openmw.org

For a long time scrawl has been the main driving force behind OpenMW. So when the news came that he'd be going on a hiatus to improve his health, many of us thought that the progress would halt, and that the next releases of OpenMW would only include bug-fixes, if anything...

But we were so utterly wrong! Out of the woodworks appeared Allofich and MiroslavR. The duo has not only solved many bugs but also implemented several new features. In addition, scrawl is still active in the community - accepting pull requests, reading the forums and occasionally closing an issue when his health allows it. While the pace is a bit slower now, our project still makes progress, and OpenMW steadily continues its journey towards version 1.0.

http://i.imgur.com/BxevPFt.jpg

On the OpenMW-CS side of things there have also been several improvements. Previously, the scene window was a static view of the world where you couldn't really do anything besides looking around with the camera. Aeslywinn came in, reworked the camera system, implemented pathgrids, water rendering and object movement, rotation and scaling sub modes. While he has now left the OpenMW project to do other great things, he has also left our editor with the capability to create new worlds.

http://i.imgur.com/lEZme4u.jpg

It should be noted that, although what you see in the above screenshot was made using OpenMW-CS, there are still some features that need to implemented for the editor. Remember - If you have skills in C++ or QT and are interested in contributing to the OpenMW project, then you too can be an OpenMW hero.

Thank you very much everyone for all that you do!

I hope Scrawl's health has improved.

Congrats on your second news post, DestinedToDie. It's nice to see some action on our front page.

Congratulations so far on the project.

I have a strange request. For a long time now I've been thinking about doing something related to programming or computers and the like. You say you need skills in the programming languages like C++. I want to help, but I need to learn how to use these programming languages. Any idea where to start?

I went to Uni and took 2 courses of Python. The next step was Java. And then C++ I think. The idea was to learn a simple language, then start introducing the more complex ones that have additional quirks.

But really, Python is used very rarely. A lot of programmers hate Java. If I were to do it on my own, I would just go straight to c++ which seems to be the one almost every programmer uses.

As I mentioned before, I took 2 courses of Python in uni and it lasted like 9 months. But the pace was slow, I was juggling 10 other courses, I didn't really learn much attending lectures, reading the book they gave me and doing the exercises. Although I got a very basic understanding of code, I would have been better never going to uni. Just googling how to do it and taking bits I found useful for my endeavours and applying them would have been more useful. If you're really going for it, following someone else's program can be a waste of your time.

But that's just my advice. Take it with a grain of salt, because I've yet to become successful at anything.

DestinedToDie wrote:I've yet to become successful at anything.

Keep at it..... you will become successful.

DestinedToDie wrote:I went to Uni and took 2 courses of Python. The next step was Java. And then C++ I think. The idea was to learn a simple language, then start introducing the more complex ones that have additional quirks.

But really, Python is used very rarely. A lot of programmers hate Java. If I were to do it on my own, I would just go straight to c++ which seems to be the one almost every programmer uses.

As I mentioned before, I took 2 courses of Python in uni and it lasted like 9 months. But the pace was slow, I was juggling 10 other courses, I didn't really learn much attending lectures, reading the book they gave me and doing the exercises. Although I got a very basic understanding of code, I would have been better never going to uni. Just googling how to do it and taking bits I found useful for my endeavours and applying them would have been more useful. If you're really going for it, following someone else's program can be a waste of your time.

But that's just my advice. Take it with a grain of salt, because I've yet to become successful at anything.

And thanks for your response man. I'm still in school and I've been thinking about what I wanna do. Been thinking about medicine or pursue my full-time sports career, but there's just something about programming and computers that I wanna do. So, every bit helps. I don't think I can help with OpenMW anytime soon, but I was thinking of it as a starting point for maybe programming.

Don't make your hobby your day-job.

I started messing around with TURBOBASIC when I was about seven or eight simply because I found it on my family computer and found it amazing that I could make the computer do what I wanted. After a while, I moved on to GameMaker, which a lot of people don't take seriously, but I think is a brilliant introduction to Object-Oriented Programming. I then learned Java as part of my A-Levels, which included writing two large-ish projects, the second of which with a tougher mark scheme. (Since then, they've changed the requirement to be a single large project, reasoning that you have more time, so it should come out better, but the code I wrote for the second was drastically better than that of the first, even though from the outside, they both looked 'fine'.) After that, when I went to university, they decided to teach us SML (which no one uses as it's weird, but I found interesting) and then Java, with C++ eventually arriving in the second year, but only at a fairly superficial level. Since then, most of my own projects have been done in C# (Java's sexier, smarter, younger sister who loves you more) with the odd little thing done in Python, as a lot of the time it's simpler when you want something quick and dirty.

If I was recommending something to a new programmer, I'd definitely recommend learning the core concepts that are shared between every major language from a tutorial thing (e.g. CodeAcademy's Python course) before tackling C++, as there are a lot of subtle pitfalls, and things that work but are a terrible idea, which are much easier to avoid if you have some idea why they're bad before you're introduced to them. I don't see a problem with learning a less serious language before tackling something else - it might well only take you about a day's worth of (non-consecutive) time to do a Python course and undertake a small project to make sure you can apply what you've learned, and it's bound to save you a lot of time later on. Even if you jump straight into C++ with a tutorial that says it's fine for those who've never programmed before, it's still likely written by a programmer, and you can always skim-read the bits that seem obvious.

Cool, Thanks a lot AnyOldName3