EPT
there was a time when i was really interesting in becoming a programmer but its just way over my head... i just cannot deal with such complicated mathWant to program video games? - Page 10
| Blogs > CecilSunkure |
|
Kinshuk
India116 Posts
there was a time when i was really interesting in becoming a programmer but its just way over my head... i just cannot deal with such complicated math | ||
|
Spikeke
Canada106 Posts
Programming is just one slice of the game development pie, and just because you know how to program, doesn't mean you know how to make games. A programmer writes code, not "make games". There are many aspects of game design, understanding the psychology of the player and what incentives drive the player are also important. I would also say that most games have more artists than programmers on staff. Deciding where you fit and pushing your skills to the limit is what you have to do to get recognized. Great games are made with great teams. Thus, inter-personal skills are also important, no one wants to hire you if you can't work along with anyone. I would never imagine I would be a programmer if you asked me 10 years ago. I'm not even a math genius, I failed grade 10 math when I was a teen and had to take it over in summer school. My point is, do what you love and keep at it, and you'll get where you want to be. Be persistent and never give up. Anyway enough jibber jabber, got to get back to work :S | ||
|
Amaroq64
United States75 Posts
I haven't programmed any games, but I've done some of the SDL tutorials on an SDL tutorial website. My programming experience is mostly making web pages. Which I know doesn't really count as programming until you get into things like javascript and php. But making games is one of my dreams in life. Just because I have amazing game ideas that I want to bring to life. One of the things I've realized is that just programming for the sake of programming bores me. The thrill I get out of programming is the same thrill that an artist gets out of drawing: Coming up with an amazing idea and bringing it to life. | ||
|
ddengster
Singapore129 Posts
Some advice from a fellow DP-Sg student On http://cecilsunkure.blogspot.com/2011/12/windows-console-game-painters-algorithm.html, whats that pile of hardcoded garbage? I hope you're not putting that into your game. Write a .bmp image importer, and never put that huge array(and in fact any hardcoded stuff) in any source code again. And don't hardcode 255 as 'transparency'. Maintain a frame buffer with depth buffer values, or do z-ordering per image. Avoid such hardcoding especially in the early stages of your development. Plus, I'm surprised you have the time to blog given DP's unforgiving schedule. You'll find yourself watching less starcraft as time goes on. | ||
|
KeksX
Germany3634 Posts
On December 08 2011 22:34 ddengster wrote: @CecilSunkure Some advice from a fellow DP-Sg student On http://cecilsunkure.blogspot.com/2011/12/windows-console-game-painters-algorithm.html, whats that pile of hardcoded garbage? I hope you're not putting that into your game. Write a .bmp image importer, and never put that huge array(and in fact any hardcoded stuff) in any source code again. For learning purposes it's perfectly fine, even though the next step should always be how to avoid that. | ||
|
ShadowWolf
United States197 Posts
On December 08 2011 22:34 ddengster wrote: @CecilSunkure Some advice from a fellow DP-Sg student On http://cecilsunkure.blogspot.com/2011/12/windows-console-game-painters-algorithm.html, whats that pile of hardcoded garbage? I hope you're not putting that into your game. Write a .bmp image importer, and never put that huge array(and in fact any hardcoded stuff) in any source code again. And don't hardcode 255 as 'transparency'. Maintain a frame buffer with depth buffer values, or do z-ordering per image. Avoid such hardcoding especially in the early stages of your development. Plus, I'm surprised you have the time to blog given DP's unforgiving schedule. You'll find yourself watching less starcraft as time goes on. Writing this in to a bitmap and then decoding it would be an enormous hassle because bitmap encoding applications I've seen don't support CHAR_INFO stuff. Unless I'm missing something, you'd end up probably having to build a bunch of meta-data and analysis to transform the bitmap to the desired CHAR_INFO struct. What he should do is put it in a source file and load it (which maybe is a long-term plan). Considering his game is a console app and must be written specifically to do console stuff, I'm pretty sure that any type of abstraction he does is going to just make life more miserable for him with absolutely no value later-on. There aren't really translatable concepts in a cruddy win32 console window that will easily move over to a Win32 non-console app. He'll have to do plenty of hacks just to get everything working. While learning, adding something like a generic rendering subsystem just adds complexity where you don't need it to a system that will never use it. Besides, going through the pain of taking something from Win32Console -> Generic Console (for example) at least once is probably good because it'll help you understand how to better build a generic console abstraction. When you have a good understanding of what the differences are then you will have an easier time of visualizing where you need abstraction and where it's unnecessary. | ||
