Quote:
Originally Posted by nosoop
I think part of the struggle is that SourceMod doesn't exist in a vacuum; anything you do to the game may produce additional side effects that you weren't aware of, or may be ignored. GLua is different in that Garry's Mod is built around tooling to allow people to create things; SourceMod is bolted on to a black box and there's very relatively little functionality on hand to inspect the game state unless you get into disassembling the game itself.
The compiler thing is indeed a pain point - I'd love to see more user-friendly error messages, especially with the infamous "function prototypes do not match", but there's so few people familiar with the compiler to know what to change to make it all happen. I'm not sure of the state it's in now, but I think it's worth opening a discussion for.
The introductory stuff on the wiki has a lot of good information, but it does take time to get to the meat of things. Silvers's guide, while comprehensive, is very much an collage of information without any direction. I've been working on my own opinionated guide on and off for that reason, and I've contributed the latter half of the Frequently Asked Questions section on this page.
As far as learning goes, the only thing I can really suggest is look at others' sources; and compile early, compile often. The former to get an understanding of usage, the latter to catch issues as they happen instead of getting bitten by something that you already stopped focusing on.
(Also, get used to refining your searches - while ideally you get what you're looking for, you should be getting zero results over completely unrelated things.)
All this information is annoyingly scattered all over the place, for sure. |
Both AlliedModders and SourceMod need
serious work done if this is all true.
How can you have something this great going since
2004, and the documentation and tools are
still trash in
2023? That's just bizarre and completely pointless (unless the devs are purposefully trying to mess with beginners, which is doubtful).
And no, I've pretty much lost all hope in Google by this point. It's just plain unreliable. And YouTube isn't any better since it's been bought and run by Google since late 2006.
I haven't tried other search engines much, but I don't have any hope in them either (I have tried Bing for one search, it seems to be just as bad as Google).
NOTE: I'm about to go off on a rant about Google being absolute trash.
I don't even know how to refine my searches anymore. I can reword my searches over a hundred times, and it still doesn't understand (or completely ignores) what I search.
And, a previous example, if I search for something
for Left 4 Dead (L4D, L4D1, 2008, etc.), it
still thinks I'm talking about the sequel. And whenever it stops giving results for Left 4 Dead 2, it gives me things that are just so incredibly unrelated, that it almost looks like it's
trying to give me incorrect results.
Take this page as an example:
https://wiki.alliedmods.net/Left_4_dead_2_events
I searched "l4d1 hook events", and
that was the only page that came up for it.
Not only that, but
every single other result was either for Left 4 Dead
2, or
completely unrelated to the Left 4 Dead series whatsoever.
This page:
https://wiki.alliedmods.net/Left_4_dead_events
The
correct page
was the very last result, and I had to click the link to
include omitted results that were supposedly very similar to the ones already shown. And, I had to click "show more results" dozens of times.
Google is fundamentally broken, and it has been for years.
Still don't believe me? Take a look for yourself:
https://www.google.com/search?q=l4d1...6&bih=617#ip=1
Oh and guess what, I tested that in Google Chrome after using Firefox!
Three of the results were, and I kid you not,
were either literal porn pages or disguising as porn pages. And I know one was
real because it was
Pornhub. It thinks that I want
porn over
game events that I can hook in code. I don't even know how those are related!
The correct page was absolutely
buried under Left 4 Dead 2, Craigslist, Wii, spouses, homicide, Splatoon, Apex Legends, Pokemon, Back 4 Blood, Dying Light, horror mystery novels, pages in other languages, Poptropica, The Walking Dead, Team Fortress 2, Dead by Daylight, the Blizzard game company, shootings, and many more pages, lots of which not even being AlliedModders.
If you can even begin explaining how any of that (and the other results) comes anywhere close to my original search, you should be a trillionaire for that alone. And fixing it? Every government in existence should be pouring money into your pockets 24/7; Unlimited money.
You would be considered the smartest person on the planet, and you would be winning thousands, if not millions of rewards.
You could buy yourself a chocolate bar with that kind of money. Maybe with nuts.
Sorry if this comes off as rude. I just hate Google, and I need to get a point across somehow that Google just doesn't work.