Path: chuka.playstation.co.uk!news From: "Jon Prestidge (Moose)" Newsgroups: scee.yaroze.freetalk.english Subject: Re: Net Yaroze Date: Tue, 28 Mar 2000 20:40:46 +0100 Organization: PlayStation Net Yaroze (SCEE) Lines: 54 Message-ID: <8br1uq$imc2@chuka.playstation.co.uk> References: <8boudp$fon3@chuka.playstation.co.uk> NNTP-Posting-Host: host213-1-95-48.btinternet.com X-Priority: 3 X-MSMail-Priority: Normal X-Newsreader: Microsoft Outlook Express 5.00.2014.211 X-MimeOLE: Produced By Microsoft MimeOLE V5.00.2014.211 Despite what I'm going to say I think the Yaroze has been a great thing and I'm glad that Sony produced it... good on `em! And I hope, upon hope, that they bring out a Yaroze II... it would really save my bacon if they did, because all avenues for getting Yaroze projects into the public arena (cover discs, competitions etc) seem to have fallen by the way-side and I still have not finished my project I started back in April 1997! Anyway, here follows some of my complaints:- ""Today I am mostly complaining about the Yaroze documentation""... for example the specification for all the TMD primitives were supplied separately on the web site .. and it wasn't easy to find them. "Well at least they would be easily updated if they had any mistakes", you might think -- good centiment, but they never were updated dispite glaring errors like the inclusion of the Line TMD primitive which wasn't even supported. And some combinations of flags didn't work... everyone was just expected to find-out what worked and what didn't by trying them... the thing is that if you're just learning a new system, how do you know if what you've done doesn't work because the TMD format is not supported or because your code has a bug?! Fortunately people shared a lot of info on the news groups about what they had concluded was not supported. Another thing with the docs was that some of the most most basic of information wasn't in them -- like a diagram of the showing the axes of the coordinate system for example. I'm sure it could be argued that all co-ordinate systems of games consoles are oganized the same way so it wasn't thought unnecessary to include it... but how are we supposed to know -- the Yaroze was designed for programmers who wanted to get into games writing (and thus typically would not have written on a games console before). I first assumed that Y increased as it went upwards, and it was a few painful months before I deduced that Y increased as it went downwards... contrary to the CAD systems I programed I at work. Easily deduced you might think .. but not if you've inverted the view point to compensate like I had! (oh how embarasing! and I made other similar rudimetary mistakes due to lack of docs). The docs didn't read very well (especially the first release) because (I assume) they had been translated from Japanese by someone who wasn't a programmer, or who didn't liaise with a programmer. As Aaron says, many people must have spent the fist couple of months just trying to get a single TMD to appear on the screen, I think that is mostly due to poor docs. Although I had not worked on a games console before, I had been a programmer for a decade and I've worked on various computer systems and I had never had so many problems due to documentation. It could be argued that those other systems I used were all proper professional systems and not a systems for learning a new field of programming..... but if you learning a new field of programming you need better docs, not worse docs! Jon Prestidge