their Intro to Computer Science course in video format.  If you or your team are looking to get learned, or upgrade/refresh your skills, I highly recommend it.  While they do tackle a number of programming languages, they are teaching programming from an engineering perspective.  In the long run, it has made our usage of the HeroScript wiki documentation more productive

http://see.stanford.edu/see/courses.aspx

For the CS106A coursework and lectures, the only item not included in the course materials freely available on the site is a textbook, which we got several of second hand for $50 apiece, which is the total material cost per person to take a stanford-quality course.    You have to work much harder to use these than even a Stanford student might, because you won't have directed group work, but the course is designed to teach Intro to CS to anthro and biology majors, not just CS people.


For more educational materials, we've been using khan academy ( http://khanacademy.org )  to learn the finer points of basic to upper math, including trig and geom and all the good stuff, including probability and statistics.

Hope this is OK to post, and I hope you find it useful.


Anyone else got any awesome educational materials to share that's relevant to MMO development in any way (even free writing workshops for MMO writing development, for example)?

2

Game Dev and Gaming / LEGO Universe Shutting Down :(

« on: Nov 11, 11, 08:32:32 AM »

I enjoyed playing this game for the few days that I played it when it launched last year.  It was a treat for myself, a game I knew I'd blow through quickly so the upfront cost of buying the game at launch for full price and conquering all the content in three days didn't bother me:

http://messageboards.lego.com/en-us/showpost.aspx?PostID=4504061

There are a few things I note about the game from a business perspective, and I think any one of them might make an interesting topic of a HeroEngine blog post written by someone with more researchin' and analyzin' skillz than me:

• While the F2P model has been successfully implemented in a previously pay-to-play game to resurrect the revenue stream of a few games (LotRO, DDO, WAR to a certain extent) it needs to be coupled with effective marketing and refocused development: the game has to be better from every angle because the people playing it now don't have $20-50 invested in it already.  
  
• LEGO Universe is the first pay-to-play game I have ever played that didn't require you to enter some credit card details for an automatic rebill after the first free month that came with the game.  While I appreciate their billing practice as a customer, they would have probably gotten at least 75% more money from me over a few months before I forgot to cancel, which would have been good for them.  (Allowing your credit card to rebill month after month forgetfully is hilariously common among online game players.)
  

3

Scripting & Programming / [Resolved] "Methods only valid in class scripts"

« on: Aug 07, 11, 07:48:52 PM »

Moderator:  Please move this to the Scripting forum, I got antsy.  >.>

Surely I am overlooking something fairly simple, but while completing the tutorial:

http://hewiki.heroengine.com/wiki/Your_First_HSL_Script

I get a message regarding "Methods only valid in class scripts" for every line that begins a method.

Here's what I've done/tried:

1.  I entered my program manually into a script called bearTutorial1ClassMethods, tried to compile it, didn't work.
2.  Copied the contents of each code section of the tutorial to a code block in my own script, still get an error for every line that begins a method
3.  Copy/pasted the contents of _scriptingTutorial1ClassMethods (which compiles on its own without error) to my own bearTutorial1ClassMethods script, and it aborts compile with the same "Methods only valid in class scripts" error, with no other errors.

(By the way, as a sanity check, I added the _scriptingTutorial1 class to a node and it behaves as expected.)

Any ideas? :<

4

General Discussion / [Resolved] Documentation question

« on: Aug 03, 11, 11:52:45 PM »

Before I bother posting a lengthy request for a documentation reorganization, to what extent is HE/IF aware that the wiki needs work?

e.g. the http://wiki.heroengine.com/wiki/Introduction_to_HeroCloud_for_Social_and_Web_Game_Developers page is suspiciously similar to a copy of the "for MMOs" page, and doesn't include any information or wiki links to stuff about the social game APIs etc (presumably because this isn't public yet). 

Anyways, this and many other pieces of front-and-center documentation on the wiki are outdated or misleading/confusing at the moment and I'm just getting a vibe for 1. whether you have a project already in the works to do something about this and 2. how receptive you are to customers grabbing this bull by those horns w/r/t just going into the wiki and trying to put right what has gone wrong?