A GDL Question

[Anonymous]

I'm working on a presentation about the GDL in archicad 10 student version and till now I haven't found any useful and clear information about how to start working with it and how to create an object within it

please help me as fast as possible cause my presentation is next week

thanks

[TomWaltz]

Let's start off at the beginning: Have you found the information that is already available?

PDFs that come with Archicad:
Object Making with Archicad
GDL Reference Manual

Website:
David Nicholson Cole's GDL Cookbook
http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/sbe/cookbook/gdl_cookbook/index.html

[Djordje]

Also:

http://www.onland.info/archives/gdl/

Good luck in your work!

UAE University or American University of Sharjah? Or somewhere else?

[Anonymous]

You know, I'm sure those manuals are very useful - once you know where to start. But therein lies the dilemma for a newbie to GDL - just plain figuring out how and where to start.

I mean, I can open objects just fine and look around in their scripts - but then what? I've not come across anything yet that walks you through the whole thing from start to finish and does things like tell you *where* in the script you're supposed to enter whatever parameters someone tells you will modify an object the way you want to modify it, for example. And it's not self-evident anywhere how you start a new object from scratch in GDL.

I've got both the basic manual that came with AC7, as well as the GDL cookbook, (although both are packed away in storage at the moment), and I've found them both completely and utterly useless because they assume you already know the most basic basics. And frankly, that's *why* they're in storage, because I only kept out my most fundamentally basic essential books and manuals that I actually find useful and usable at this stage of my journey - like Dwight's book, and the user's guide.

Wendy

[Dwight]

In computing, everything is about something else.

There we were, happily drafting in graphite and using black coffee for sky washes because it was more-or-less opaque in the blue printer, and then there was a machine. How do you talk to it?

We learned, in 1972, to operate in BASIC, a simple computer language, so it was easy to adapt to GDL, a language, more-or-less having the syntax of BASIC but with geometric operators. So, having a leg up on computer programming helped me work in (notice that I didn't say "master") GDL.

It's like being mystefied by Photoshop because you were never in a darkroom, or confused by a spreadsheet because you were never book keepers. Or using Archicad to make lousy perspectives because you were never an artist.

While I sympathise with how hard it is to accommodate yet another discipline (code writing), Wendy is totally wrong that the GDL Cookbook makes difficult assumptions. DN-C goes the full distance to bring the programmer's logic to Archicad users.

There's really another problem - the main challenge of GDL modeling - in that visualizing through the rigid discipline of code, syntax and numbers is not natural to architects. Managing the convolutions of these transformations can exceed the capacity of most minds. I'm always getting this wrong.

GDL IS hard. It used to be easier, but we are using it moreandmore to control complex interfaces and property data instead of simple, elegant objects. Like back in version 4.0. Creating an object takes more time in the interface and parameters than writing the actual code.

Our GDL Cookbook is still the bible for the beginner and a reference for the experienced. Gotta have it.

[TomWaltz]

Wendy wrote:
You know, I'm sure those manuals are very useful - once you know where to start. But therein lies the dilemma for a newbie to GDL - just plain figuring out how and where to start.

I mean, I can open objects just fine and look around in their scripts - but then what? I've not come across anything yet that walks you through the whole thing from start to finish and does things like tell you *where* in the script you're supposed to enter whatever parameters someone tells you will modify an object the way you want to modify it, for example. And it's not self-evident anywhere how you start a new object from scratch in GDL.

I thought the Object Making with Archicad PDF was pretty good... In fact I thought it did exactly what you said you could not find. It starts off by modifying GDL from objects made by saving slabs & walls as objects then moves into making objects from scratch.

Still, I do feel like there is some information missing out there... like a kind of working architect's guide to quick-and-dirty code. I've got a tutorial for it in the works.