Video tutorials?

Sponge Sponge Discussion
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I have been playing around with this idea of making tutorials for Sponge for a while now. I have a huge amount of spare time on public transport (somewhere i dont feel comfortable pulling a laptop out on) so I could write scripts there.

I have never done any video editing (outside od cropping videos) but I can easily learn.

My question is how many people would be interested? A few of my university mates say they learn best from videos and physically being able to see every action.

If I were to create videos I would not start from learning java. But start from API 6 or 7 (whatever completely recommended).

Edit:
What would people recommend for screen recording? I would prefer if it could focus on parts? Or should i make my own?

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Video tutorials are great for things like preparing your development environment, or using an animated slideshow to explain complex concepts like the Data API or mixin processing. Not so much actual programming. Here’s why.

First of all, with textual documentation, you can be much more concise with your example code, or even not provide any, which forces people to understand what you’re talking about before using it. However, with a video tutorial, full functional code is used at all times, greatly enabling cargo cult programming.

Second, documentation will always be out of date eventually, and it is one of those ways that the universe functions that videos of programming will always be out of date no matter how hard you try. Even barring that, however, if one uses textual documentation, then updating it is as simple as writing the new bits and committing it, whereas with video documentation the entire video must be re-recorded every time something changes. And no matter how updated you keep your videos, unless you directly delete the old ones (and even then, because of reupload trolls), you will always find people using the outdated videos.

Back in 2012, a channel called BcBroz uploaded a massive tutorial series on Bukkit pluginmaking. I haven’t seen anything beyond episode 4, but what I did see was several years out of date. And hundreds of noobs, incapable of looking for the link labeled ‘Wiki’, would search YouTube for how to make a Bukkit plugin, and BcBroz videos would appear at the top of the list. And forevermore, countless people have been posting in the Plugin Development section with enable/disable log messages, using Minecraft’s logger instead of their plugin’s, with command functions that don’t check before casting CommandSender to Player, compare aliases instead of command names, and return false no matter what. And then every comment tells them to stop watching video series and read the perfectly good documentation.

Just sayin’.
Also, OBS is the best IMO. There might be better premium software somewhere, but OBS is also free.

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Fair enough.

If i were to do it my original plan was to label things saying what API its designed for in the title example would be (API 1-6) or (API 7-Ongoing) . But deleting it also works. I do understand that it would get out of date and uploading updated videos would be essential.

I do understand that essentially spoon feeding the audience the code. But I would explain what I was doing before hand and the people who don’t listen and want the code to just fill the gaps and not learn then thats fine too. Most “plugin development” forum posts get spoonfed the code. But animations are a good idea and ill try to stay away from the spoonfeeding until the very end. And ill try to put it in good format such as using the plugin logger and stuff.

And thanks for the suggestion of OBS. Never used it but after I posted this I found a top 10 and found OBS. So i tried it and like it. Still getting used to it though.

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Considering that SpongeAPI releases Major version changes every so often, I’d be more interested in “how to fish” videos rather then “Gives you a fish” videos. as in the old saying “give a man a fish and you feed him for a day; teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime”

So things like, How to setup a workspace, basic git, how to debug, how to sign Ore plugins, how to read JavaDocs, How to navigate the typesystem using your given IDE so you can find out where all the references are (especially considering SpongeAPI has a bunch of pseudo enums) How to find out how to call a method. An overview of Permissions/Economy services.

Overview of the structure of Scoreboards.

Introducing the Minecraft concepts as Sponge exposes them.

e.g. A Chunk is heavily compressed block data, with attached tile entities.

BlockStates are singleton objects, used to represent the behavior and state that a block has, but is encoded in a chunk in a compressed format.

That the BlockSnapshots that Sponge passes around are a snapshot in time of a block, and won’t change.

Immutable vs mutable classes.

How Entities differ from Blocks in terms of class structure, mutable vs immutable.

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Anything you chaps can offer up will be considered for linking in the SpongeDocs, within the “Tutorials” section under plugin development. At present it’s a bit spartan.

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Ok. Thats a good idea. Ill start of with the basics and then work to more advanced things.