I will stick it, so it appears at the top of the thread.
Done. I already did an edit (of-off). I have never worked on a google doc, but it appears to "save" instantly. Very cool. Now I have to figure out some goals and add them. I really believe in goal setting and have lectured and written on it. Here's a long and quite interesting thread from hubski (Feb. 2013) on our ambivalence towards goalsetting. I'm trying to figure out where my goals went. Here's some possibilities: 1. My goals are so integrated into everyday life that I can't stop and unpack them. 2. I've fallen into a comfortable, but kiss-of-death complacency that I no longer want goals. 3. I've been so preoccupied with propping up the reality and maintaining the well-being of certain family members, that personal, professional, or creative goals have fallen to the wayside. 4. All of the above? (still musing) Edit Still thinking about these things. After reading 4. Keep daily habits. Write every day. Read every day. Do some sort of exercise
on blackbootz post, it reminded me of a time in my life when I had a list of goals like those and would check them off every day. It was an interesting time.
I find my goals fade when they're no longer remaining a step ahead of themselves. A good move in chess isn't just about the movement of one piece, but also considers why you're making such a move. What future moves is it facilitating and are you accounting for your opponent's potential reactions? If you just move turn by turn, you risk crumbling or at least often finding yourself confused about your current position. It's the same with goals in life. I've stated one of my 2015 targets as 'learn to code'. But above that is the fact that I want to get into audio work for games, and having at least some knowledge in the relevant languages would be a huge benefit. In the distance is potentially creating my own interactive experiences. In that way, a goal becomes multi-faceted and isn't just simply reasoned by 'just because' or 'it seems like a good/the right thing to do'. I guess another way to put it is to think macro and then divide into micro. I posted this old proved a week or so back:“A vision without a plan is just a dream. A plan without a vision is just drudgery. But a vision with a plan can change the world.”
Go to /r/gamedevclassifieds. Compare audio for hire vs. audio wanted. The day I joined, there were five audio schmucks looking for work. Not a one of them mentioned knowing any code. In episodic television, audio and video post are about 1:1. In reality television, audio and video post are about 1:10. In video games, it looks more like 1:50. And that's why I'm teaching myself WWise, FMod and Unity.But above that is the fact that I want to get into audio work for games, and having at least some knowledge in the relevant languages would be a huge benefit.
Yeah man, it's all just about having that edge that'll let people know you're the 'real deal'. Experience with the relevant engines and language is definitely just that, imo. I remember last time I checked out the audio for hire submissions on that subreddit and they were rather lacklustre. I'll be keeping an eye your progress updates with WWise etc, they're things I'll need to get my head around at some point.
From what I've been able to gather, it's about having a one-stop shop where you can get all your shit done. Take that 50:1 ratio. There are a couple different ways to look at it: You're either going to be one of four people working in a massive AAA house with 200 pixelmonkeys or you're going to be the only guy at a AA shop with 50 pixelmonkeys. If you're at the AAA house, you get to specialize. But how many audio guys at AAA houses only know the mixing aspect? Or the composing aspect? And most of that they farm out anyway. Take the little shops with one guy or five guys or eight guys. None of them are pure audio. And really - why are they going to grab your sound design rather than whatever samples they can slam into Cryengine or whatever? Since you're going to need to roll up 5 or 10 or 50 of them in order to stay gainfully employed, you're going to need to be pretty versatile. My working assumption is you're going to be in a much better place if they can hand you a ball of code and say "audio this" and come back in a week or two. That comes from knowing code, not knowing Pro Tools. Audiokinetic has free training, by the way. And cheap certification. FMod is a little more but I've got several thousand dollars worth of samples from Sound Librarian so I'ma see if they might maybe cut me a deal.
One of my best friends is organizing Indievelopment next year, a conference here in the Netherlands on indie game development. Last year there was a talk on generative audio in games, with the guy working on No Man's Sky. Might interest you, even though the presentation is dry and the sound is (ironically) not so great.
edit: since when did we get Vimeo embed support?
