Hi,
I would like to consult with you if it's a good choice to learn c / c++ game programming in the old DOS environment fashion ?
Is it a waste of time in our days or rather a good practice to sharpen my programming skills ?
Thanks in advance.
Is it a good choice to practice the old skool programming methods ?
It really depends on what you mean by "DOS environment fashion". I don't really recommend trying to get any of those old libraries running, or even coding a game as a console project (unless it's a text based game), as none of the libraries and such are really going to teach you anything that you couldn't learn from modern libraries. I DO however recommend training yourself to be very frugal with memory and cpu consumption, as I've seen too many programmers nowadays taking advantage of modern computing power, and they forget just how quickly those resources can dwindle. I've found it's much more beneficial to really learn good programming practices *before* you try to get into game development, because knowing how to create proper, efficient object oriented code is the best foundation, not necessarily the game coding practices themselves. Get a good library like SDL, or microsoft's XNA, so you can focus more on the coding practices and less on the mechanics of how a game works to get started, then you can move up to opengl or directx coding when you feel more confident in your abilities. I can't stress enough efficient coding practices though, I like to program on an old laptop with limited memory and processing power, because if I can get a game running without any hiccups on that, then I know it won't have any problems on more modern machines. + 2 cents
It is rarely a good choice to learn c++ if you're posting in for beginners.
It *is* a good idea to get a solid programming foundation before starting in with graphical libraries.
It *is* a good idea to get a solid programming foundation before starting in with graphical libraries.
Console mode programs are useful things even when you've got some experience under you're belt. I've an entire library of test programs for various scenarios, and I'd guess that maybe 75% of them are console mode.
The big advantage of console mode for beginners is that it lets you focus on the important stuff - algorithms and program structure - without being distracted or confused by having to also deal with UI code. An incredible amount of commercial console-mode programs still get released every year, and many of them are even fairly large (and expensive!) "enterprise-class" tools. So console mode is most definitely far from dead, and it's difficult to see it ever being so.
The advice about being frugal with memory and CPU is good, but don't make it a religion. In a real program you'll often find yourself in situations where you're doing what looks on the surface like it's "wasting memory", but in reality it's part of a tradeoff, the other side of which is increased performance elsewhere. A more balanced approach is best IMO, where you view memory as a resource that's there to be used, but you don't go unnecessarily nuts with it (same applies to CPU).
The big advantage of console mode for beginners is that it lets you focus on the important stuff - algorithms and program structure - without being distracted or confused by having to also deal with UI code. An incredible amount of commercial console-mode programs still get released every year, and many of them are even fairly large (and expensive!) "enterprise-class" tools. So console mode is most definitely far from dead, and it's difficult to see it ever being so.
The advice about being frugal with memory and CPU is good, but don't make it a religion. In a real program you'll often find yourself in situations where you're doing what looks on the surface like it's "wasting memory", but in reality it's part of a tradeoff, the other side of which is increased performance elsewhere. A more balanced approach is best IMO, where you view memory as a resource that's there to be used, but you don't go unnecessarily nuts with it (same applies to CPU).
The advice about being frugal with memory and CPU is good, but don't make it a religion. In a real program you'll often find yourself in situations where you're doing what looks on the surface like it's "wasting memory", but in reality it's part of a tradeoff, the other side of which is increased performance elsewhere. A more balanced approach is best IMO, where you view memory as a resource that's there to be used, but you don't go unnecessarily nuts with it (same applies to CPU).[/quote]
This is very true, a classic example being large precomputed tables. A novice programmer will go "this is faster, it's just a memory lookup, memory is there to be used", whereas somebody with more experience will actually realize the table will be too large to fit in the CPU cache, causing cache misses to occur a lot more and introducing memory latency in the equation, which may negatively impact other areas of the program in a way which might not be immediately obvious. Same deal with spending hours optimizing away a part of the program which only represents 1% of its running time...
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