Quote: "2. Is there any 3rd party programs or plugins that I can use to visually design my games?"
If you're talking about designing levels, yes visual design is the way to do it. (explained in detail below)
If you're talking about coding, no there's no way code other than using plain text. (unless something new has been invented
)
Quote: "place things in my world withought having to guess cordinates?"
There's two basic ways to solve that, I use both (but 1 is usually easier)
1) Caligari gameSpace is the level editor I use, (3D World Studio, Cartography Shop, and a number of free ones are good too) and how these work is you visually "paint" your game worlds. You can drag and drop objects and some function in the program will tell you their coordinates.
2) Insert some code into your game to constantly display the player's 3D position. Then, walk your player to where you want to put something, and write down the coordinates. The FPS tutorial in DBPro explains this.
Then you can save the object you want to position and use
position object to position them at the coordinates in DBPro, or what I do is have a level file that holds the coordinates of objects. My program reads that file automatically and positions the objects at said coordinates.
Quote: "3. Is the coding hard? Say if a 14 year old were to try it, would it be easy?"
I've been coding since I was about 10, and I'd say yes
generally it's pretty easy, it's just time consuming and you need to be committed. But keep in mind, coding is easy to learn, hard to master. I've only been creating
games for about 1.5 years though since I got DBP (unless you count text adventures in QBASIC), and games can be very hard to code when you're pushing your limits, which is neccessary to get good at making big games. That's why everyone says start with Pong, not an MMORPG. I've found that a knowlage of triginomtry is a great help for games, but if all you can do is + - * / then you'll be ok for a long time. If you keep practicing once you can make simplier games the more complicated ones become easier.
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