New programming course

[krzys_h]

I'd integrate programming with the missions and half of the people disagree because they can't and don't want to program, they just want to use arrows to beat the game ("programming game", sure...).

I would love to see the missions better designed for using programming, but remember - this is only a remake, so we cannot change the key aspect of the design which was to make it possible to pass the missions without programming.

I'd make the programming course an addition to the plot and half of the people disagree.

Who exactly would disagree with that. As far as I'm aware, all people (unofficially, but still) agreed on making the programming course an optional prequel to the main story on the last ColoIRC.

I'd make the programming course completely unrelated to the game, with boring environments where I can't even use half of the stuff in the game, because it would be a "spoiler" and... people agree.

It's not that we want it to be unrelated to the game. If we are going to improve missions to allow for more programming and design programming course as prequel, it's naturally going to be played before the main missions mode. And as such, it can't contradict with the main plot.
Remember, we are going for complete redesign of the exercises mode, which means we can add whatever new objects and mechanics we want for it to be really helpful in learning programming from strach.
Ideally, what I would like to see is for the main programming course to teach somebody the basic concepts of programming and using documentation without spoiling what you'll discover in missions, and then, whenever a new object in game appears, just link to it's documentation which may include some examples. Actually, a cool idea might be to unlock some additional bonus exercises sent to you via SatCom from Houston, to familiarize you with this new object. Something like the flying and shooting training, except it should be completely optional, just like the whole programming course.

I'm tired of this project. Everyone wants to make a different game. It doesn't make any sense, it can't work that way, we won't achieve anything that way. You know, I don't want to take part in designing this game any more, it's too hard. I'd like to be just given clear tasks like "write this, fix that". Someone end writing the plan for this course or just simply abandon it. I gave you writing permissions for a reason. I'm too scared of doing all this work and then someone coming in the end saying "we can't do something, because reasons, just leave it naked like it is or forsake it".

I feel like this video clearly demonstrates the problem we have: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BKorP55Aqvg

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TWO new posts while I was writing one. Wow.

I suggest we start developing Colobot 2. Colobot: Gold Edition's current state of missions and exercises should remain unchanged since this is how original Colobot was, but the code and data can be still updated as long as we don't change the game too much. Colobot 2 should be our current priority. Large scale refactoring and rewrite. Colobot is already stable enough and our current version system doesn't make sense anymore, so this is a good time to change things. We are changing the game a lot, redefining basics and adding incompatible features, so this is clearly not something we should be doing in our current project, we should be doing this in a new game.

One of the initial goals of Gold Edition was to prepare the engine for easier modification and export all game-specific logic to the data repository, so that both Gold and Colobot 2 can mostly share the same engine code. This is the only way to maintain both of them, we do not have enough people and time to manage two separate (and not really designed with maintainability in mind) codebases. That goal is not finished yet, and thus we shouldn't move on to Colobot 2 right now.