FC_CPP: C++ Fundamentals Starting Up

[orcmid]

The best category I could find for this is Unity Courses, although technically Unreal is with C++. Maybe there needs to be a different category.

I have run into some things starting with the first lecture having to do with beginner’s mind and tacit knowledge. Some of these observations are sort of irrelevant but maybe of historical interest.

Three beginner things,

1. Lesson 1 does a flyby introduction of the URL for raylib. When I got there I was fascinated (omg, BGI!). Definitely recommended that students visit rayib and view the examples.
2. The Lesson 1 resource is a link to GameDev.tv community right here in FC_CPP. There was nothing here and I am being brave about that. I might be even more brash and create another thread. There were some glitches getting this far into the Community Forums.
3. I feared (partly because some lines were cut off in my browser window) that students would have to swallow Visual Studio. I am grateful that it is Visual Studio Code and we are starting out with command-line developing. I also see that the initial code is basically in Clean C and technically we’re doing C/C++. And it appears that raylib sticks to C99. We’ll see.

[Tuomo_T]

Hello Orcmid, and welcome to the course!

The best place to be posting for the course would be in the “Other” category since this course doesn’t 100% fit into either Unity or Unreal (and even then, Unity would be the furthest in similarity due to C++, as you have observed).

I’m glad you’re finding your way to our community forums and are liking raylib so far, and I hope your learning journey continues to be good one.

[orcmid]

@Tuomo_T Thanks, I also see tag cpp-fundamentals.

I came to this FC_CPP thread from the lesson 1 Resources (label 1_fc_cpp). It seems that lesson 2 goes to a different label (1b_fc_cpp) and my initial theory is that there might be a different label for each lesson. Looking at the raylib install, I am a bit concerned about in whose eyes this is simple. Figuring out how to work with the gamedev.tv community forum is also a challenge.

I will pitch in where I can.

[Tuomo_T]

Your observation is correct that while there is a tag for the course, there is also separate tags for each lecture. It helps us to know which lecture a student is posting a question for in a particular course.

Could you provide a little more detail on your concerns for RayLib installation and the challenges you’ve had with the community forum? I can pass them on to team.

[orcmid]

@Tuomo_T Concerning the Community Forum, I did not at first distinguish between categories and tags and what the customary treatment was. I didn’t realize the list of categories was much longer than the few that I saw in the pull-down. I then learned to scroll farther down when you mentioned the “other” categories.

There are other matters. I probably should look for some help here that may be part of the community forum. I got here by using the links given as resources in the lessons, so I attempted to do what I could. Since this tag had not been used yet, I was even more on my own (and now I see how emoticons are included).

One thing I wonder about. I don’t know whether there is a quote-reply option. So mostly I am using @ names as a clue to who I might be responding to. So I am winging it. And trying things that work in other forums, or where markdown is accepted, or like Discord, whatever.

I past Coursera courses, there was a bit more of an on-ramp for student use of discussion forums. Something to assist beginners. I see from the Lecture 2 posts, we have people that are beyond beginner offering easy-for-them remedies .

[Tuomo_T]

@orcmid

One thing I wonder about. I don’t know whether there is a quote-reply option. So mostly I am using @ names as a clue to who I might be responding to. So I am winging it. And trying things that work in other forums, or where markdown is accepted, or like Discord, whatever.

Well, I can help you with that one! When you reply to a post in a thread, there’s a little chat-bubble icon you can click to have the post you’re replying to added as a quote.

@orcmid

I past Coursera courses, there was a bit more of an on-ramp for student use of discussion forums. Something to assist beginners. I see from the Lecture 2 posts, we have people that are beyond beginner offering easy-for-them remedies .

This is mostly why I am here now, I’m going to be the TA for this course. My hope is to be able to provide beginner-friendly solutions for students.

[orcmid]

@Tuomo_T It took me a while to realize that raylib is a bundle and installing it first made sense. It is clear now that the Notepad++ is set up to provide tutorials and other things (on Windows at least). I understand that raylib installs are created this way but it leaves more mystery meat. For example, exactly what/where is the compiler that is going to be used under MingW. And how do builds get whatever library that has the implementations behind the prototypes in raylib.h etc.

I know I am relying on knowledge I already have of this kind of programming, and it is premature for the lessons to get into that (so far). But I would have expected to be able to find out that kind of thing, especially if an exercise from VSCode fails to find things, like InitWindow .

I see more, now, on how raylib is set up to obscure things, although relying on CMake under the covers, if that is what is happening, is not exactly simple. There are some pretty leaky abstractions here in attempting to keep things simple.

I don’t have an answer for this. I think progressive disclosure is appropriate. I wonder about over-simplifying when expecting a beginner to comprehend something with more than 3 steps at once.

Maybe more discussion will be appropriate under different tags.