T w e n t y S i d e d
As I alluded to last Friday, I’ve been dabbling with the idea of expanding (modernizing) my programming knowledge and learning some Unity. I’ve been stuck in my old habits for a long time now. I’ve always been caught in this Catch-22 where I don’t want to stop working on an existing project to learn something radical and new, because doing so would bring the project to a halt. But if I’m not working on a project then I don’t have any immediate use for the New Thing. I’m either too busy or I don’t need it.
But for whatever reason, now feels like a good time to take a crack at it. To this end I’ve been watching Unity tutorials. This is both fascinating and maddening.
I have decades of coding experience, but I’m new to both Unity and C#. I’m a C++ programmer. C# and C++ are very similar, but not so similar that I can just jump in and begin writing useful C# code without educating myself first. The problem is that aren’t really any tutorials out there for me. Everything is either high-level stuff that assumes a deep knowledge of both C# and Unity, or (I am not joking here) it teaches you how to make some rudimentary “game” without needing to write a single line of code.
The latter actually kind of pisses me off. I get that this is part of the allure of Unity for most people, but for me it’s like I took a class with a master carpenter in hopes of learning woodworking, and instead he spent the entire class showing us how to assemble IKEA furniture. This wouldn’t be so bad if I was just scanning a text document, but it’s pretty annoying to sit through fifteen minutes of rambling video waiting for them to get through this introduction crap and to the main part of the video, only to realize that this click-and-drag stuff IS the main part of the video and I’ve just wasted my time again.
For couple of days in a row I’ve opened up Unity to an empty project with the silly notion that I was going to begin making some small thing. But then two hours later I was still scanning through video tutorials looking for answers and I hadn’t typed a single line of code.
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Learning C# – Sort Of”
