Hey guys,
I’ve been thinking. Why is the list behavior so useful? Why is everyone praising it? Why does Code Alpaca love them so much?
It must be important.
… But what the heck does the behavior even do?? What uses does it have?
I need to know the answer to these questions, I need to learn how to use it. Can someone teach me?
-Ember.Y
CodeAlpaca explains it here. I even have it bookmarked since I’m still learning of them myself.
So Lists are very broad in what they can do, I love them so much do to the flexibility that it offers when coding things. And besides that, when I work with them everything just feels right. I never worry about what I code with them, I have full trust in my abilities with it and what it can do. I’m by no means the best game developer here, adding juice and game essences is something that is hard to nail, but with pure coding like lists, I never have to slowly tweak values and constantly playtest. If I do it right (and I usually do) every piece of the puzzle just works perfectly and is one of the most satisfying things.
They can do anything ranging from Dialogue, Card games, Save systems, character stats, tile maps, JR’s Camera+, etc. Nearly an endless List of things (haha, I’m so funny)
It’s very hard to explain everything about it, and something I wish I included in the example Maniac provided is practical examples.
I mostly just talked about how the behaviors worked, but not how implement it into actual games.
So in short, I can explain how to use them, but it works best with a practical case.
Imagine I had the text “The Sky Is Blue”
And I want it to be “Blue Is Sky The”
How would I do that? Well it’s just text, so you would think a List wouldn’t be needed, but it’s actually required for a problem like this.
It’s better if you try to work out how you would solve something like this, and then I explain what I would do different, and my thought process behind why I did it differently.
Literally only a few dozen (if even that) know how to use it and like 6 other users besides me to a really high technical degree.
It’s actually not that hard to learn, I started using it after 3 months with Flowlab, and literally just from me experimenting with it I became one of only a few dozen because no one really bothered to learn one the most useful behaviors.
Best advice is make something that requires it. In Alpaca Raceway I needed a save system for the track, so I used Lists. And even though I cringe horribly at the code now, at the time it was by default one of the most complex things done with Lists by default because know one really works with it. I didn’t ask for help, I just did it. I think it’s best to experiment first, reach a roadblock, try by yourself for a few days, and if you’re still stuck then ask for help.
Someone explaining something can teach you, but it won’t give you the deep understanding that learning it yourself can give you.
Oh, never mind. That’s what it’s for… hmm…
Wydm? I just said it fits such a broad spectrum of things, whatever you’re making can probably use it.
Lists are used to save different kinds of values right?
Yeah it can be thought of like that. Like a Number behavior saves a single number.
I try to be as vague in how I think of things as possible, because if I thought of Emit as a projectile shooter, that limits my thinking to mostly be toward projectiles even though it can do other things.