Slick Forums

It's a provoking topic this, so be aware of that

If you follow Slick community from some time like me, you can see a lot of movements. Many people asking how to develop a game, how to fix a collision problem, how to deploy a webstart (it's all the same old questions). Forum Search seems to be forgotten by newbie and wiki a strange word.

As community member, I've developed in years some games with Slick (Jpacman, Cute Tower Defense, You Can't Win, Pong, Escape from colors, Fuzzy and Catch the cat ) and as first objective is always the same: get things done.

To do this, I've developed a little library MarteEngine and someone find it useful: this is great, because so many newbie are solving the same old problems (not in order, of cours):
- collisions,
- camera,
- code organization,
- distribution,

So after years it's clear that Slick is not a library for newbie: you have a lot of things to master and some big problems (code organization and collisions) are note solved by library itself, but you have to (you have to do, not you could do) solve before have a game.

Note: this is not a Marteengine advertising, I'm talking about Slick library itself.

I want to propose a community effort to solve this problems, adding to Slick a library (slick-common, I don't care too much about this problem) to solve this common problems, with some little class.
And again, adding a link here on the forum to wiki, because wiki is great!

Plus: using common slick and slick, build some little games (pong, platformer, top down zombie survival, anything you want), put code on github and have fun on forking/propose idea on games.

what do you think about this?

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I always thought of Slick as an library holding some resources for game dev. What you do with them is up to you. But Slick is also a kinda hybrid, givinig you stuff like GameContainer or ParticleSystems. Well I guess Kev just wanted to have something to work with to. And he also thought :"Why not share this?" You do the same with the MarteEngine

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yes but I can see on forum many newbie asking same questions.. how we can help them ?

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I think there need to be special, detailed tutorials for getting started with Slick. I've even considered making them myself if I knew how to post them anywhere but the forum. They need to be posted on the main Slick site, not the Wiki. The tutorials have to have pictures as well, not just text.

1) A tutorial for how to set up Slick with NetBeans. A tutorial for how to set up Slick with Eclipse.
2) A tutorial to teach StateBasedGame. I liked the SlickBlocks tutorial for this.
3) A tutorial for the different ways to distribute your game (as a .jar, as a .exe, different settings you can have for a .exe, how to change the location of your natives, etc) using NetBeans, Eclipse, JarSplice, and Launch4j.

If I had to identify the weakest spot in the current tutorials: finding them is really hard from the slick.cokeandcode.com website. The second-weakest spot would be the lack of detail in a lot of them.

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I completely agree with cmasupra.

But another thing I noticed the first times using slick, is that some of the tutorials on the wiki (such as slick blocks), go beyond the main topic of the tutorial itself. I mean, I found the slick blocks tutorial really great, but too long for what I wanted to learn (StateBasedGame). Maybe it's just me, but I like the feeling of learning something without writing thousands of lines of code. For example, I found the entity-component system tutorial more straight forward and easy to follow, because it focused only on the main topic. Of course slick blocks would be great for a tutorial on how to organize and realize a complete game, for example, and these kind of tutorials would help a lot people who are trying to make their own games (like me ).

I think we should find the important topics about programming a videogame, and about slick itself (e.g. drawing a simple image and moving it, using StateBasedGame, managing the input (keyboard, mouse and controllers), and so on) and make a little tutorial about them. It would guarantee a gradual learning process that, in a short time, would help newbies a lot. Also video tutorials would be cool (maybe only for some topics such as setting up slick in netbeans/eclipse, which are better to watch than to read).

Finally someone
So the problem are tutorials? We can open a poll and ask for "most wanted tutorial" from this list:
- setup in netbeans
- setup in eclipse
- distribuite with window, linux, macOS
- put an image on screen
- move an image using keys, mouse, controller
- statebased games

other ideas?

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The two points you mentioned from MarteEngine:
- collisions
- camera

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Tutorials about the main tools available: tiled maps support (I liked the platform one on the wiki, but it's incomplete), TWL, Artemis entity system, and others

- collisions: how? there are a lot of ideas, need something more specific,
- camera: just following an "entity"?
- tiledmap: incomplete how? what do you need more?
- twl: for do what? just hello world?
- artemis? again do to what?

must be more complete in our wish list

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Ok, your right, I'll try to explain what I was thinking

- tiled map: not incomplete because of the contents (it's really complete and well written from that point of view), but because of the explanations; in the 3rd part it says: "wip: here i'll explain the code we used in previous article.", but there's no explanation in fact.

- twl: I didn't start using twl yet, but I think it is for creating UIs (e.g. menus, etc), so basically I was thinking about making a tutorial on basic stuff (main classes/methods of this part of slick), just to have an idea of how to set up a basic menu for a game.

-artemis: in this case I think it would be cool to create for example an asteroids clone (or something else, but keeping it simple) through which we could explain the main steps on how to set up a game using this little but powerful framework. It should cover topics such as the main idea behind entity frameworks (advantages/disadvantages) and how artemis implemnets it (what is an entity, what is a component, what is a system and how it works, which system's methods are mainly used to manage entities and their interactions (e.g. collisions), what are component mappers and why they are useful). I know that some of this topics can be found around the web, but I think that putting together something complete would give a more clear idea of the topic.

Also, I was thinking that making tutorials also downloadable as pdfs would be nice, so that one can have a sort of "collection" of tutorials to get started with the main tools.

Yes!
Collision: I think the most used collision is for platformer and RPG like games. They simply want to stop the char., befor he go through a wall.
The most common way I see here is:

if(moveLeft)
player.x -= 1
if(collision)
player.x += 1

It is really simple and short, but to get there is a long way of trys, if you never done something like this befor.
In addition a way to know where the collision happen (left/ right..) is nice to have knowledge. (->Headshoot? and sowhat)

Camera: Yes, following the entinity and maybe something like a cutscene where the cam. follow a path.

I would love too make tutorials but my english is horrible. The other way were i make maybe some german tutorials.

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One question: tutorial with slick or something else?
For example basic collision are handled with MarteEngine, but add different concepts: Entity, Worlds.. all explained in ME wikis.. what I mean is: what tutorial for slick itself?

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I think the most should be explained in Slick only.
A lot of people want their own implementation of game mechanics,
but in some way need a hint how to start with it, so a tutorial about this.
(My opinion )

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can someone help me in define a poll for this stuff?

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I absolutely agree with you. This was also something Kevin Glass (the original developer) thought about: http://slick.javaunlimited.net/viewtopic.php?p=25496#p25496

Something like slick-common.jar should contain the stuff that isn't needed to make a basic game, but can be of great help, like TiledMap(Plus) and A* Pathfinding (this also shows that Slick always was and is a hybrid library; not just a very basic game library).
If there are good, abstract and reusable ways of doing stuff like collision, camera and the like they should also be contained.


Do you mean making a poll if there should be something like a slick-common.jar or about the tutorials?