Hello,guys

Hello Thrive Community,i'm Arbiteras,but you can call me Arby if you want
i originally found this game by playing Spore.
i was dissapointed by the wasted potential of the game,so i searched on Google videos of the 2005 version of Spore and found this awesome project in the comments
I'm not English(Italian),so i can't spell it 100% right,so i'm sorry if you can't understand some of my lines
i registered 2 or 3 years ago,but i never had the chance or time of getting here due of school
now i'm here ready to help,i really want it,i've got a lot of free time for the next 5 years,so i can focus on the development
i don't know if this can be of interest for you,but i have a passion for science and very good knownledge of it,especially astronomy,geology and biology,i don't know if the project needs this,but i'm ready to do another task,as long this game gets done.
my life's desire is to become a game developer or founding a new game company focusing more on quality than most of modern game developers who sicken me,they don't do the games for passion but for pure profit.
but i wanna ask,(since i can't reply or do another topic)how's the game developement right now?
Hope we can work together and see ya around

Well right now we are in version 0.2.3, but version 0.2.4 is coming out soon (hopefully within the next few weeks). I am fairly low in the hierarchy by the way, so hopefully someone who is higher up can clear things up more.

Hi Arby!

Arby wrote:

life's desire...game developer...new game company

Awesome. That's the first step -- wanting it really bad. The next step is to make games. Lots of them. Whether programmed, or with Flash, or GameMaker, or pencil and paper if you don't know how to program or use any game-making software; make games, however you can. How far into this are you? Have you started making games yet? Do you not know how? That doesn't reflect badly on you -- you've indicated you're interested, clearly you'll want to learn. Luckily, you have one important thing, which is time. With 5 years, you can go from not knowing anything about making games -- no art, no programming, no game design, nothing -- and learn enough to start making money as an indie. It's a lot of work though, obviously.

So; how much experience do you have with making games? How much knowledge do you have about making games? What motivates you? What role do you want to fill on the team? You say you have lots of background knowledge on useful science fields, and that's good because it will make it easier for you to do whatever role you choose. But what do you want to do?

If you aren't sure, that's fine. We can keep talking, and hopefully figure that out. If you just want to learn about making games, we can talk about that too, but you'll probably learn more on a site dedicated to learning how to make games.

Since I'm one of the programmers, I can only really give you advice on joining the programming team. For that, my advice is to learn how to program, specifically by learning Lua. Feel free to ask us anything, or complain about the tutorial, or tell us you don't want to do it, or whatever. But once you learn enough about coding in Lua, we can start talking about Thrive's code, how things work, and where you can get started. If you're ready to do that already, just say so. If you would rather contribute some other way, just say so and I'll give you someone else to handle your application.

moopli wrote:

Hi Arby!

Arby wrote:

life's desire...game developer...new game company

Awesome. That's the first step -- wanting it really bad. The next step is to make games. Lots of them. Whether programmed, or with Flash, or GameMaker, or pencil and paper if you don't know how to program or use any game-making software; make games, however you can. How far into this are you? Have you started making games yet? Do you not know how? That doesn't reflect badly on you -- you've indicated you're interested, clearly you'll want to learn. Luckily, you have one important thing, which is time. With 5 years, you can go from not knowing anything about making games -- no art, no programming, no game design, nothing -- and learn enough to start making money as an indie. It's a lot of work though, obviously.

So; how much experience do you have with making games? How much knowledge do you have about making games? What motivates you? What role do you want to fill on the team? You say you have lots of background knowledge on useful science fields, and that's good because it will make it easier for you to do whatever role you choose. But what do you want to do?

If you aren't sure, that's fine. We can keep talking, and hopefully figure that out. If you just want to learn about making games, we can talk about that too, but you'll probably learn more on a site dedicated to learning how to make games.

