Quote:Original post by lucasloredo
im a little confused cows, you are a sophomore in highschool yet you have been programming for 7 years? .... making you, what, 8 when you started?

man if that's the case i really need to get going or i'll never catch up lol :-P

Yeah, actually eight is about right. Maybe 9. But it wasn't until I was 12 that I actually got a real grasp on what I was doing (I saw a good explanation of pointers and what they're actually used for, and I read a long thing about raycasting and actually took the time to get it (half) working). Before that I didn't make too much progress because I didn't have enough mathematical background and people didn't really take me seriously.

Keep in mind that there are five year olds who can program. In general, though, at least one of their parents is a professor of computer science who forces it down their throat. This is not preferable. But if you have access to the right materials, it really doesn't matter when you learn.

EDIT: As for "catching up," if you want to, you could catch up to me relatively easily. As it stands, I just finished up my roughly year-long break from programming. If you check my posting history, you'll see nothing but "GDNet Lounge" from sometime last year up to four days ago.

In general, it involved books and a lot of very, very stupid mistakes. I do not recommend taking the steps I did, unless you really want to take the long route to game programming (it entails learning VBScript ; that in itself should convince you it's largely a waste of time).

Quote:
@Telastyn: Im guessing polymorphism isn't that far in then...? =P
also, i think i might've been misunderstood, i'm not planning to make any "pretty-shiny" games for a while. My main concern is being able to do anything at all using graphics (as in, after finishing this book, i wouldn't even be able to make a graphical tic-tac-toe :-\)

It's not so much the far, as much as it's something that's one of the most commonly used features of the language. Further, templates are usually after that, and they too are really useful in making exceptional problems into merely difficult.

Sorry for the unclarity. Just using graphics is 'pretty-shiny' in this context. Adding a UI, or rather trying to do the UI and the game at the same time increases the difficulty quite a bit.

Games are just rules. Graphics just provides an interface to them.

Onto other topics... I've taken upto Calc III, [2 full years of calculus/differential equations] and found it all useful at one point.

And my father was a programmer, so it was neat to just throw a few little things together. Programming is like abstract Lego's at that age.