Opinion about a RTS tutorial

Hi all, I'm aiming to build an RTS game someday, therefore, I started to look for tutorials about that kind of game in particular to start a prototype. I found the most complete free tutorial about it at:

http://www.stormtek.geek.nz/rts_tutorial/index.php

I know that it's kind an old (feel free to recommend a better/most recent one, if you know so), but it has a lot of basic mechanics implemented and it was made by someone that looks like to know how to handle a lot of the situations by coding. That's where my doubts started, I don't have any special skill or experience in programming (very basic level tbh), but even so, some parts of this tutorial seems to be... overly low level and I'm not sure if it should be THAT low level or if I'm just feeling like that because I'm not used to programming games (or anything else)...

So, I would like to know what you guys (that certainly have more experience than I do) think about that this tutorial? Do you believe that this is the correct path to follow for now? Or should I considerer other strategies in order to achieve the foundation of my possible future game?

 

For an RTS, you are going to have to learn to code, and learn to code well. There are no two ways about it.

So if the tutorial isn't working for you, consider stepping back from an RTS and focusing in on learning to program. The learn section of this site is a good place to start.

 

Thanks for the answer.

I already got it that learning how to code is (obviously) essential for game development and I'm working hard to improve my coding capacity. It happens that some scripts in that tutorial seems to be too complicated considerer it's final output. The guy who made it have a strong programming background, so I was just wondering if his decisions are ok or if he's complicating some parts more than it should (even unintentionally)...

 

I glanced at a couple of the parts; it looks reasonable to me, except that it's using the old GUI system, which I wouldn't recommend you use in new projects. The new UI system is recommended, supported, and in most cases much easier than the old way.

On the other hand, maybe that doesn't matter — you have much to learn, and going carefully through this tutorial will help you do that for sure.

 

Yeah, someone here already told me that.

I'm trying to understand every line, function and class that he implements, commenting almost every line of code and search for some documentation in some cases. The hardest part for me so far (excluding that UI part that you mentioned) is about structurate all scripts together (is hard to me to think about how to start a script that willl call other class that will use another class/variable that may need another class/variable etc..), but I hope to get there someday.

Thanks, I'll keep going.