Dwarf King

I have used Torque 3D full time for a year now. I would say Torque 3D, not because it is superior but... Okay here we go:

• Torque 3D is free(try to imagine what it would cost if 10 people had to buy a license for like 1500 $)
• You get the source code(sooner or later you want that access, trust me)
• No payment for source code access(try to think about the price you need to pay if you need Unity access)
• You are free like in FREE to hack and bend Torque 3D in any way you want and no damn royalties
• You get an awesome community with great hacks and resources for making games
• You are not dependent on other than your teams own programming abilities(maybe at first bad but later on a true investment)
• You will learn a great deal of how an engine is put together(a great knowledge to get)

Last I would say this:

"Give a man a fish and he can eat, learn him how to fish and he can survive"

 

You want the Torque 3D engine in the long run, Unity3D is great but it is like peeing in the pants on a cold winter day. In the beginning you feel great and then you soon realize that it is getting colder again. You need to get under the hood of a game engine in order to stay over the water in this business. 

 

All the best

While many people on this great site are great programmers and great talents I would say that no one except the OP should decide whether he should stop programming or not. Perhaps the OP should learn to do what he likes and not what other people are telling him to do.

 

When reading a book or tutorial line by line should be read and understood. Every example should be read carefully and researched like one is studying the holy text itself. This counts no matter what programming you are doing(scripting or engine programming). You need to be stubborn, real stubborn and persistent.     

 

Start programming now if you feel like and stop asking others what to do. Have fun and enjoy your life. It is your life and your decisions. 

 

All the best for you.

 

Dwarf King

The one and only cplusplus tutorial I used it to get familiar with the language back then and it was fine. Also it is in a pdf format so you can sit on a cafe in (insert you favorite location) some where and read it

well I have been told to stop programming so I have taken almost 2 month break from programming. I still like programming. Can I please get a second chance to improve my programming skills.

why? keep on programming if you love it. Follow your passion

"Still, in reality, calling scripting programming is like calling chihuahua a real dog."

 

Scripting IS programming. As soon as one starts to deal with AI one will need programming skills and knowledge about algorithms and data structure to a certain extent. Oh and chihuahua IS a real dog. It is just another kind of dog.  

Great list   plus one for you Serapth, but... Torque 3D no longer costs 179$, it now cost zero $ and is free under the MIT license. Regarding books, then two new useful books have seen the daylight:

• 3D game programming all in one third edition, Kenneth C. Finney 
• Torque 3D game development cookbook, David Wyard

I sure hope the other information about other game engines are more up to date....

Torque 3D is absolutely free under the MIT license. It does require that you are up for some programming though. Go to github or garagegames.com for a free download and see one of the finest engines ever(according to me ).

look for something called "border" and "center" in .css/html. Also you need to think in "div" boxes. Now I have given you some very useful clues that you can work with.

 

A very good website for .css is this .

 

Hope that helps out

You do not need to buy an Golaith engine. Plenty of very good and free engines out there that can save you like three or four years of work.

 

Ogre and Torque3D are just a few of the fine engines out there. I am told that the free version of Unity should do just fine too. Hey LEGO Star wars is made with Unity

 

In fact do not even think about competing witht the big players in this industry. I mean they have an army of workers ready to produce and ship their stuff and even an army of hype warriors(marketing) to make people believe that they cannot exist without the newest Mass Effect etc. etc.

 

Be happy, make games

it is worth considering that the licensing terms/costs are drastically different:

 

Unity has a free indie license, but the feature set is significantly crippled - my impression is that most serious developers will be looking at a commercial license instead. A commercial unity license costs $1,500 per developer (plus $400 for each of iOS and Android publishing, if you need those), but you never have to pay any royalties.

 

The UDK requires a $100 publication license when you are preparing to ship your product, but also charges 25% royalties on any revenue after the first $50,000.

 

This presents you with an interesting cost equation. Unity's per-seat licenses are expensive upfront, but after that you never need to pay a dime. The UDK costs pretty much nothing upfront, but if your game produces a high revenue, you will be paying a fair bit of money out in royalties. My back-of-the-envelope calculation suggests that the UDK might be more cost effective for a game that grosses under ~$120,000, and Unity is significantly more cost effective for a game that exceeds that figure - but you should run your own projections to validate the choice for your particular situation.

