ChessMess wrote:
It would appear that I need to look to the community to provide what
I had thought would have been provided in the SDK?
Yes. There are a limited number of engineers at Valve. There are other
things that they are working on. The community, however, has hundreds
of people who "bootstrapping" off of what other community people have
learned. You best bet is to find an active community Half-Life2 forum
(Wavelength and VERC are the best), and ask questions. Valve engineers
do reply to posts at VERC. There are many experience coders in the
Half-Life community that can help you understand how things worked in
Half-Life and that may help lead you to information that you are looking
for about Half-Life2.
Maybe I'm not seeing everything, or maybe its not clear to me where
to start or how to properly start. Both possible and probable given
that I'm new to all this.
Start with the existing Single Player or Multiplayer SDK source code.
Pick ONE thing that you want to understand (for example "How a player
gets spawned into the game") and walk through the source code to see how
this is done in Source (again having some understanding of how Half-Life
did this will help you understand Half-Life2). DON'T try to understand
everything at once. It can't be done. Pick one simple thing and change
it (for example "Spawning the player with half (or twice) the normal
health). Figure out how to do that, then move on to some other simple
thing (like changing the number of shells the shotgun spawns with or
changing the amount of damage a weapon does, etc). Again, don't try to
change 100 things at once, you'll just create too many problems and will
probably just frustrate yourself.
What I need is a 'Hello World' type tutorial, something that would
allow me to understand the basics of creating a mod, all the pieces
and parts that make one up and how they relate to each other. Also
I'd like more in-depth documentation on the classes and entities that
come with HL2.
The community will probably create these types of tutorials over the
next few weeks. The problem is that the experienced coders that are
working on a MOD are spending most of their time trying to understand
how things work and probably don't have a lot of time to create working
tutorials (it's amazing how much time creating a "idiot-proof" tutorial
takes). There will probably be less experienced people creating
tutorials, but be warned, many of these tutorials will be incomplete, or
just plain won't compile. The tutorials that are "less than complete"
will assume that you know how to fill in the blanks and fix any problems
with them (this is where a Wiki site becomes a HUGE advantage because
someone else can correct a tutorial that's wrong or incomplete).
It's just going to take time for the community to get up to speed and
gain critical mass. Once the learning curve has been overcome, you
should see more and more tutorials showing up on VERC, Wavelength, and
other places.
--
Jeffrey "botman" Broome
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