Money
Michael Packard wrote:
> The books give you the option of going deeper than we can here on the
> listserver.
I agree. And the book has been highly recommended by David Gay. Let me make
it clear that I consider the book a Good Thing for what it does. But not as
a substitute for answers in this group, because that puts Michael Packard in
competition with this group, and the group loses.
> That being said, I think the book reference is MUCH more useful than an
> incomplete overview of some pretty complicated material.
The utility of your text is not in dispute by me.
> Which is better to teach someone, a five minute general response to a
> question, or a 100 page dissection of the theory and a line by line code
> walkthrough explaining the WHY's of each line and HOW it ties in to all
> you do?
I ascribe no unkind motivations to David Gay or others. I will grant that
perhaps his answer was *exactly* what was needed. But in the instances I was
referring to, there was no overview, or code snippet offered.
> I spent 4 months developing a generic arcade game engine, it's a
> disservice to wave my hands in the air and say "you know, just do this..."
A disservice to whom?
It's not "disservice" to tell someone how to do something. By the time a
person has reached the point of knowing that they have a question, they've
probably reached the level of being able to understand a direct answer. In
terms of teaching method, sometimes it's better to give someone a five
minute explanation of the theory (with salient examples), and leave them to
their own devices.
You've made a point of listing the things that your game engine does (large
numbers of sprites, collision detection, etc.) to the group, and followed it
by remarks that if people did not want to have to wait a number of months
for the information to be published piecemeal, they would have to purchase
your book.
By giving out the information, the primary person you'd be doing a
disservice to is yourself. You've labored months to put together a great
product, and to give all the information away at once would marketing
disaster - where's the incentive to buy something, if you can get it free?
This is a commercial venture, plain and simple.
> A hint and a code snippet is different from A Crash Course in Game Design
> and Production.
Another plug.
> If you're curious about a technique, you want a hint and a code snippet,
> if you are serious about learning from the ground up, you want more
> serious training materials.
Sell, sell, sell. Even in a response to too much commercialism in this
group. Where's my "ironic" smiley? %^(
Your training materials are for SALE, being touted as a solution on a list
that was set up to provide Euphoria users with FREE information. That's why
I am concerned when a sales pitch is substituted for a direct answer. It's a
sort of creeping commercialism, and the beneficiary sure isn't me, or the
group.
-- David Cuny
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