Did you start with GScript?
 

I was having a discussion with Tig the other day. We both encountered and made an effort to learn GScript. It was in essence the thing that we "started with" and created our love for programming in all forms. Once we learnt GScript, other programming languages came very easily.

So I ask this question to everyone else. Was Gscript your "first" language?

Yup. It taught me the basics of programming that has helped me skip the intermediates of most other languages and jump right into the complicated stuff.

Sadly though, my only other attempts at programming was C++, and that was too intimidating for me, and I hated the fact that I couldn't jump right into graphical stuff. I lost patience with it and forgot about it.

I've been wanting to get into programming for a while but never tried hard enough to learn/gather the resources. I heard original Graal was written in Delphi, so I've wanted to try that but I don't think I've found any free compilers for it or anything.

Yeah Delphi is not free, but you have the same problem, you can't dive directly into graphics programming like you can with gscript, and that has been a reason why I disliked alot of packages.

One day I decided to learn DirectX programming in Visual Basic 6, and after about six months I had discovered I had remade Graal x-x (Tiling engine, NPCs, it could even open and load .NW levels, Although it ran at 60fps on a very cruddy computer, none of this 20fps lark :O)

Infact I'd say the closest thing to GScript in terms of direct graphics processing is Flash :O

I don't want to do Java or Flash. Ever.

Gscript for me too ^^

Oh, and Robin, you have to share that remade Graal with me :P

It was the first for me as well. Since, I've only bothered to learn PHP, XML and Lua, and I'm not really an expert on any of those.

I started with GScript. I found it really easy to get into programming this way, and now I'm also into PHP and Lua (coding AddOns @ WoW).
GScript made me love programming, yesh <3

Visual Basic 6 based on DirectDraw 7 and instead of gscript, VBScript.

I posted my tiling engine on planetsourcecode and of course, the tileset was from FTO, because I didn't fancy getting in trouble with Graal :P

You sure? :D

Heh, the 60fps sounds nice, and you say it runs fast on slow machines(I have a very old one)? I'd love to try it out.

60fps... does that mean you have timeouts under 0.05? :o

Well I didn't have timeouts per sé. I had everything event driven. I don't really feel like getting out my old hard drive, and I don't own VB6 anymore, but I'd really love to try and rebuild it possibly using SDL.

I guess you could say the timeouts were every millisecond? Although I did recode everything to use frame based movement that were every ten milliseconds, which would make the timeout 0.01 seconds.

The frames per second were ranging from 200-60 wildly so I capped it at 60. The computer I made it on was a pentium 2, with geforce 2 mx 440 graphic card (with 8mb of graphics memory!)

Funny, that's about the same machine I'm running right now :P
I think that's always something that stomped me while trying to learn how to code games in other languages. Mostly everything in Graal is done via timeouts... I never really figured out how to apply the same logic in other languages.

When you think about it, most games go like this:

Initialize
Main loop
Process input
Display output
End loop

You're not really doing much different with timeouts.

I would never have learned Gscript2 if I hadn't learned Gscript, and I would never have explored several other languages if I hadn't known Gscript2. Gscript and Graal has formed my entire life since I was 10, literally, and I wouldn't have it any other way. Thank you Stefan and unixmad.

Very well said. Same goes for me here.