I am going to begin programming and i have no idea where to start. I do have what you could call "experience" i suppose. I worked with(for those of you who are fimiliar with this) Warcraft 3's world editor, in which i begin slowly and then moved onto editing this game purely in a c-based scripting language they use called Jass. i've went over a few tutorials for c++ and i've seen a lot of things i already have a firm grasp on(altho i'm very rusty its been over a year) such as arrays, strings, functions, variables, and quite a few other things.(I think i understand pointers, that is, atleast what they do, but i can't for the life of me figure out exactly why i need them yet) I want to eventually move into programming fully 3d games with online capabilities, but thats a long term goal. i also want to program much smaller scale 2d street fighter style games with hand drawn sprites, but thats a medium term goal. I want to begin by doing text based games, or tic-tac-toe or minesweeper style games, thats my short term goal.
Here is my problem though. I've read so much now I've come across the fact that well, people make games with openGL or direct3D(i know this is not exclusive and games can be made with C++). So what am i doing here? Are these completely different then C++? Should i start with C++ and move into openGL or Direct3D(to be honest i think i prefer Direct3D but i'm not 100% yet) is C++ the core and Direct3D/openGL to be figuritively considered an "addon" or "expansion" or are these programs standalone and have little or nothing in common with C? or perhaps like Jass(which i used in the WC3 world editor) they are based off of C, and were Designed in the spirit of it, and altho learning C would build my overall undrestanding, it would not directly apply to the scripting itself?
Dear moderator god, i'm new here and i'm lost and confused, if i have posted in the inappropriate section i apologize and would like to be guided to the right location but...
for the love of god someone help me out here i'm so confused.