Since I'm one of the programmers, I can only really give you advice on joining the programming team. For that, my advice is to learn how to program, specifically by learning Lua. Feel free to ask us anything, or complain about the tutorial, or tell us you don't want to do it, or whatever. But once you learn enough about coding in Lua, we can start talking about Thrive's code, how things work, and where you can get started. If you're ready to do that already, just say so. If you would rather contribute some other way, just say so and I'll give you someone else to handle your application.

to be honest,i never programmed,aside from making some mods on some games or tweaking minor txt config files i've done nothing impressive
i'm quick to adapt to a tool
but i won't turn that off a chance to make this game real or have a chance to get in the indie gaming industry to make it better
i'm motivated of making a game because i've always dreamed of making one,but mostly because i have a passion for them,as they fill a lot of my free time,it's exciting to play a (good) game,let alone be part of a team to make a fresh game
there are too many cash grabs and bad games out there,i need to do something for that
i would accept any training you will give me,and i'd like to offer some advice on science gameplay ideas
of course there's no guarantee that these ideas will be in the final game,but it's nice anyway to exchange ideas
but i'll do it for 2 conditions(it could be hard for some people)
the first: this game has not be abandoned or end like StarForge (buggy alpha release with 10% of the promised features)
the second is that what we are doing has not be wasted,we have to use everything at our disposal

yes i have a good knownledge of science,coming from reading science books or surfing wikipedia
i don't know what role i can do,but i'm ready to start learning right now
programmer if you need programming,and i'd like a science related role,if you want

moopli wrote:

Hi Arby!

Arby wrote:

life's desire...game developer...new game company

Awesome. That's the first step -- wanting it really bad. The next step is to make games. Lots of them. Whether programmed, or with Flash, or GameMaker, or pencil and paper if you don't know how to program or use any game-making software; make games, however you can. How far into this are you? Have you started making games yet? Do you not know how? That doesn't reflect badly on you -- you've indicated you're interested, clearly you'll want to learn. Luckily, you have one important thing, which is time. With 5 years, you can go from not knowing anything about making games -- no art, no programming, no game design, nothing -- and learn enough to start making money as an indie. It's a lot of work though, obviously.

So; how much experience do you have with making games? How much knowledge do you have about making games? What motivates you? What role do you want to fill on the team? You say you have lots of background knowledge on useful science fields, and that's good because it will make it easier for you to do whatever role you choose. But what do you want to do?

If you aren't sure, that's fine. We can keep talking, and hopefully figure that out. If you just want to learn about making games, we can talk about that too, but you'll probably learn more on a site dedicated to learning how to make games.

Since I'm one of the programmers, I can only really give you advice on joining the programming team. For that, my advice is to learn how to program, specifically by learning Lua. Feel free to ask us anything, or complain about the tutorial, or tell us you don't want to do it, or whatever. But once you learn enough about coding in Lua, we can start talking about Thrive's code, how things work, and where you can get started. If you're ready to do that already, just say so. If you would rather contribute some other way, just say so and I'll give you someone else to handle your application.

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so what's up?i haven't recieved word from any of you guys.my request is still valid?

It's difficult to suggest something for you to do without you having anything specific in mind, but I'm always looking for people to work making xml files for the gui these days! I'm in the processes of writing a tutorial: https://thrivegame.canadaboard.net/t1488-thrive-gui-tutorial-cegui-from-image-to-script that should be finished early next week at the latest, so if that's something you're interested in you can let me know.

If you wanted to get into the actual programming, you would need to study some basic programming on your own first. If you want to get into the art/3d models, you would need to practice that and show your work.

crovea wrote:

It's difficult to suggest something for you to do without you having anything specific in mind, but I'm always looking for people to work making xml files for the gui these days! I'm in the processes of writing a tutorial: https://thrivegame.canadaboard.net/t1488-thrive-gui-tutorial-cegui-from-image-to-script that should be finished early next week at the latest, so if that's something you're interested in you can let me know.

If you wanted to get into the actual programming, you would need to study some basic programming on your own first. If you want to get into the art/3d models, you would need to practice that and show your work.

thank you for having replied to me.
well if you want i can help you,just point me the basics and i'm good to go.
i've got loads of time.
what program code i have to learn for Thrive? C++ ?
tell me what i have to know to start and i'll do whatever i can

C++ is probably a bad idea for a language to start with. There are ways you can make it work, sure, but it's much more work when you don't know a programming language already. My recommendation is to start with learning Lua -- it's easy to learn, and the main language we use for gameplay programming. There are lots of tutorials on the web, and I'm not sure anymore which is best, so Google is your friend.

