Firstly, welcome to GDnet. Go here, and here.

Quote:
One game is an MMORPG, and the other, which I plan to work on first, is an RTS.

These are both fairly complex projects, but especially the MMORPG. You'll find most people around here very wary of anyone wanting to make a MMORPG, especially if that person doesnt have previous game-making experience. MMORPG's are one of the hardest tasks you could possibly pick, and we see on average about 2 posts per week or more from people wanting to start these. I know of one person who's succeeded. It's a VERY hard task.

The RTS is a more attainable goal, but is still very challenging. I'd highly recommend doing some much simpler games first to get some programming practice. Pong, Tetris, and Pacman clones are the common recommendations for this - and it wont be wasted experience - these small projects do contain most of the elements of a 'real' game, such as a main loop, rendering system, basic AI, user input, etc - and as the projects are much smaller, you'll be able to concentrate on learning the techniques instead of having to worry about all the details of your major project. In the long run, this tends to be a lot easier.

In addition to some books (online tutorials are also quite good), you'll need a compiler, and you'll probably want an IDE to go with it. There are recommendations for these at the links I provided.

Good luck. [smile]

Quote:Original post by isLuForever
Thanks =] And sorry if I left this out... I don't plan to actually do 100% of the coding. I do the stuff like designing items, unit stats, spells, maps, ect... balancing the game :] I just feel that I should learn as much programming as I can, so I can technically "do" something ;]

Alright then, that seems like a good attitude to take towards this - we also get many people with nothing but ideas wanting people to program thier games for them - all the programmers here have thier own ideas already, so learning to do some of the work yourself is an excellent way of attracting help that you may not be able to get otherwise. Definately look at some basics, and make sure you write up a good design document for your project. There are some sample design documents in the Resources section of the site, and you can ask for additional help either here, or in the design forum if you need it. Make a post in Help Wanted once you've learnt what you need to know and prepared your material if you need to find programmers, artists, musicians, etc.

Once again, good luck with your project.

Quote:Original post by isLuForever

Quote:Original post by Anonymous Poster
What exactly do you mean by a 'html convert-to-exe thing?'

You know, that's a good question... maybe I meant a program to actually make your code run as an exe file? Or maybe I was reading up on html and slipped it in here by mistake. I think I meant a good program to use for your code, such as... that .NET thing that comes with Microsoft Office.

*** The compiler. Term slipped my mind for some reason.

Judging from your post there, you may have confused HTML source-code with source-code in general. HTML (or Hyper Text Markup Language), is used to create webpages, and you don't use a compiler with it, you simply create a HTML file (with either a .html or .htm file extension), and put it on a webserver. This file is then read by browsers, which parse (read) the code, and display the page.

Exe files can be compiled from sourcecode in many different programming languages - some common ones include C, C++, BASIC (and variants such as MS Visual Basic), Perl, Java, and so on and so forth. The code is written (often using an IDE, or Integrated Development Environment - basically a fancy text editior with some helpful tools such as a debugger, however, a plain text editor, such as notepad.exe on the MS Windows OS is fine). A compiler is then used to translate this code into a form the computer can understand, and this is your executable file. It's actually a little more complicated than this, but for now that should be enough of an explanation for you. Be sure to read the For Beginners Forum FAQ (which I already provided a link to above), it contains some links to IDEs and compilers you could possibly use.