it's always been hardest for me to find coders...maybe because i myself am a modeler...the best modeler. ever. mwahahahaahhahhaaaaaaaaaah!

I just want to say that I code myself.  I'm getting my BS degree in computer science, and this stuff goes WAY over my head.  'Course I'm in my 2nd year so it's probably not a big deal.  Anyway, I want to thank you guys for giving my an insite into some other languages besides C++, which I really like myself.  That and visual basic(basically the same thing).

I just read that url you posted, and I was very impressed.  Tim pretty much took the good stuff from C++, Java, and Basic and left out most of the bad stuff.
Things I like about UScript:
- The whole state system makes me spooge.
- Enums.  This is something sorely lacking in Java.
- Strings are handled like strings should be handled.
- Operator overloading, which is also missing in Java.
- Garbage collecting is very elegant.  It's not just reference counted, which means it handles the examples I provided properly.  If the garbage collection sucked, then when A.Enemy points to B, and B.Enemy points to A, neither object would ever be destroyed.  This is obviously not the case in UScript.
- The 'abstract' keyword does exactly what I was talking about.
- The way they handle fake-multithreading is really really awesome, and much better than I had assumed.
- You can implement classes in native C++ code.
- Level designers can manipulate object variables in UnrealED

I was so tied up in how much Java sucks for making applications, that I failed to realize how UScript could be great for making mods.

I can't say for sure because I still haven't made an Unreal mod, but from what I can tell, it seems like it is ideal for making complex AI behavior, and making simple modifications easily, but it seems like it would be much harder (or even impossible) to do complex changes to things like physics, such as what was done in QPong.  Is this a correct observation?

My AddObject example is one gripe I had with Java, but is pretty much a moot point in UScript.  Being able to do that lets you create things like a binary tree without having to care about what type of data you are storing.  In java, you have to create a binary tree for objects, one for ints, one for floats, etc.  The code is exactly the same, but the variable type is different.  Very annoying.  C lets you do it with void *, C++ lets you do it with templates.  There are a lot of cases in which you don't care about the actual data type of a variable, but most of that, I now realize, is irrelevant in UScript.

If you care, I have been programming real applications for about 6 years in C, C++, PHP, Perl, Javascript, Basic, and other more obscure languages.  I have only taken 1 programming course, so my comments come from real use, not theory and 'textbook knowlege'.  Lately I have been programming hardware interfaces and database applications (in other words, I read data from custom hardware, and stick it in a database, then read it from the database and display it in pretty charts and graphs).  For what I do, Java would have been a terrible language choice.  I needed an abstract interface to different types of hardware that all did pretty much the same thing, but whose implementation was different.  So I created an abstract class and do this:

Code Sample

IHardware *hardware = GetHardware(); if (hardware) { hardware->Startup(); while (!stop) { NewData(hardware->GetData()); } hardware->Shutdown(); }

The actual implementation is in a dll.  GetHardware() finds a dll that implements IHardware, and returns a pointer to the abstract class.  This lets me add new hardware by just dropping in a new dll.  We use the same idea for other things, such as the database (so we don't have to care if it's ODBC, MySQL, XML, or even flat file).  You can do the same thing with COM, but that brings in a whole new bag of problems (not to mention ugly syntax).

Re: the US evaluation, yes, that's what I am saying, US does what it does quite well.

That document was based of UT, and UT2k3 is alot better layed out.
For example, before, players and bots were different inheritence trees, which caused alot of problems.

Now, players and bots use the same pawn classes, they just have a different Controller implementation, which makes things ALOT easier to handle.

I don't think it would be that hard to do the ball movement in US. I would Inherit from Actor, which is higher up the chain, and just handle when a ball is touched by another ball or shot by a weapon.

another good source:

http://wiki.beyondunreal.com/wiki/Home_Page

New features in UT2k3:
http://wiki.beyondunreal.com/wiki/New_Features_In_UT2003

Actor Class Heirarchy:
http://wiki.beyondunreal.com/wiki/Actor_Class_Hierarchy

As far as day jobs, I do application development too, pretty similair actually to what you are doing.

I take input from seperate systems (PBX Switches, Point of sale Systems, etc) and transfer data back and forth from our property management system.

I do what allows people to go into a restaurant at their hotel and charge directly to their room, etc.

Since this has kindof turned into a programmers geek fest, have a look at ruby.  It's object oriented coding done right.

www.rubycentral.com/book for an online book about ruby.

It was built as a OO language first, and then scripting capabilities were added after.

Most objects that store other objects has an each method, so

Code Sample

myarray.each { |array_item| print array_item.type }

would iterate through the array and execute the code inside the {}'s
the variable inbetween the ||'s gets assigned the value of the current item in the array.

Also since everything is an object the following code works

Code Sample

10.times { print "ruby rocks" }

If you are looking for a new language to learn, I would recommend having a look at ruby.