Where To [Re]Start?

not telling · 2014-04-03T02:17:01

I realize that you all get this kind of question a lot. I should know, as I have been on these forums under a different account for upwards of 2 years pretending to be a half-competent game developer. The truth is, I'm not. A little more than two years ago, I realized that the games I was playing were corny and weren't fun and I wanted to make my own. The reason wasn't money or fame, and I knew making games wasn't a fun process of no work, and I knew that most games are highly unsuccessful. I just wanted to be the creator of a community like Notch (I wasn't expecting one millionth of his financial success, though). In college I had no friends, but that is a different topic. I, like so many people, thought I could jump right into 3D game development and "learn as I go." I thought the game idea was simple enough: a 3D island where players walk around designing concrete fountains that spew out viscous magic fluid. Armed with extensive math skills (linear algebra specifically), a pretty good handle on Newtonian physics, microcontroller programming, and having read K&R, I thought I could do it and that I was somehow exempt from the learning curve everyone faces. I thought that if I knew the math everything else would fall together easily.I haven't written a single line of compilable code for my magic island project in the past two years I have been dedicated to it. I begin telling myself that "today I will make a working input/render loop that will move around a virtual camera and render the image to screen," just OpenGL and SDL/Xlib. I then get frustrated at the fact that I would have to spend the next few weeks just learning these API's and not actually implementing my systems that I have designed, and I quit. I often read Nvidia's whitepapers and I really enjoy speculating about graphics programming (since I never learned OpenGL or DirectX I can't practically do any). I have learned a lot of theory, but have never practiced it. I need to restart and do it right, starting from the beginning. My uncertainty is just that I am not sure if I should start at the base level (i.e. Tetris) or if I can start somewhere a little bit more advanced. What do you recommend I do now? Thank you so much for any responses. EDIT: I do know about how OpenGL and D3D work by an overview perspective, but I can't write a C program to do shit with it.

For Beginners

Started by cherryWine March 26, 2014 01:25 AM

10 comments, last by cherryWine 10 years ago

DekuTree64

1,170

March 28, 2014 07:25 AM

OpenGL via SDL is pretty simple to get things rendering on the screen. What's difficult is the 3D model data... learning the general structure of 3D model files, and then designing your renderer (and collision) code and getting data from your 3D modeller loaded into whatever kind of structures you use. What is your favorite modeller, BTW?

Since you come from a microcontroller background, if you have any inclination toward console development, Nintendo DS might be a fun system to make your game on. It's also a good stepping stool toward OpenGL, because the overall structure of the 3D hardware is quite similar, but just a bit more specialized so there's less to worry about.

But either way, I'd be happy to help you get started translating those theories into code, especially if you like the C style of doing things I'm on MSN, Yahoo, and XMPP/Jabber.org with this username (except Yahoo is dekutree65), if you have any of those messengers. Or I can just post stuff here.