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Just curious after reading comments on yet another programming language for non-programmers. It occurred to me that video game scripting is one of those cases in which non-programmers have the incentive to write some code.

I am not an OXP author - which is probably a good thing!

Meanwhile, a musical interlude.

Back in the day I learned a bit of BASIC at college where we had a terminal linked to a Honeywell mainframe which I believe was in Manchester or somewhere. This was in the mid-seventies. More recently I've done a fair bit of HTML and CSS (is that coding?) but my JS has been picked up from OXP-ing.

<grins> Back in the day, I never got to college, so I taught myself some Fortran. Come the eighties, I got into COBOL - and thence into a bottle. <sighs wistfully>

this is back in like 1975 in grade 8 which is first year of high school in Australia. we learnt a language which i cant remember the name but was very much like basic. I was in a small town 80 Km south of Brisbane. we had to mark cards with a pencil. 1 card per line of code. The school had to post in our stacks of cards to a Brisbane school that had the "computer". It would come back with a print out of what the program did...
Fast forward to University 1979 and i learnt FORTRAN ( was trying to do an electrical engineering degree)
In 1982 i got a job as a CNC programmer on a LASER cutting machine in a sheet metal factory. so i learnt G code..
around 1985 i got a job with a small electronics company and after a while i had to learn Z80 machine code to help program the machine tool controllers we made.
this job got me back into formal education with night school doing and electronics/computer course. here we did some x86 programming in assembly.
many years later a friend and i taught ourselves ( badly) turbo pascal 4. we were trying to write a lotto program/database thing... not sure it ever got finished..

now? can barely do more than a 3 line for loop in basic...lol

No experience at all, I started tinkering with plists after playing oolite for a few months then moved on to modifying scripts. I have had some great help from members of this forum to create the oxps I've released and most of the scripts are just modified versions of others code.

It all started with C64 and basic... I'm a maths and computer science teacher, so yes I can code in various languages and teach others to do it too. I'm not a programmer by profession though.

I'm definately not a programmer so i picked the graphics/audio option, but playing about in Oolite with shaders and things really helped me cobble together a powershell script for work that saves loads of time adding users ( and probably the occasional Thargoid ) into our email system

spud42 wrote:

grade 8 which is first year of high school in Australia.

Well, in Queensland, anyway. NSW, Victoria and ACT all start high school in grade/year 7 (not sure about the other states).

I fell in love with computers and programming in year 7/8, on Apple ]['s and CPM machines. I also had a C64 which I constantly bashed away at, trying to write a game that would actually play fast enough to be enjoyable. C64 Basic wasn't really up for the challenge, though. When I finished school I managed to find a "Trainee Operator" position at the local Council, which morphed into a PC Suport Specialist. After doing some contract programming on the side in VB3/4/5/6 I managed to land a full-time programming job in around '97. I've since moved on to VB.NET, C#, ASP, and Javascript (although I only do a small amount of this for work).

Started on an Acorn Electron learning some Basic in the 80's. After that not much. So I too chose graphics/music option. Although I've learned some HTML and CSS but that probably does not count. I can read and alter some plists and I can update the script of some of my own OXP's (Famous Planets) (read: insert new planet descriptions) but I cannot program or come up with new code from scratch. If I could then I probably first want to make an update of the Life in the Frontier OXP. .

Today I have made more music for stations in BGS. And my contribution is mostly on the ambience side of the game. Although I am (luckily) a small part of this excellent community.

phkb wrote:

spud42 wrote:

grade 8 which is first year of high school in Australia.

Well, in Queensland, anyway. NSW, Victoria and ACT all start high school in grade/year 7 (not sure about the other states).

true, but they changed it last year i think.... now our grade 7 is part of high school too....

after a year of bashing out the Laser cutters code on a teletype punch tape machine we got an Apple IIe... the boss paid a couple of engineering students from QIT to write a program to interface with the teletype terminal so we could code into a text file ,send it to the teletype terminal and get the punched tape the Laser cutter needed...it all seems so primitave now but it was so cool and new at the time i.e. 1983.

pagroove wrote:

Today I have made more music for stations in BGS. And my contribution is mostly on the ambience side of the game. Although I am (luckily) a small part of this excellent community.

Sir. It's easy to find programmers willing to make a game. But graphics/audio artists... I believe they are the most valuable for an open source project. No school can teach how to do these things right.

I'm not a programmer. I've learned what little I know by trial and (considerable) error. I should also give credit to those here who have offered help and advice, as well as all those who have written oxps the working of which I could attempt to fathom.

It's a stretch to call myself an "OXP author", having sort-of half-made one unfinished OXP with much assistance. I did contribute big chunks of words, and some ideas about how they could be combined, to  Random Ship Names, though, and having a dim understanding of BASIC (courtesy of a ZX81 and a ZX Spectrum) was probably helpful in understanding the sorts of things a simple program can be reasonably expected to do. If I stare at a plist until my forehead bleeds I can usually work out which bits do what, and, if forced, might be able to cut, paste and mangle other people's code into doing something slightly different but essentially the same … but asking me to write code from scratch is a non-starter.

I wouldn't really call me an OXP programmer, but I'm a programmer in real life. I started with BASIC on the C-64, and later I did a little 6502 assembler too. In school, I learned Pascal (on an Apple IIe). My first "serious" programming as an intern and as a side job during my computer science studies was done in Modula-2. During my studies 1989 to 1993, I of course learned c (among some other languages I didn't consider very useful at the time, e.g. COBOL and LISP). But I never earned any money by programming in c. During my first job, I took over a database software project done in VBA, closing the loop to C-64 BASIC, and basically (no pun intended!) that's what I'm still doing today. The only other language I use in my job is PHP, and my first serious contact with JavaScript was Oolite.