How do you feel about sharing code?

[TrickWithAKnife]

While we are not technically working on the same projects, one of the wonderful people here (I'll add his name if he wants) and I have been working on some coding things together.

How it has mostly been working is I made a bit of a technically demo for testing features. He's been helping me find problems that need to be fixed or things that could be improved, and also ideas from his own project.
We end up sharing code, and because of this both of our projects have more possibilities.
It's worked out great so far.

How do you feel about sharing code? Not just code snippets, but actually showing people the technical side of it, letting them mess around and make suggestions?

For example, recently I started working on a smartphone with various functions. Right now (with help from the other programmer and people in this forum), I have a working camera, photo album, map viewer, a kind of dictionary, and a few other things.
I don't mind showing other people code, but I prefer if it's people who also help others. It's a bit of a waste if someone just copies and pastes the code for your whole game, but doesn't help anyone else.

[Hijiri]

Considering some of us can only learned when we're shown how to, I tend to favor the idea of sharing code.

[Funnyguts]

I am all for open source coding. Although since I am terrible at code I will be amazed if anyone ever uses my code for something.

[Auro-Cyanide]

Camille released the RPY. files for both of our free releases. Obviously won't be for our commercial releases, but that's a different thing. I think it's good though, especially since I am a person who is much better at learning about things when I see them in action.

[Obscura]

As I said in my other thread, it was only because Camille released the code for Ristorante Amore than I could figure out what was wrong in the "cookbook" section of the wiki.

I am all for sharing code for non-commercial work.

I actually have no problem if someone takes my code and just cuts and pastes it for their work. (Though of course at this point my code is pretty elementary and copying it would be pointless.)

As long as whatever they make is a fun or cool and can be shared by the community, why not? I think the only time I'd be upset is if somebody copied some advanced code, created a commercial game, and then never participated in the community at all.

But I'll really go with whatever PyTom supports. He created a free engine and allows others to make games--even commercial ones--off of it, all free of charge. I am so very grateful he did this and will support the kind of vision that led to RenPy.

Based on the posts I've seen, I think he encourages the use and distribution of free assets and code. Someone please correct me if I'm wrong on that.

[Gambit74]

I'm all for sharing code from non-commercial works as well. In fact, I actually plan to make most of my code public once I finish my game (They're elementary anyway) so that beginners can learn from them and adapt them into new things.

I was able to learn the basics of image mapping this way by examining the code from the person who made that Clannad fan game (I'm so sorry, but your name currently escapes me at the moment since it was last year when I downloaded the game from your website). Not only did I learn how to do that, but I also learned how to display a short description when a menu choice in the title screen is highlighted, like in Umineko .

[TrickWithAKnife]

Well, a very positive response. I do have one more question though.
Where would you show your code?
Would you post snippets in this forum? Would you link to somewhere else where your code is available?
Would you post a download link in your signature for people to download a developers version of your game?

I wonder if there would be problems if the forum was suddenly flooded with topics for each game's code.
Should we be asking very nicely for a sub-forum in the Programming section for code examples/discussions?

Ok, that was about 400 questions. I'll stop there.

[Gambit74]

The RPG Maker XP (and higher) community has a separate board that's dedicated for programmers to share their scripts. Maybe we can do the same here?

As for how I would share my code, I'll just release the rpy files with my game like everyone else who share theirs does.

[Obscura]

The RPG Maker XP (and higher) community has a separate board that's dedicated for programmers to share their scripts. Maybe we can do the same here?

Yes, I think a separate thread or forum area to post code snippets would be great.

I think PyTom mentioned that nobody has the time to maintain the RenPy cookbook section. I think a forum area dedicated to code examples would be much easier to keep updated, comment upon, and run.

[WatchJessieGo]

I'm all for sharing code and helping other people out. If I were any good at code at this point, I would definitely share mine, but I'm still learning the basics.

[Gambit74]

I just noticed that we now have a cookbook forum :O . Does anyone know if it's just for tuts and snippets, or can we post completed scripts as well?

[CheeryMoya]

I wonder if there would be problems if the forum was suddenly flooded with topics for each game's code.
Should we be asking very nicely for a sub-forum in the Programming section for code examples/discussions?

Looks like your prayers were answered. I think Aleema and Camille's tutorials should be moved over here for everyone to have easy access too (they're buried under all the individual threads about other questions). If any of the mods are reading this, here they are:
Aleema's "[Tutorial] Customizing Menus"
Aleema's "[Tutorial] Customizing the Textbox"
Camille's "[Tutorial] Crash course in screen language/UI design"

I just noticed that we now have a cookbook forum :O . Does anyone know if it's just for tuts and snippets, or can we post completed scripts as well?

Completed scripts as in what exactly? I assume people would like the entire codes for a thing so they can copypasta and it'd work by itself with no necessary editing required.

[Gambit74]

Completed scripts as in a fully working feature that can be copy/pasted, and customized if the user wish. Like say I made a custom menu layout script for example. If I wanted to share it, I would provide the whole thing along with any graphics that's used (Though I don't have any fully working custom scripts at the moment).

Well I guess it would be like the ones in the cookbook but more advanced and detailed.

[CheeryMoya]

I don't see why not :/ You should provide a list of what kinds of images they'll need though (textboxes of this height, headers for that, etc.).

[Gambit74]

That's what I was thinking as well. In the RPG Maker community, I usually just edited whatever resources they gave along with the script to match my taste, so I figured the same could be done here as well. Plus the default resources would already come with the required size.