Thread: Really Where do you start?....

Yea, but as I said.. it's just code with dumped in comments

Ruski, if you know C, then the comments will explain what the code does (which you should already understand because it is C). Therefore it teaches you stuff.

I agree with Ruski though... sort of. Lotsa people don't want to learn from the book how to say "hello world, variable 1 is a. Variable 2 is b. Variable 3 is c."

So they wanna make a game. And to be perfectly truthful, I got my start in Java (yes, that's java and not c++) from a course which starts out right from makin a game. True, it took a while to figure everything out, but if I started learning from a book, I woulda had to take around 3X as long to learn the same stuff.

So my point is, maybe Ruski is a beginner and doesn't understand the code from GameTutorials himself

I'm kidding, I'm kidding, no need to throttle me yet But still... oh whatever, I'll shut up now

I personally find that tutorials that include very little code, but explain the theory behind things are far more useful than the stuff that is on gametutorials.com. Gametutorials.com is great if you just want to copy and paste someone else's code and not actually do any of the work yourself, or understand the theory behind anything...but it's hard to imrove on something that you don't understand the basics of...sure, you can write the code, but do you understand why that is the code you need?

Oooh, you canned it! I remember trying to figure out how they did their transparency, and scratching my head till i was bald...

I say pick a peice and just jump in. Putting on paper, as suggested above, may help you find your starting point.

The best advice I can give is to just start. If you wait to long you may allow yourself to get overwhelmed by the sheer scope of the project.

Don't worry too much about making mistakes. You can always start again and just copy chunks of code that you have already created.

How does that saying go, "A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step." (Something like that) A program with a million lines of code begins with a single keystroke.

My very first game started out not even as a game. I started to play with graphics, find a more effiecient way to draw geometry. I ended up drawing a craps table. Then I added text to it. Then I found a way to make each area an independantly recognizable zone. This is when I actually thought, "hey this could be doable to make into a game." From there adding the other pieces just came naturally. I look back on it now and think man did I suck. Look at this spagetti code. But, hey, it worked.

Originally posted by JoshG
Ruski, if you know C, then the comments will explain what the code does (which you should already understand because it is C). Therefore it teaches you stuff.

Yea but I dont know C

Do you mean you dont know C or C++? If you know one, you pretty much know the other (except for classes I guess). If you dont know C you should learn it before trying to make games.

I know C++, but not much of it. Still got lots and lots to learn

If you dont know C you should learn it before trying to make games.

Actually, I started with Pascal when I was in grade 6 or 7, then abandoned that after a week or so, and started learning C. After another 2 weeks or so, I got frustrated with bugs coming from code that should (in my opinion at the time) have been perfect. Then I took a course in Java, which I found much more entertaining (we started right off with a graphical game). After a while I took a C++ course, in which my previous experience in C and Java really helped... though not much, since some stupid guy put me in a class where we made a graphics engine with DirectX 8 and added networking support... I was too busy trying to figure out what an "IDirect3DDevice8*" was supposed to be. Anyhoo, I ended up learning c++ on my own, with hardly any knowledge of C. And so, without learning C, I made a game

So my point is, you don't have to learn C to make games.

Ooh, you must be special! I had to get books

So did i Didn't work for me tho

Originally posted by Hunter2
Ooh, you must be special! I had to get books

what book did you get?