|
ddengster
Singapore129 Posts
On December 09 2011 00:12 ShadowWolf wrote: Writing this in to a bitmap and then decoding it would be an enormous hassle because bitmap encoding applications I've seen don't support CHAR_INFO stuff. Unless I'm missing something, you'd end up probably having to build a bunch of meta-data and analysis to transform the bitmap to the desired CHAR_INFO struct. What he should do is put it in a source file and load it (which maybe is a long-term plan). Considering his game is a console app and must be written specifically to do console stuff, I'm pretty sure that any type of abstraction he does is going to just make life more miserable for him with absolutely no value later-on. There aren't really translatable concepts in a cruddy win32 console window that will easily move over to a Win32 non-console app. He'll have to do plenty of hacks just to get everything working. While learning, adding something like a generic rendering subsystem just adds complexity where you don't need it to a system that will never use it. Besides, going through the pain of taking something from Win32Console -> Generic Console (for example) at least once is probably good because it'll help you understand how to better build a generic console abstraction. When you have a good understanding of what the differences are then you will have an easier time of visualizing where you need abstraction and where it's unnecessary. It might be a bit daunting at first, but the rewards justify the cost. It's much, much easier to open a picture-editing program like photoshop/gimp/etc and edit the correct color values, save the file and load it into the game. Compare that to putting lots of 255s and color values into hardcoded arrays. You'll be wasting more time doing these kinds of stuff than actually learning things like how file formats are stored, etc. No to mention that if you have to change image sizes and so on, you'll have to maintain the array to make sure crashes don't happen. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BMP_file_format details the bmp file format image. It's probably one of the easier file formats to decode, and I'm sure that you can google for code on decoding such stuff. Basically, you try to strip away all the headers and excess information, leaving the RGB values that you can store. Many programmers copy paste code. Don't be one of them. Make sure you understand what the code is actually doing. | ||
|
CecilSunkure
United States2829 Posts
On December 08 2011 22:34 ddengster wrote: @CecilSunkure Some advice from a fellow DP-Sg student On http://cecilsunkure.blogspot.com/2011/12/windows-console-game-painters-algorithm.html, whats that pile of hardcoded garbage? I hope you're not putting that into your game. Write a .bmp image importer, and never put that huge array(and in fact any hardcoded stuff) in any source code again. And don't hardcode 255 as 'transparency'. Maintain a frame buffer with depth buffer values, or do z-ordering per image. Avoid such hardcoding especially in the early stages of your development. Plus, I'm surprised you have the time to blog given DP's unforgiving schedule. You'll find yourself watching less starcraft as time goes on. That's all out of the scope of a freshman first-semester game and pretty pointless. If my grade depends on my freshmen game being playable with a certain amount of content, a BMP parser and proper image rendering isn't going to help. Plus, we wrote tools to manipulate large arrays of characters and didn't "waste time" doing it by hand. If you have proper time management you can do a lot of things while attending DigiPen. | ||
|
Loophole
United States867 Posts
I would suggest reading Andre La'Mothe's books on game programming. He's an entertaining read, and you can learn a lot of the basics from him. | ||
|
rrowland
United States84 Posts
On November 17 2011 06:31 ClysmiC wrote: Awesome blog, I'm very interested in developing video games as well. I'm currently in HS, learning Java in my C.S. class. I hear that C is very similar to Java, so I figure in the future I can easily learn C, but I've never really known where to go from there. I'll definitely check out the podcast and your game blog. Looks awesome =) C is Procedural and Java is Object-Oriented. What you may have heard is C# is similar to Java. Basically, C# is Microsoft's Windows-proprietary version of Java. They copied Java almost exactly, with the obvious difference being some syntax and the .NET libraries. | ||
|
CecilSunkure
United States2829 Posts
| ||
| ||
