GUIers! Come upgrade to vJass! Anyone who wants to learn, I'll help!

[Zaraf]

I'm willing to assist anyone who wants to move on from GUI and upgrade their triggering (and coding) skills and learn vJass. vJass is different from the Jass most of you are familiar with, and the main difference is just syntax, formatting and shortcuts. vJass basically allows you to take a bunch of shortcuts which makes your coding more efficient.

Speaking to a lot of people who do a lot of GUI, I've found that most of them WISH they could code in vJass, but just never had the motivation to learn it because they thought it would be too much work. I know, I was in the same boat. I started mapping in April 2008, and I was resistant in sticking to GUI (despite all the people telling me to learn vJass). Finally about a month ago, I took the plunge, and to my surprise, it was a lot easier to learn than I had ever imagined.

I understand that most people find it difficult to follow through long detailed and "textbook-like" tutorials, and that's where I'm here to help. I will answer your questions on moving from GUI to vJass. All you have to do is show some commitment and a bit of motivation to learn.

I find that for GUIers, the BEST way to learn vJass is to take your GUI triggers you have made, and convert them. Start by converting to custom text, and then clean up the code to follow proper vJass syntax and optimization. Believe me, it's a LOT easier than it sounds, and I actually quite enjoy doing it.

Converting from GUI to vJass is the way I teach, and since I'd like to help a lot of people here, I'm going to set a bit of a criteria for those who I will help. Instead of going through an example with each person (which would take up too much of my time), I'd like anyone who wants to learn to go through Acehart's tutorial in which he goes (very slowly) step by step through a conversion of GUI to vJass. Basically the same thing I would do.

Triggers - Heal All: A tale of ancient GUI and modern JASS

Finish this tutorial, and then speak with me and I'll answer any questions you have, and help you move onto the next steps of learning. Even if you are working through the tutorial and would like to ask questions to further clarify things, that is fine too.

You can contact me on any of my IM contacts. Please introduce yourself as from the Helper, and that you want to learn vJass.

Come on guys, don't be lazy and step up to the REAL triggering

 

[gjcraig]

re

Ok I have been messing with map editor for a while and just started to get adventurous enough to mess with Triggers - just did my first GUI trigger the other day actually. Anyways your tutorial looks great, but how do you know all that stuff ? Or more importantly how would I start to get to know how to do that stuff ?
Im great with anything in the world editor except making my own models - I can import them though , and Im still very clueless on how to start basic triggering.

 

[Zaraf]

First of all, that's not my tutorial Acehart made that. Second, this is meant more for people who already know GUI quite well. It will be harder for you to "convert GUI to vJass" if you don't even know GUI.

 

[NullCurrent]

Ok, I have a question... I was in the process of learning jass and I was using NewGen Jass WE, along with some tutorials.

When I was learning jass I got the feeling that you have to know a bunch of strings by heart (such as "call... blah... blah...") and how can you possibly remember all of those "blah"s? It just seems easier to GUI, because you can easily browse through to find what trigger your are looking for... So, in this aspect, how is jass easier (or if I got it all wrong, tell me)?

 

[BRUTAL]

if you use newgen, it has this thing for when your typing a function call; like an autocompletion kind of thing. and then when your typing the values inside the parenthesis' a box pops up telling you what you need to put
its easy

edit*
i think the tool is called jass helper, not 100% sure OR its tesh : o
yes its TESH

 

[gjcraig]

First of all, that's not my tutorial Acehart made that. Second, this is meant more for people who already know GUI quite well. It will be harder for you to "convert GUI to vJass" if you don't even know GUI.

Well I don't need to convert anything - I do a gui trigger then close the world editor and it turns it into a jass script. I thought your thread was on the premise of "I can help you out with learning Jass" - I was interested in that premise because it seems like the Warcraft 3 community is starved for good maps. For instance Dota is a simplistic ugly map where there are very little game play options if you ask me. I have made better with just the world editor on my own. Im a mapper and I want to learn triggers. So can you help a beginner with triggers or at least point me in the right direction if you think im more trouble then its worth ?

 

[BRUTAL]

Well I don't need to convert anything - I do a gui trigger then close the world editor and it turns it into a jass script.

yea but that doesnt make you know jass
plus that will be un-efficient jass, gui turned to jass is like all BJ's lol

 

[Kelvin87]

yea but that doesnt make you know jass
plus that will be un-efficient jass, gui turned to jass is like all BJ's lol

Not agree. although all of these trigger turned into BJ's when you direct converted it into custom script, but you can use JassShopPro on syntax guidance to help to guide you on optimizing the codes or triggers to an efficient trigger. Perhaps, I prefer pjass becoz pjass can do whatever good triggers as efficient as vjass if you know cache system. Even DotA itself also using pjass!

Further more, pjass no need newgen at all - it can be direct access on using world editor to edit the trigger and no need TESH.

Do you guys agree what I'm trying to say?

