I enjoy the fact that Sturgeon’s Law is a thing.
KevinWorkman, it’s nice to experiment, alone or with other people, it’s sometimes necessary but writing a library for oneself and writing a library for others impose different constraints. As you ask for some precise examples, I’m a bit sad than the JMonkeyEngine developers don’t seem motivated to merge their engine with Ardor3D and I saw several tiny “libraries” on JGO that are a bit overpraised by their developers (with the risk of discouraging some developers). Sorry, I should add “IMHO” into most of my sentences. I don’t tell novices not to post, I don’t advise them to write libraries for other developers and I advise them to get much experience before planning to write libraries, frameworks, engines and tools for the mass. It’s my personal opinion, it’s neither a rule nor a fact.
Edit.: I’ll go on asking people (including your teacher) to use JOGL 2 and to stop using JOGL 1 because I want to reduce the risk of confusion. There are tons of videos about JOGL on Youtube and some of them are so bad… In my humble opinion, some authors don’t mind if it harms JOGL or not, they just want more views, they are selfish attention whores.
I’m perfectly fine with people making their own libraries for personal use. There are plenty of advantages to doing so, and you can learn a lot as well.
If you want something that’s intended for the general public, however, you’re going to have to spend a lot of time working on it no matter what.
Hell, Mercury’s been in development for over a year & three months now and it still won’t make its first official release until December. I can already tell that in another few months from now we’re going to be laughing our asses off at the the first release of the library just for how bad it was and what it lacked. That’s just how time goes.
The biggest problem with making libraries for your personal use is that you become incredibly vulnerable to hacks and shitty solutions to certain problems. When you have something that is public, open source and open to contributions, things become so much easier. Seriously. The only way to improve upon libraries like these is to help contribute to them as much as possible and let people know that they can have a say. Want less awful libraries? Help the ones which are growing, both old and new. There is nothing wrong with giving people out there more choices, there is something wrong with stopping that from happening.
Have fun, experiment, and let people help you out. Coding is all about contributing. Without the help of others, bad code and a lack of knowledge is the only thing that is gained.
Just my 2¢.
- Jev
ITT: people who have created and released their own libraries telling other people not to create and release their own libraries.
Does at least not apply to what Jev just said, which I agree to.
What’s wrong? It means: making mistakes and learning from them. I have never released any library. JOGL and JOAL have existed for more than ten years and I started using JOGL in 2006. I didn’t create Ardor3D, JMonkeyEngine, Xith 3D, Java 3D, LibGDX, … I created the TUER engine but I have never released it separately and it will be almost the same for my deployment tool. Sometimes, my tools are so specific, not interesting enough and not documented enough to be useful for others (but I still release the source code).
Moreover, kpars and me don’t discourage people from creating their own libraries, he wrote “I’m perfectly fine with people making their own libraries for personal use” and I agree with him. I make a distinction between libraries just for your own use and libraries that you share with others. If you want others to use your libraries, you have to spend a lot of time in documenting them and in my humble opinion, it’s worth the effort if your library really brings something new or at least useful.
Finally, I agree with kpars (especially with his conclusion) about open sourcing to get some feedback and I’m unpleasantly surprised when some people release some stuff and refuse constructive criticism.
Woah calm down guys, I was mostly just kidding. I don’t really disagree with anything anybody is saying. I just think it would be more useful to say it directly to the people you’re talking about instead of trying to make a sweeping “rules and regulation” post.
I agree with your last post, KevinWorkman and I already wrote what I think about SJGL and YAGE… Their authors are free to consider that their pieces of software compose some “libraries”, I’m free to have some doubt especially about the former.
Or we could just all go code games…?
Kev
Very hard to determine where to draw the line. I think libgdx is ok as an assortment of utilities you can choose from. If you don’t care to use portions of it, you can still use it as basic, cross platform window management, input, etc.
That’s just mean. You know full well some of just… can’t. I can code the hell out of some tools though! 
Plus, during a gold rush, sell pickaxes!
A library is a set of utilities that was designed to be used together, you could say that all librarys are “collections of utilities”. However, not all “collections of utilities” are librarys.
[quote] HeroesGraveDev: A utility collection is quite broad, and can be smaller or bigger than a library (but usually smaller)
I’d classify it as a bunch of utilities that don’t work together, in contrast with the description of library above.
I would expect to be able to extract specific parts of a utility collection and still have them work, whereas a library usually requires everything together.
[/quote]
The bigger question is why does the distinction matter?
It doesn’t. This whole thread is quite pointless. I think the chitchat monster may need to be awakened.
I don’t think making libraries/utility collections is bad. I’m just saying that actually making games is better.
more beneficial for humanity *