I'd say you're ready once you know Lua well enough to:

• Understand the syntax of a file when you read it,
  
• Understand, conceptually, how program flow (if, else, while, function) works (you don't necessarily need to know the exact syntax to use, I still google all the time to be extra-sure)
  
• Understand how Lua tables work
  

By reading a lot of articles online, and, of course, writing code, you could probably do that in a day to a week.

Then I think you're ready to start getting tips/help from us on how to mod the game. Then, I think it would be best to start modding the game, fiddling with more and more complicated things, learning how the game works on the inside, and then in addition to whatever modding you wanna do, we can give you some bog-fixing, and game-improvement tasks, and as you get better with experience you'd naturally get more and more stuff, and more and more difficult things, done.

At some point near when you start fixing issues and adding features, we'd help you get set up with git and a build system, so you could stay up to date with the current dev version and push your changes there easily.

And that's pretty much all I can think of for high-level roadmap.

But if you do decide to learn C++ this book really helped me a lot when I was starting out.

TheCreator wrote:

this book really helped

When you were going through it, did anything ever seem out of place? I'm not sure if it would be possible, but I'd suggest putting aside everything in section II except for chapter 9 for later. That of course depends on how detailed those chapters get; if they really are just 1-hour lessons (including lots of time to program!) then I can understand why getting taught that stuff early isn't too harmful.

Yeah, after reading through the 7th edition I find that Moopli is right. Also checking out the reviews it appears that the 5th edition of the book was the best and explains things a lot better than the 7th. That was actually the one that I read a long time ago, but when I wrote the previous post I assumed the 7th would be better.

Anyway, if you want to check it out here is a PDF of the book. Not really sure if this is illegal or not, but it took me a 30 second google search.

moopli wrote:

TheCreator wrote:

this book really helped

When you were going through it, did anything ever seem out of place? I'm not sure if it would be possible, but I'd suggest putting aside everything in section II except for chapter 9 for later. That of course depends on how detailed those chapters get; if they really are just 1-hour lessons (including lots of time to program!) then I can understand why getting taught that stuff early isn't too harmful.

hi there!
came back today,unfortunately due of family problems i had to be absent for a while,but i managed to start learning

It's great taht you're back (and I hope your return means your family troubles are resolved, and if they're not yet, I wish you all the best) -- what are you learning? Lua? C++? Both? Feel free to keep us posted as you make progress, I for one am always interested.

moopli wrote:

It's great taht you're back (and I hope your return means your family troubles are resolved, and if they're not yet, I wish you all the best) -- what are you learning? Lua? C++? Both? Feel free to keep us posted as you make progress, I for one am always interested.

the problems are getting better,they're not completely solved,but i assure this won't be an obstacle for my progress

for now i'm learning the basics,i've visited several sites to learn more,and the problem is that it's hard to find a site in my launguage for easier learning

there's some helpful program/tool that i can use for practice?

The easiest way to practice is to mod Thrive. I will try and figure out what file would be easiest to modify and see your results.

Here we go:

• Enter the scripts directory
  
• Create a file called test.lua
  
• Edit manifest.txt, adding test.lua on its own line at the end
  
• Write whatever lua code you want into test.lua
  
• Run Thrive in a command-line (you'll have to google a bit for this, I don't know Windows command-line)
  
• test.lua will run after all the other scripts have been loaded (they are loaded following the order in the manifest)
  
• The output of your test code will appear in the command-line window.
  

If you create functions in test.lua, you can use the console in-game to run them -- again, I think the output will appear in the command-line, but something might appear in the console too, I'm not entirely sure, despite having been the one to implement the console

More notes:

• Each file loaded in the manifest can access the variables and functions created in files loaded before it -- this is why we put important utility files like util.lua early in the manifest list, so code that needs those useful functions will have access to them.
  
• If you want one file to run before another, just change the order in which they appear in the manifest.
  
• Note that not all the lines in the manifest are filenames -- four of them are folder names. Easily enough, the folders are loaded in order, and they have their own manifests to control the load order of files/folders within.
  
• One of those folders is commented out // because that folder has been removed from the game (it was some prototype I think), so you now know how to make comments in manifest files too!
  

Quote :

Run Thrive in a command-line (you'll have to google a bit for this, I don't know Windows command-line)

You won't need to run it from the command line It will open a cmd regardless!

There is also sites like: http://www.lua.org/cgi-bin/demo where you can type in lua code and have it output stuff! (you will generally make stuff output using print("my text") )