SRL Archive - News and General

Well over the past month or so I have kept on thinking about whether I want to script or not. I read a few tutorials and I actually have a very good understanding of just basic stuff. I still sometimes forget the things that are easy to do such as just including semi-colons in certain lines of code, but so far every beginners tutorial that I have read I have understood basically all of it.

The only thing thats really keeping me from being a scripter is when I look at all these good scripts that I use that are like 1000-5000 lines of code. This is where I convince myself that there is no way that I could possibly have that much patience or knowledge to make myself type that much code. I would love to give back to the community in more ways then just simply posting on the forums and such. I have a decent amount of free time and I have two computers, so I could always just run a script on my good computer and script on this computer.

I just feel like I could not make myself think about and then type that much code. I am currently just finishing up visual basic in school which wasn't so bad, but scar is kind of, well you know, COMPLETELY DIFFERENT! If anyone could give me advice on what exactly I should do I would be very thankful.

Just start small. No one when starting out goes for the major scripts. Those people started off doing small scripts and worked their way up while learning along the way. If you sort of understand the basics, go to the help forms and help people who dont understand at all( there are more than you think).

hmm… yes I suppose I could do that. Could I ask how long it would take for someone in high school to learn scar good enough to make say a four or five star script?

Ask me soon when I (hopefully) release a couple scripts (as shown in sig area below). I'm in high school right now and these are my first 2 scripts, and I know HTML really well, so we kind of have the same situation. Maybe you want to PM each other and test eachother's scripts? It would help me, and I could probably help you out a bit. Just a thought.

Making a good script doesn't happen all at once. Those thousands of lines can take a lot of time to complete; very few people do it all at once. Sometimes, you'll run into a piece of tricky code where 20 lines will take you 30 minutes. Sometimes you'll finish hundreds of lines in an hour. It all depends on the script and it's inherent requirements.

Don't be afraid to try scripting. It's a great way to start programming and will give you an edge over others if you ever move on to another language. There's hundreds of programming languages out there. Unless you get a job programming, nobody's going to force you to stick to one language or another. Take advantage of this freedom and try to find the language that allows you to be most productive, but is still practical, then do your best to excel at it.

With time comes learning and practice. The more you know about a language, the easier it's gonna be to code in it. Not that everything is going to be easy, but you'll be able to do more coding with less thinking, which equates to more speed. Once you've been at it for a couple months, you'll be able to complete scripts with a bit of brainstorming at the beginning, and far less thinking during the actual coding process.

One helpful factor of scripting that doesn't really exist in other languages is the repetitiveness. Not so much so that it becomes boring to script, but enough so that it simplifies things greatly. For example, once you've found one object perfectly using advanced methods, you can find them all. There are exceptions, but after a while, you will reach a point where you're just taking pieces of your previous code and putting it in the right order.

My biggest suggestion for you is to start small. Make a few simple programs that will do simple math problems for you, maybe impress your friends with a program that will launch your web browser then navigate to your favorite website and log in. I made a timer to keep my brother from hogging the computer. At first, it was only 50 lines or so. By the time it was finished, it was over 600 lines. It looked horrible. Some pieces had no standards at all, others were pristine.

That leads me on to my next suggestion: learn and use standards. It's alright if you don't like an element of the 'official' standards; but try to keep your code somewhat organized, flat code is terribly hard to read. Standards aren't only for looks, though; they help you keep your loops in order, aiding you when debugging or updating your script. No matter how trivial the program, always practice standards, if you don't practice them, you'll never learn to use them correctly.

Well, now there's a bit of a lecture. Hope it helped :)

yes smartzkid, it helped and I decided that it can't hurt to at least try to become good at scripting. tyvm ;)

Nah man, programming is fun once you get into it.

I'm doing an A-Level course on Programming with Pascal and it is very similar with Scar, and I bloody love it!