 

One other hard fact is that you will have to shed a huge amount of cash out if you need to change something in the source codes as well. I guess options like Ogre and Torque could be worth considering as well. In fact this link could help out also: free engines

You go to amazon.com and type in "Java Game Programming" and then you get this Java Game Programming books You then read some of the reviews(some bad and some good) and then you will have something to compare with.

 

 

Hope that helps out

Let me put it this way as a game programmer who recently returned to University to get my degree. You DO NEED the degree to do anything remotely useful in game development.


Topics that you will need to know that only Univeristy can teach you are:
- Physics
- Animation
- 3D graphics (not how to use OpenGL or DX but the actual algorithms used)
- Multivariable calculus and differential equations (required for graphics and animation)
- Linear Algebra (required for graphics and animation)
- Data Structures (required in all programming)

I know the saying that you can learn anything on your own but in reality, it's not true unless you're Isaac Newton. The programming language the school uses to teach you is irrelevant as your concern should be the algorithms and how to implement them. So stay in school, study hard and apply what you learned a little at a time.

I voted you down here. Not because what you wrote was really wrong. But to claim that ONLY a university can teach you the knowledge you point out to be important for a game developer, which is utterly wrong. All the mention classes above can be learned by one self by reading the relevant books on the topic. Do a google search or a search on Amazon.com and the knowledge will be there for you to grab.

I DO agree that all the classes you mention are necessary for a game developer, but do not claim that these topics only exist at the university. We live in the age of the free internet(for now at least).

To the OP I would say if possible then by all means hang on there and endure to you graduate. If that is not possible then follow your heart

Python is a great language to start out with. It let you focus on the concept behind programming and not too much on syntax issues(which is great in the beginning) while you learn how to think as a programmer. I always recommend this book: http://www.greenteapress.com/thinkpython/

And it is free to use and learn from here and now. That book really got me and my class mates going back then. It did what no other book had done. It really teach you to be a novice programmer and then from there everything can be build upon.

Try it it out

actually we're not yet thinking for how much we'll charge for our game..our number one concern for now is the quality of the graphics and the realism of the AIs. And we are still researching on which engine is much better,.. How about UDK?.. It also have many cool and very useful features though i haven't really used it yet. I saw it's youtube vid 'Unreal Engine 3 (2012) feature highlights' ...the physics and graphics is very amazing..as to what platform we'll use, xbox is just an option..but we are prioritizing a PC game..

http://www.unrealengine.com/udk/

Now on that side you can read about the license, try out their engine for free and make a decision upon that.

Hello,

Today, I ,for some wierd reason, was all excited and gun-ho to start researching and programming with a game engine. The first game engine that popped into my head was Unity because, well...... C'mon its pretty well known. Anyways I go to google type in Unity and click on the website and I get suddenly amazed at what I see! Theres all this stuff that means nothing to me!! But it looks high-tech and smart!!! Anyways, 5 minutes later I start to question whether or not if I should go and download it or see what languages it can be written in. I obviously go with the smarter of the two decisions and went and checked the languages. Good thing I did that because I found that it doesn't carry C++! I was pretty sad after that, so I did a little background checks to see if there was a plugin or anything of the type and found that it would be somewhat difficult to do and it just would not be the same. (Next thought that came into my head.) "Maybe I should go to GameDev and see if they have any suggestions on what I can do now that I know what I can't do!!".
Thats where you guys come in. I haven't done any work at all with game engines so I have no idea what to search for or even know what to type into google (hahaha).

What do you guys suggest if the requirements are:

1. Has to be programmable in C++.
2. Doesn't matter the difficulty.
3. Has to have at least the very basics of a game engine (I don't know everything that is included in game engines soo......)
4. Oh, and it has to be free. [I'm not made of money here;)]


Thats it for the requirements and thanks in advance!!

You wait a few weeks and then you go to Garagegames website and download the by then Open sourced(MIT) free Torque 3D engine. You have access to all the source codes in C++ and you can use it for commercial use for free too. It uses a scripting language too that is close to C++ syntax.

After you have open up the hood and start looking at the source codes in C++ for this engine you will be grateful that engines like Unity and Torque has its own scripting languages. Unity has a very nice option of doing scripting in C# or a java script like language and Torque 3D uses Torque Script. However, Unity is not for free and costs quite a few $$$ if you want the pro version.

It makes a lot of work so much more easy when one can just script. I mean think about it. Each time you change a code in an engine you better rebuild it before you can test the result. With scripting such as Unity offer you, one is free to run it at once and check the result.

Also I second what Mizu says above.