Quote:Or I was thinking maybe I should just study more math it took me forever to really understand and write my own bubble sort and I look at things like radix sorts and cry.

Good Idea! Someone who actually wants to learn the math before programming a 3D Game and failing. If it really took you a long time to implement a bubble sort, then I would suggest studying a little more math before moving on to any more programming. Bubble sort, and Radix sort for that matter, is just understanding some logic. I've never used Radix Sort in my games, yet, so I don't know if its neccesary to understand it.

Sure, like the above poster said, you could use SDL and make some 2D games, the math that is required in most 2D Games is high school geometry, but if you want to truly understand what you're doing in 3D, you should have at least a somewhat decent knowledge of the math behind 3D computer graphics. I recommend this tutorial (click) if you want to learn some vector math which will be very helpful if you make anything 3D.

Also, if you just program as a hobby, and you want to make some neat games, then I would suggest SDL, but if you really want to learn what's going on, use DirectX. Sure you can call one of SDL's functions and load almost any kind of file with one line of code, but if you write your own loader using DirectX, then you can get a much better understanding as to how images are loaded. People say that "use SDL, DirectX is so complex", but I don't think DirectX is that bad. When I first learned DirectX, it took me about a week to understand how to get a window set up and start blitting some images using DirectDraw. When I used SDL, it took me about 1 hour to understand how to get it set up and working.

You'll never truely know 'when your ready' you just jump right in and see what you can do :)

And yeah learn math...you only need trig if your going to do 2D but beyond that i couldnt tell you as thats out of my field somewhat.

You're ready when you can follow the code. The best thing to do is assign yourself progressivly more difficult projects and then finish them. For example, first make a black jack game using plain text only. Then make a graphical version. Then add music. And so on.

A good way to learn new concepts is to find existing code that implements the concept and then tweak it to see what does what.

If you're trying to learn OpenGL or whatever go to GameTutorials.com and download a sample. Then mess with the code to see how changing things affects the output. And then try to expand the code to do something more complex.

Learning more math is never a bad thing, specially if you eventually want to get into 3D programming. Most games nowadays are developed in C++, but if you don't think you are ready for C++ yet, you may want to consider C#.

C# is slower than C++, but for a beginner it may be easier to learn since you wont have to worry about dynamic memory allocation, pointers, COM, or anything like that. You can basically jump right into the programming without having to worry about a lot of the nitty gritty details you would need for C++.

If you have your mind set on games, your end goal should probably be C++ ... but C# might be a good next step along the way.

You can download free copies of microsoft's visual studio 2005 express betas (including C#) here: http://lab.msdn.microsoft.com/express/

If you dont want to run the beta versions, I think there are some other free C# compilers available, although I don't know what they are called.

edit: You might also want to pick up a good general book on data structures and algorithms. Learning the theoretical side of programming will help you out no matter what language you are using.