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Comment by orf | Hacker News Reader

This kind of thing changes lives. I used to play a lot of counter strike source. One day I found a server mod called EventScripts, and suddenly I could make all kinds of crazy game modes on Python. I found I picked up this programming thing pretty naturally, and without that mod I doubt I would have even dabbled.

The feedback loop is phenomenal and is something you simply do not get with other forms of learning. I really can't think of a better method and I'm so excited the younger generation will be exposed to this.

Kudos Microsoft, I only wish it was done a bit quicker.

Edit: For anyone interested some tutorials are archived here: https://web.archive.org/web/20140810191103/http://python.eve.... Good times :)

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This will show my (lack of age). I organically taught myself digital logic as Minecraft slowly added redstone and its features. When it came time to pick a major computer engineering was an obvious choice and I never looked back! Minecraft will always have a special place in my heart for this reason.

Minecraft is pretty much a technical phenomenon. It's a decade old, it's not fancy, but even now people are still playing it and modding it and taking the game to wherever their imagination will go. It's become part of many people's childhoods and even my closest friends, approaching their 30s, are still heavily invested in building their world in there, using various mods to basically recreate Civ and build out each stage of evolution.

You couldn't create such an inspirational game, or even an accidental ecosystem, by actually planning for it.

And a very good example that people should care foremost in doing a game that others want to play, instead of doing language flame wars about which one is better to write games on.

Absolutely. The easily obvious purpose really means a lot (I want to make this Spleef arena automatically regenerate with Cobblestone [as quickly as possible] when X happens) to me.

Besides Redstone Minecraft also got me into Java (both by writing mods and something [Forge Mod Loader?] requiring recompilation of the jar), Lua through ComputerCraft and Sysadmining with Bukkit and PermissionsEx.

Of course it didn't only lay the foundation for my current, largely useful technical knowledge, but through playing on servers and participating in the administration (at 12) learned a lot of social skills I probably would've taken way longer to acquire otherwise.

Yeah, I like that this game exists.

Way back there used to be Metamod (which IIRC circumvented some limitation of the Half-Life engine regarding how it loaded DLLs into the game), and then AMX Mod layered on top of that, which was later replaced by AMX Mod X. This in turn used a little programming language called "Pawn". You could then write mods in Pawn, compile that to bytecode and dynamically load it into the game server. Later there was Sourcepawn. These enabled a lot of complex mods, and required relatively little knowledge about the messy details of the engines, however it was still relatively involved. First you had to setup the various base mods to get it to work, then you needed to compile your mods, restart the game server for most changes etc.

I remember SourcePawn! It was a bit too hardcore for me at the time. If I remember correctly it used a thing called 'sigscanning'[1] to find the address of private functions. I think it would have a list of patterns and then scan the binary w/ pattern matching to find the address.

Hacky as hell but you could do some neat stuff with it like respawning players and adjusting all kinds of 'untouchable' attributes.

1. https://wiki.alliedmods.net/Signature_Scanning

sigscans are how nearly all third-party modding APIs work. It's a lot better to hardcode what behavior you're trying to find than hardcoring binary offsets, and then having to update them manually once the program updates.

Fun fact, the creator of pawn / sourcemod was one of the guy working on the JIT compiler of spidermonkey (js engine) @ Mozilla : https://www.bailopan.net

Lots of people that started out in game modding end up doing some really cool stuff in other software fields too. The skill and motivation are transferable, I suppose.

Wow what a nostalgia hit.

I remember coding with it, to manage fixtures between teams. I looked it up and found a source on my hard drive, last modified 04/10/2001 apparently.

https://gist.github.com/conradfr/a20e9c9598b7b65ad94b8a8605f...

> The feedback loop is phenomenal and is something you simply do not get with other forms of learning.

Coming off of a BA in the Humanities and studying programming for economic necessity (i.e. getting skills that would help me get a job), this is what hooked me. It felt refreshing to enter a world where my creation worked or didn’t (runtime bugs aside) and I knew it right away.

This isn’t to degrade my Humanities studies. I’ve gotten a lot of value out of them, too.

Funny to see someone linking to one of my tutorials :) I'd completely forgotten I wrote all of those!

Thank you for making them, and your support back then.

I still have my eventscripts release T shirt somewhere :)

Blast from the past. I have a similar story; Eventscripts was how I learned python! was a lot of fun playing with code that you could see take action in game.

I feel the same way. I am so excited about this. I hope it is not too late though. Seems as though a lot of the popular around Minecraft has faded a bit.

I was surprised to learn that it's actually the opposite: Minecraft recently reached a new peak with over 90 million active players.

https://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2018-10-02-minecraft-...

Wow! Good to know. Thanks for sharing this!

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