Unreal Script Lessons… From days past

Something Completely Off Topic…

My life before ALS.
Unreal scripting & game programming.

The other day I was thinking about my life before ALS and for some reason I started thinking about my old teaching job. I've not mention it before but I used to teaching introductory game programming. Specifically mod authoring for Unreal Tournament 2003 using the built-in unreal scripting language. In these classes we would teach students how to take what was a first-person shooter and turn it into, well any other form of game solely through the scripting interface.

While these lessons are now dated, especially since unreal engine 3 has come out the structure of the script has changed. The fundamentals of the scripting language have not. For example if you want to modify one of the weapons functions or the player controller it might be in a different place in the script, but the principles of the language to make the changes are the same.

So in light of my situation in dealing with ALS, I've decided to share all of these lessons with the world. I just copied my old folder straight up to my Google drive account. So there is probably some traffic for you to sift through. But all of the lessons are there, free for you to use as you will. The only thing I would appreciate is if you use them in a public sense, please put a note in your script somewhere as to where you found the reference.

I hope they're still useful, and that you enjoy them as much as I enjoyed teaching them back in the day.

• old webpage main interface.
  Probably a bunch of broken links, but you should be able to still access the lessons.
• lessons 01 – 24 root folder
• lessons 25 – 55 root folder
• root folder to everything ;-)

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Introduction to C++ programming course

in my last semester teaching, before I landed a job in the games industry I was also asked to do a standing course for introductory programming for nonprogrammers. The goal of this course was to give a whirlwind introduction to C++ programming so that the students would have a basic familiarity with how to code.

If memory serves, these lessons were all written using Visual Studio 6.0. Shouldn't be a problem to port this all over to newer compilers.

These lessons are not quite as complete as the unreal scripting lessons as they were done more on the fly on the whiteboard so there are no  PowerPoint walk-throughs. Nonetheless are some notes with explanations and a few very basic coding samples to help people get started.

• root folder to everything ;-)