Game Programming Advice

[Sumner]

Hey everyone, I have a few questions about starting out with game programming. I'll try to make them as specific as possible.

So first I'll explain my goal. I want to be able to make a very basic 3D RPG game by next year. Just a simple map, some type of opponents walking around on it, a main character and a very basic fighting system to attack the opponents. After that I just hope to create more complicated RPG games step by step. I will be programming in C++ (I have already dabbled in it but I will really start to learn it soon).

1. Is there a recommended game engine to use? Does using C++ make a difference in what game engine I'm going to use? I was thinking UDK because it's free and seems to be pretty legitimate. There are also very extensive tutorials online. Here's the link: http://www.youtube.c...z/videos?view=1
This YouTube user also provides many other tutorials.

2. For whatever game engine you decided to recommend, do you know of any tutorials or books to help me learn how to use the game engine efficiently?

3. Are there any recommended websites or books to look at to learn C++? I will obviously have to go through more than one website or book, so I would really appreciate a recommended list. I want to know the language inside and out.

4. Should I learn any other language in addition to C++? Use one language for logic and another language for a different aspect of the game?


That's all I have right now. Please feel free to add to my list of questions if you have more advice for a beginner. Thanks for reading this!

 

[smealum]

Hey everyone, I have a few questions about starting out with game programming. I'll try to make them as specific as possible.

So first I'll explain my goal. I want to be able to make a very basic 3D RPG game by next year. Just a simple map, some type of opponents walking around on it, a main character and a very basic fighting system to attack the opponents. After that I just hope to create more complicated RPG games step by step. I will be programming in C++ (I have already dabbled in it but I will really start to learn it soon).

1. Is there a recommended game engine to use? Does using C++ make a difference in what game engine I'm going to use? I was thinking UDK because it's free and seems to be pretty legitimate. There are also very extensive tutorials online. Here's the link: http://www.youtube.c...z/videos?view=1
This YouTube user also provides many other tutorials.

2. For whatever game engine you decided to recommend, do you know of any tutorials or books to help me learn how to use the game engine efficiently?

3. Are there any recommended websites or books to look at to learn C++? I will obviously have to go through more than one website or book, so I would really appreciate a recommended list. I want to know the language inside and out.

4. Should I learn any other language in addition to C++? Use one language for logic and another language for a different aspect of the game?


That's all I have right now. Please feel free to add to my list of questions if you have more advice for a beginner. Thanks for reading this!

Well I'm probably not the best person to answer these questions but I'll try anyway.

1. Using C++ is probably best if you want to use a pre-made game/physics/graphics/whatever engine as that's probably what most use (as opposed to C anyway), and C engines could probably be used in C++, while the reverse might not necessarily be true.
I've never used a "game engine" so I can't recommend any to you. In fact, if you really want to learn I'd recommend against using such a thing, at least for now. Your goal is simple enough that it can very well be achieved by doing all the code yourself, or only using other people's code for specific stuff like physics/collisions. It might take longer than using something like UDK (and even that's not a given), but think about it : once you know how to do all that stuff yourself, using a pre-made game engine will be a breeze, you'll just have to learn about the specifics of the engine and you'll be good to go. On the other hand, if you learn by using something that does pretty much everything for you and dumbs everything down (I've never used UDK so I don't know if that's indeed what it does), then you'll end up with a rather limited skillset and you likely won't be able to move beyond the boundaries of the engine you've chosen.

2. N/A, any good C/C++ tutorial (I don't know any though, sorry) and a good opengl tutorial (again, don't know any).

3. I don't know, sorry.

4. Not really. Once your game becomes more complicated you might want to implement some sort of script language to be able to create more dynamic content, but you won't really have to "learn" that language, it'll most likely come quite naturally. At any rate, C/C++ is great to get around.

So yeah, I guess my answer isn't quite what you were hoping for so sorry about that. In any case, good luck with whatever you choose to do.