So first, this will probably interest you when it comes out. Second, there's a wiki of open source game's here. Personally I can vouch for Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup and Battle for Wesnoth are fun, though I don't know how fun they'd be to score. Hope some of that helps. There are also games that aren't free but have open engines that can be worked on when you purchase the game. So, semi open, I guess. If you don't have a problem with that, Mount and Blade is super fuckin fun and would be awesome to play around with. There's a whole Samurai mod. It's bomb.
Hey me too! Tried earlier this year and it didn't go too far because of other projects and then trying to keep my grades up, but I really want to try and learn it this time around (shoutout to insomniasexx for being an amazing source of knowledge on these things). Currently: Downloading Ubuntu, a Virtual Box, and then going to install Ubuntu in the VB and then setting up LAMP and everything else in Ubuntu. I think that will work for now so that I can use Linux instead of Windows and make it easier to follow along with The Odin Project. It's the most amazing resource I've found so far, part of my problem earlier this year was Codecademy and textbooks weren't doing it for me, but this site seems to go above and beyond those. However, it teaches Ruby instead of Python so I'm going to have to find some other place to learn that after.It's the same with goals in life. I've stated one of my 2015 targets as 'learn to code'.
General trick to learning to program is pick an easy language, pick a throwaway project, learn a few skills (structuring programs, basic data structures, functions, library calls, classes) by doing. Drop it like it's hot and never look back. Repeat for new, unlearned skills.
I'm currently running through the Python course on Code Academy as I heard that's quite a good language to start with. Ideally I want to pick up C/C++ and Java, but Code Academy don't have those languages and I couldn't find an alternative just yet. I really like having the interactive, code as you learn environment.
Python's great because it's easy to read, quick to get started with, and mostly intelligently designed. The two main types, lists and dictionaries, are part of the syntax, so instead of writing: "LinkedList<Integer> a = new LinkedList<Integer>(); a.add(1)" (Java), implementing your own or looking for a library (C), or whatever the hell it is in C... in python, it's just: "a = [1]". The same is true of dictionaries (HashTables in other languages), and many other basic operations (Reading / writing files, quickly saving objects, basic parallel programming...). The complexity is abstracted away, which makes nicely for quickly jumping in to making something that just works. This all is a debt, to some extent though. You'll learn about time complexity and why you might want you want to represent a "list" using one of many structures (Arrays, linked lists, doubly linked lists, skip lists, binary trees, ...). You'll learn about 32-bit integers and floating point approximation and realize that 1.0 isn't exactly equal to 1.000000000000000000000000000000001 and the latter might pop up when you weren't expecting it. You'll learn about the stack, memory allocation, and garbage collection and compilers and JIT compilers and realize python was never designed to be the speediest car on the block. If you stick with it long enough, all these debts will eventually need to be repaid. But in the meantime it's pretty nice as a way to get a hang of making simple things that works while you learn about the places where there be dragons. I came in the C++ -> C -> Java -> Python -> Lisp -> Assembly route, and while it's definitely helpful to know certain aspects of each, my opinion is that it's much more satisfying and easier to learn when you get a full program or two working before you start worrying about registers and caches and memory leaks.
Cheers for rundown! I just got done on learning about about comparators, boolean operators, and conditional statements. So far, not too far astray from the likes of some Excel formulas. I'm sure it wont stay that way for long though. I get what you mean about learning to actually make something before delving too deep. I might spend some xmas money on a subscription to this. It seems like it has good tutorials on there and actually teaches you to make stuff as you go along.
I'd put mobile programming under its own umbrella of skills, since it usually involves learning device-specific languages, libraries, and design principles. All useful, but many are mostly useful within that context. Just keep in mind that things have been moving fast in the mobile (And also web dev) world and that much of what you may learn will change as the platforms change their security designs, the companies adopt new performing languages (Looking at you, swift), markets change, and products / operating systems fall out of favor.
Yea? (More please. :)It was an interesting time.