FMB needs to be much more User Friendly.

[klem]

Originally Posted by Ataros

Purchased a book called "Introduction (or basic) course to C# programming" by a university professor last Saturday. It is only about 200 pages and makes things way easier.

Below is a sample code I wrote yesterday after just 2 days of reading it. Of cause I was using 2 pieces of code from other people: ZaltysZ and naryv, but the book provided enough understanding to combine them and finetune to my needs.

Hi Ataros,

I applaud your dedication and success but coding requires a particular mindset, not complex perhaps but particular. After many years of creating suites of linked Access databases with much Visual Basic programming and some VBS I know I was considered by my entire department to be some kind of geek. I didn't see it like that at first because like you I was on the inside looking out. "if I can understand it anyone can" but they couldn't. And we weren't even talking high level language there!

Yes I could study C#, it doesn't look complicated because most coding fits a certain logical mindset, you just have to learn it's own peculiarities, but I don't really have the time and more importantly the community is mostly like my old department and should have some kind of graphical interface within FMB to allow them to select start times, pick events, assign actions to events, etc etc without writing C#. Now that's a tall order for a company struggling to keep up with the debugging of CoD but it should be on their roadmap.

What would be very useful, and should be do-able by 1C right now, is a list of events (I know you gave some earlier), how to use them, and sample code for many key mission stages like start timing, event selection and actions, identifying army and player and messaging, etc etc, I'm sure you could add many more. Some real cut and paste stuff for those of us caught between C# guru and complete C# novice in which we could easily see where to edit in our own minimal info.

I know there are some good examples posted here by you and a few others but it needs bringing together as a manual or at least a consolidated reference set, perhaps under its own sticky in this forum and locked or heavily moderated to eliminate discussion or the 'reference set' will get lost in the noise. And it should be provided by 1C. I have searched for a couple of weeks to find out how to message individual players and armies under the Timetick example that I think you first showed us but I have had no success. I want to do that because the briefing system doesn't work, at least in Dogfight missions it doesn't, and I also want to send event based or time based 'Controller' messages but for example I don't know how to call up an army or player id under Timetick or set a timer under the other examples that give me an Army or Player.

Its bad enough that we don't have a graphical interface but to give their customers C# scripting without even a catalogue of the game parameters and not even a basic guide is just daft.

[ZaltysZ]

Originally Posted by klem

What would be very useful, and should be do-able by 1C right now, is a list of events (I know you gave some earlier), how to use them, and sample code for many key mission stages like start timing, event selection and actions, identifying army and player and messaging, etc etc, I'm sure you could add many more.

I have expressed a wish to developers for having ability to enter arbitrary amount of meta data in ME and access them in script. This way it would be possible to write some kind of universal script, which could interpret meta data and do some things (like timed spawn, auto despawn and so on). This would be useful for mission designers without coding knowledge.

Originally Posted by klem

Some real cut and paste stuff for those of us caught between C# guru and complete C# novice in which we could easily see where to edit in our own minimal info.

Cut and paste approach begins to show disadvantages when you need to make multiple parts work together. You simply need to know what those parts do, or desirable result will be hardly reached.

Originally Posted by klem

Its bad enough that we don't have a graphical interface but to give their customers C# scripting without even a catalogue of the game parameters and not even a basic guide is just daft.

Start a whining campaign (targeted at Luthier). I am serious. I got impression that devs usually help us only in their free time, and there is no one assigned for writing any documentation/samples/examples for us.