A Course in WEIDU

[Melmoth]

Hi DavidW! And thank you for your work!

I would to ask permission to translate your guide to Spanish.

[DavidW]

Belatedly: sure, but please find some way to explicitly note the version (date is fine, for instance) so people can tell if the translation falls behind the original.

[Luke]

On 6/7/2022 at 5:09 PM, argent77 said:

Another peculiarity involves the end-of-line character $. The symbol matches only Unix-style line breaks. To include support for the (more common) Windows-style line breaks, you have to add %MNL% as an optional match (e.g. "Minsc%MNL%?$").

Just to clarify: you meant %WNL%?$ instead of %MNL%?$, right...?

[jmerry]

It would technically work either way, as %WNL% (Windows) is %MNL% (old Mac OS) concatenated with %LNL% (Unix-based systems, including Linux and modern Mac OS)

[Luke]

3 hours ago, jmerry said:

It would technically work either way, as %WNL% (Windows) is %MNL% (old Mac OS) concatenated with %LNL% (Unix-based systems, including Linux and modern Mac OS)

Yeah, me dumb, you're right...

[CamDawg]

Yeah, I know I should stop using my redundant [%LNL%%MNL%%WNL%]+ checks, but it's an ingrained habit at this point.

[DavidW]

I've just updated this course to version 1.1. Changelog:

• Moved to HTML.
• New chapter on advanced techniques (immutability, encapsulation, optmization).
• New section on error handling.
• New section on mod component structure.
• New section on the APPEND function.
• Variable section discusses scope.
• Function section discusses macros.
• New appendix that explains what's where in the official WEIDU readme.

Link here.

[AL|EN]

The link to the appendix has a typo: the uppercase A should be lowercase: 

https://gibberlings3.github.io/Documentation/readmes/weiducourse/weiducourse_a.html

 

[Luke]

Please do not hate me, but technically speaking, the macro set_spell_vars should look like this:

Spoiler

DEFINE_ACTION_MACRO set_spell_vars
BEGIN
	LOCAL_SPRINT spell_name ""
	LOCAL_SPRINT spell_res ""
	LOCAL_SPRINT SOURCE_DIRECTORY ""
	LOCAL_SPRINT SOURCE_FILESPEC ""
	LOCAL_SPRINT SOURCE_FILE ""
	LOCAL_SPRINT SOURCE_RES ""
	LOCAL_SPRINT SOURCE_EXT ""
	LOCAL_SET SOURCE_SIZE = 0
	LOCAL_SPRINT DEST_DIRECTORY ""
	LOCAL_SPRINT DEST_FILESPEC ""
	LOCAL_SPRINT DEST_FILE ""
	LOCAL_SPRINT DEST_RES ""
	LOCAL_SPRINT DEST_EXT ""
	//
	COPY_EXISTING_REGEXP - "sp\(in\|cl\|pr\|wi\)[0-9][0-9][0-9]\.spl" nowhere
		SPRINT spell_res "%SOURCE_RES%"
		TO_UPPER spell_res
		LPF NAME_NUM_OF_SPELL_RES STR_VAR spell_res RET spell_name END
		SPRINT "%spell_name%" "%spell_res%"
END

 

I mean, in 99% of cases that's probably overkill, but just to be precise...

[DavidW]

If you are checking those variables in contexts in which they were not properly set you have only yourself to blame.

 

[DavidW]

2 hours ago, AL|EN said:

The link to the appendix has a typo: the uppercase A should be lowercase: 

https://gibberlings3.github.io/Documentation/readmes/weiducourse/weiducourse_a.html

 

So, annoyingly I caught that and uploaded a new version 2 minutes later, but it doesn't seem to have been picked up by the system.

[Incrementis]

I have now completed Chapter 2 and the information so far is extensive.

I will use this in combination with the WeiDU documentation (but not always because sometimes I just like to experiment) as this course is much easier to understand and contains lots of code examples.

In my personal opinion, this course feels like reading a well-written book on programming.

The only "downside" I see is that (new) mod developers who have no experience in programming will have a hard time understanding it.

On the other hand, determined (new) mod developers with no programming experience will have manageable material to learn from, which is not a given when it comes to modding IE games, as far as I can tell.

Thank you for your work! I'm very glad you wrote it.

[DavidW]

14 hours ago, Incrementis said:

I have now completed Chapter 2 and the information so far is extensive.

I will use this in combination with the WeiDU documentation (but not always because sometimes I just like to experiment) as this course is much easier to understand and contains lots of code examples.

In my personal opinion, this course feels like reading a well-written book on programming.

Thanks! That's high praise.

14 hours ago, Incrementis said:

The only "downside" I see is that (new) mod developers who have no experience in programming will have a hard time understanding it.

I'm hoping that chapter 1 is basically intelligible to new modders without programming experience. Beyond that, I think there's a limited amount I can do - WEIDU is a programming language, ultimately, and systematically teaching people to program is beyond me. The hope is that chapters 2 and on are useful to people who have a bit of programming experience but want to learn WEIDU in particular.