 

[Zaraf]

Ok, I have a question... I was in the process of learning jass and I was using NewGen Jass WE, along with some tutorials.

When I was learning jass I got the feeling that you have to know a bunch of strings by heart (such as "call... blah... blah...") and how can you possibly remember all of those "blah"s? It just seems easier to GUI, because you can easily browse through to find what trigger your are looking for... So, in this aspect, how is jass easier (or if I got it all wrong, tell me)?

Interestingly enough, this is the biggest concern people coming from GUI have. How will I know what to write?

The short and straight answer to this is: Practice.

I know, it sounds long and tedious and boring, but it's actually not that bad at all. You'll find that once you can get stuff working in vJass, it's actually a lot of fun to use.

There are a few different ways you would find out or know what function to use, and what the function is called.

1) Experience/memorization - Yeah, so you'll get to this point soon, don't worry.

2) Function List - Like BRUTAL has mentioned, Newgen has TESH which has a very handy function list of all natives and BJ functions you would need. Jasscraft is also a handy external tool that can assist in this.

3) Convert from GUI - I used this a lot in the beginning. If I didn't know how to do something, I create a new trigger in GUI do it, and then convert to custom text to see how its done.

4) Ask someone - Ultimately you can always ask an experienced coder, and if they are willing to help, then you can get your answer from there (hopefully).

I'm surprised though at how people shy away from vJass because of the "typing out" aspect of it. If you think about it, how do you know where certain things are in GUI? How do you know where the function to create a unit is? Or how about to add exp to a hero? Or to play a sound effect? Or send a message to a player? It's because all of these functions have been categorized in GUI. You find the first function under Unit, the next under Hero, the next under Sound, and the last under Player.

Functions in vJass are ALSO categorized just like this. You simply open up the Function List, and type in the category you want. You add in "%" to act as a wild card. So for example, if we do a search for: "Create%Unit", we get as results:

CreateNUnitsAtLoc
CreateNUnitsAtLocFacingLocB
CreateTextTagUnitBJ
CreateUnit
CreateUnitAtLoc
CreateUnitAtLocByName
CreateUnitAtLocSaveLast
CreateUnitByName
CreateUnitPool
GetLastCreatedUnit

For most of these functions, just by reading the name of it, you can probably guess what it does. So really, figuring out what to write is not as big of a problem as GUIers like to make it out to be. Really, it's just an excuse.

Not agree. although all of these trigger turned into BJ's when you direct converted it into custom script, but you can use JassShopPro on syntax guidance to help to guide you on optimizing the codes or triggers to an efficient trigger. Perhaps, I prefer pjass becoz pjass can do whatever good triggers as efficient as vjass if you know cache system. Even DotA itself also using pjass!

Further more, pjass no need newgen at all - it can be direct access on using world editor to edit the trigger and no need TESH.

Do you guys agree what I'm trying to say?

Bro, please. Let's keep pJass out of the discussion here. The topic is learning vJass, not pJass. I don't know enough about pJass to talk too much about it, but let's not confuse the new people more than they already are.

 

[uberfoop]

Not agree. although all of these trigger turned into BJ's when you direct converted it into custom script, but you can use JassShopPro on syntax guidance to help to guide you on optimizing the codes or triggers to an efficient trigger. Perhaps, I prefer pjass becoz pjass can do whatever good triggers as efficient as vjass if you know cache system. Even DotA itself also using pjass!

Further more, pjass no need newgen at all - it can be direct access on using world editor to edit the trigger and no need TESH.

Do you guys agree what I'm trying to say?

Well, it's pointless to argue over efficiency of basic Jass versus vJass, since vJass compiles into basic jass.

Anyway, comparing pjass and vJass is silly. vJass is a load of extra syntax, pjass is a compiling program.

Anyway, skimming through converted GUI to remove the BJ's is better than than doing so in efficiency terms, but the difference there is just about negligible. As opposed to actually laying out your code efficiently.


This having been said, worrying too much about code efficiency, as opposed to, say, leaks, or on-screen models, is usually kind of silly unless you're either doing something VERY wrong or for whatever reason you need some huge loop to fire like 10,000 times per second.

 

[gjcraig]

yea but that doesnt make you know jass
plus that will be un-efficient jass, gui turned to jass is like all BJ's lol

Ya, I know thats why I want to learn. I really need a very basic beginners guide with Jass. This is only one of two areas - the other is making models - that I don't know how to do to make a perfect warcraft 3 map.

 

[kingkingyyk3]

Yeah, all upgrade to vJass from now!!!

 

[Andrewgosu]

I'm sorry to lock your thread because your intentions are sincere, however, I don't want this to become a spamfest of random questions and answers - it's awfully difficult to keep track of them when this thread expands.

If you want to continue though, I suggest you to post a "classroom" thread in the JASS section - get some feedback about the topics people want covered and post your explanations plus some exercises about them. That way, it would be a little more concentrated.

Or the best option, if you feel yourself qualified enough take up writing a tutorial about a certain subject.