retired_hctwist99

First up just wanted to say a big thanks to Dan - he's telling us everything on the status of MCFM in the face of a bunch of childesh tw*ts who thought they had pube the other day, but then p***ed out of it... but that aside, top draw, and thanks.

Secondly, I keep reading a few of the 'counter moaners' telling people to go create your own program and im starting to think perhaps that is not such a bad idea, so I might give it a go... So therefore I few questions to get me started to anyone who may be able to help:

1. Is it difficult? I know it must be time consuming but do I need a degree in nuclear physics and five years experience with NASA or can I pick it up relatively easy? I should mention i'm an IT manager, and while no real programming experience I do have a big background in IT so hopefully can understand what your talking about...
2. What are programs like FM Scout, MCFM etc. programmed in?
3. Any other tips to get me started?
4. Am I waisting my time?

I know it might take me six months and FM scout/MCFM might be out in six weeks but for future games updates I would like to learn so that I might be able to contribute in the future. I'm not expecting a step by step guide, just a few pointers to see if its worth me looking into.

Thanks

borat123

I admire your courage!

I won't lie to you. It is difficult. If you don't know the first thing about hex, or assembly or even programming, you will struggle.

That said, it doesn't have to be a bells and whistles program and if you can pick up process memory readers for most programming languages.


MCFM is made in Visual Studio 2003/2005. This can be an expensive piece of kit but there are free alternatives such as SharpDevelop (Google for it). That's C#. There are hundreds of programming languages out there. VB and C++ (which is what FM is written in ) are a couple of major ones that pop into my head at the moment.

There are other easy languages such as Java (which is closely related to C++ as it's designed to be a scaled down, easy version of it) and Pascal. Whilst Pascal is a relatively old language, the building blocks of learning programming languages can be found in it and Pascal is designed as a teaching language anyway. Delphi (which is what FMM was written in, I believe) uses Pascal behind a pretty graphical interface.


Don't set your initial goals too high. You say you have no real programming experience so you can't possibly expect yourself to write a program on par with something like MCFM, FMM or Graeme Kelly's CM3 Save Game Editor (still regarded as the best example of post-game-creation editing).

That depends really. Do you think you'll benefit from knowing programming languages and how to program? If so then you're not wasting your time because you'll be learning something you want to know. If you don't think you'll use programming languages much, then it can get hairy to get back into after a break away. So your best shot is to keep at it making small programs which become more and more complex.

borat123

That said, it doesn't have to be a bells and whistles program and if you can pick up process memory readers for most programming languages then you're on your way.

retired_hctwist99

Ok thanks

I'm going to seriously look into this and who knows, I might be able to produce something. I can get hold of Visual Studio and Visual Basic quite easy so no problem there. If anything its something ive always wanted to learn just never had any reason to - but a nice little tool for FM should give me a goal to work towards.

Thanks for your help.