Hello,
As ths is my first post I'd like to quickly introduce myself before I ask my questions. My name is Dan, I am a 3d Artist/Animator and over the past year have been studying C++ and hope to one day utilise my programming and art skills together for game development.
I have spent quite some time reading books and working through tutorials learning the fundimentals of programming and the C++ language, sometimes in general terms and sometimes game specific. Recently though, I have started to slow down and have come to a bit of a learning block. After a year of study I don't have a great deal to show for my hard work and its occured to me that I have never really put my knowledge into practise. I've found that I understand most of the things I have covered well, but, as to actually using them I find I have a bit of a mental block.
For example, I have gone through many of the quizes on this site and pretty much get 100% of the questions right. Ones I don't I look up and understand where I went wrong. Then I moved onto the challenges and tried the 3 'code completion' tasks and managed to do each one very quickly indeed, from memory, 100% correct. So then I moved onto the help free and just about got through the first one, looking up many parts from past tutorials i've covered, but then the second has causes me to grind to a halt. If I looked at the solution I would probably understand all the code used, but I'm just not able to get there from scratch. It feels like i'm not in the right frame of mind to approch programming problems yet.
So my question is does anyone have any advice? Can anyone remember how they first started to apply there knowlege when first learning? Is anyone going through a similar problem now?
Thanks for your help, sorry for such a long first post, I feel i just needed to explain where I'm at, at the moment so hopefully can get some advice and start to move on from here.
Dan