I started with Processing and am now a senior software dev. Itβs an awesome tool for visual programming which is valuable in its own right, but the coding skills will be transferable to more βpracticalβ languages/frameworks.
this post was submitted on 11 Feb 2024
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did it teach you basic programming concepts?
my first classes were cobol
At some point, my company wanted to have some interactive, uh, graphics elements for a big conference. So, where there'd be a touchscreen and if you dragged your finger across, some color wave would follow, or something like that.
I still think, Processing is an excellent tool for that, although admittedly the demand for that kind of thing is low.
The skills are also quite transferrable to gamedev, although definitely far from everything you need to know.
And as the others said, it can also teach you the basics, and in particular the fun, of programming.
I went straight from Processing to Rust. You'd be surprised by just how many skills transfer over! I've found that it's actually easier than other programming languages, aside from doing anything visual. I haven't figured out how to do the same kind of graphics stuff as i could in processing just yet.
As for use cases? Processing is a learning tool, and it's great for teaching as well. You can make some pretty great animations using it, and a lot of YouTubers use it internally to animate their math videos.
I think, at this point, your best bet is to use a game engine, like for example Bevy: https://bevyengine.org/examples/
It's not as hyper-focused on drawing things as Processing is, so there's a bit more boilerplate to set everything up, but once you have that down, the actual drawing calls shouldn't really be more complex...
does bevy act like a module or is it like godot with a gui?
It doesn't have a GUI editor for tweaking the game contents, like Godot has it, but it's a complete game engine, so with a tiny bit of configuration, it will do all the things to display your game in a window.
So, it's not just a graphics library/module, where you'd still have to write a whole structure yourself, but rather a framework, which means it provides a structure for you and you basically just have to fill out the blanks with whatever you want drawn.
so it's like the pygame module for puthon?
I've never done anything with pygame. From the little I've just read up on it, it sounds like Bevy is probably a somewhat more cohesive experience (albeit not yet as mature), but yeah, the scope of the projects should be similar.
I heard Cary Huang made some pretty interesting stuff with Processing, such as Evolv.io (I can't explain it well enough, so look it up, also the link will lead you to nothing), a tool that lets you mix the faces of multiple celebrities together, as well as a program that generates an entire city landscape from one image (an example of which was used in his Battle for Dream Island cartoon series).
However, all of which were made with an outdated version of Processing (1.x I believe) meaning they need that outdated version in order to run.