Quote:Original post by lucasloredo
On a general note, C++ is sometimes a bit difficult for me to fully understand. I can do the commands and statements, and understand when to use certain things (for the most part) but its hard for me to fully grasp something that i'm learning without knowing why its happening. My mind (and i'm assuming a lot of your minds as well) works best when i know what's happening behind the scenes.

I would guess that you guys would suggest taking a computer science course... however, being a sophomore in highschool limits my possibilities. Would you suggest a summer course in said subject? I live in Austin, TX and have easy access to the University of Texas.... are there any good programs there that you guys know of?

thanks again,
Lucas

I'm a highschool sophmore too, actually. My recommendation is to read books (lots of books), read this forum (and don't be afraid to ask questions; In general the more specific a question is, the better), and read anything else you can. A good, college-level computer science course can be good (it helped me a lot), but any class that isn't good will only hurt you (and almost any highschool class at all will hurt you, too.)

If you feel like you don't really know what's going on, my suggestion is to read a book that goes a bit more in depth. Also, even if you don't read that great of books, if you have lots of good examples with at least some explanation of what it is that they do, you'll be able to get quite a lot. Be warned that if you see something and it doesn't seem like there's enough code to achieve the desired effect, then there almost certainly isn't. Beginning programmers usually are surprised that the code has to do more or less everything to produce the final output (of course, there are shortcuts to things like physics, but generally you'll end up needing to learn most of what a particular library does before you can use it correctly). Each bit of code itself is generally quite straightforward, though, so it's how you think of a game world that will really allow you to deal with it.

Quote:Original post by I_Smell_Tuna
There is a link somewhere on GDNet of tons of file formats, which will be very useful.

wotsit.org?

Quote:Original post by lucasloredo
How long have you been programming cows? Where are you at in terms of skill level, and how did you get there?

its nice to know that im not there's other people out there my age that have had success =]

Probably... wow, I guess I've been programming for more than seven years, actually. I know a good bit of C++ and Java (C++ better than Java, but with Java you don't really have to deal with pointers in the same way), and quite a bit about data structures, etc. The game I'm trying to put together right now doesn't use anything beyond what's in your book aside from OpenGL, though.

I had the "EXACTLY" same experience. I read the book, and then I saw that inheritance and polymorphism. It had no graphics! But it came in useful. I wrote a letter to the author on his wesite (here) and he answered and said that I should check out SDL for graphics as it is pretty easy to pick up. After that my own suggestion would be OpenGL, as it seems sort of less confusing(to me). Good luck.

P.S. He also said to check out 'Focus on SDL'(a book) and to check out some of the MANY tutorials online.

Quote:Original post by lucasloredo
how much math do you use in C++ or other programming languages? I'm taking pre-cal right now as a sophomore. I'm very good at math, but I have a feeling a lot of this knowledge and advanced classes won't do me much good in the long run haha.

Like SiCrane said, it depends. You'll use more than you think, particularly if you want to control the finer details of how your program works. None of the math is unmanageable, though. Even when I was younger I'd teach myself little bits of linear algebra or calculus to keep up with whatever I was reading, but it was little bits that you could grasp in a day, rather than years, particularly if you don't care exactly why something works, just how to use it. Math, though, is something you're much better off taking classes in (at least than programming). In general, there are better math teachers (more of them), and better-refined teaching (it's been around longer).