Sunday, 04 April 2004, 12:21:29 EDT

All this weekend I have been doing nothing but learning Unreal Script so that I can work on a modification for Unreal Tournament 2004. I have found it to be quite frustrating because there is a severe lack of proper documentation. Yes, there this but it is not navigable in any quick and easy manner. Yes, the #unrealscript channel on irc.gamesurge.net has been tremendously helpful. But that is no substitute for good documentation written by the authors of the damn language. When I first started watching the tutorials about unreal script on the second DVD that came with the game I thought they were going to be helpful. I was wrong, oh so very wrong. They are just about useless. The start out talking about object oriented programming and how it works and then move on to the language operators, control statements, and how to write and work with functions. They spent at least two hours on all of that and I learned one, one, helpful thing - iterators specific to unreal script and the unreal engine. Whooptie-doo! As I put it to Will, learning a programming language without proper documentation is like trying to find the right hole blind folded; sure, you eventually get it but there is a lot of fumbling and cursing until you do. If I had acces to the documentation here I would have already finished what I have been working on all this weekend and started on something else. But, I don't have a spare $250,000.00 to pay for a license. Why they couldn't write separate, toned down, documentation for the mod community is beyond me.

Now to go fix my car. At least the struts came with documentation.

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