Hey, I am currently 16 years old. I bought Delphi 5 when i was 11-12 and played around with the IDE for awhile. Than i got into VB and have been coding with it since then. So ive used VB for roughly 4 years. My question is now what? Ive used several other languages but havent got into any of them like i have VB. I'm currently reading my 2nd c++ book(im using vc++ 6). Should I port to Vb.net? Should I get really good with c++? Or should I just learn c#? Any help would be appreciated. Jordan Weber www.pheonixsoftware.com

You should learn either c++ or c# in my opinion. .NET languages may be the wave of the future but i love my c++. I personally would reccomend c++ over c# simply out of preference, but as i said, .NET languages may be the wave of the future

hope that helps
-Dan

I've spent the last few months learning the syntax for c++. Whats the next step? All ive done with c++ is console applications. Should i learn how to make guis in c++ or should i go straight to dx/opengl. From what ive seen c++ appears to be used moreso with console apps and than games. Ive found little gui applications from c++(is this correct?) Thanks

Thats definitely not the case, as far as commercial games are concerned c++ is the weapon of choice. I don't reccomend doing GUI's with c++ though as frankly, c++ aint very good for it, if you do go get GTK or wxWidgets. Instead i say you should go learn OpenGL (i personally found D3D to be too hard when i just started c++ (simply because of vertex buffers and all the pointer dereferencing and such just kinda confused my poor 14 year old (at the time) brain)) OpenGl on the other hand, doesnt make you mess with vertex buffers when you begin, instead you have the option of using immediate mode, which is a great testing tool even later on in OpenGL development. This is not to say D3D doesnt have its merits, i love it as well, but i simply prefer OpenGL myself (opinion, not flamebait) and find openGL to be much more begginer friendly. Actually, one other option for you would be SDL, which is a great API for first learning to program games in c and c++ as its very simple and allows you to do 2d graphics easily, and 3d graphics when combined with openGL

hope that helps
-Dan

Ok so once i am comfortable with console applications i should go straight to graphics? Personally i think ill go DX because i am very comfortable with it from VB's DX SDKs and ive never used OpenGL. The SDL you talked about reminds me of.. BitBlt from the windows API. Comparable? Any good websites on DX for c++?

Thanks for the Help

msdn is probably your best reference, as for getting started http://www.gametutorials.com used to be a high and mighty source of tutorials for both d3d and openGL but now many of them GASP cost money... i believe the beggining tutorials are still free though. As for SDL and BitBlt i do believe most of the drawing uses blitting, but since ive never actually used SDL myself ive just heard great things (i will soon start using sdl for initialization though)

also: http://www.ultimategameprogramming.com/ is also a great source of tutorials

hope that helps
-Dan

Thanks for the help.

Thanks for the input ill have to check it out. From what ive taken from this.. Use VB/C# for Windows GUi apps and use VC++ for most of my gaming?