Game programming

[HFrankenstein]

Any game programmers out there have some wisdom for someone who's never done it before? I've been playing around with a game concept in my head the past few weeks, but I've never coded a game before. There aren't any courses on it offered at my college, so can anyone recommend any books/tutorials/etc. for me to learn from?

Additionally, if anyone's interested, I could sure use a few coders to help out when/if this project ever gets underway. No way in hell I'm posting my idea on the board, but if you wanna talk in private...

[pythonite]

Have you given any thought to what development language/api you want to use? Of course, platform and functionality play a major role in what api you choose...

I'm currently developing a ego-shooter just for kicks... I love game programming due to the immediate results (clarification: program something cool, then you get to see it )

A few places to start in regards to tutorials (opengl specific):
www.gametutorials.com
nehe.gamedev.net

Feel free to PM me for any questions/advice...

And most of all: have fun! (that goes for any type of programming!)

[cheerios]

http://gamasutra.com/ <-- also a good resource

[Jack Ruby]

http://www.gamasutra.com has tons of articles on everything from philosophical design issues to vertex shaders to bit-twiddly network programming. Highly recommended.

http://www.flipcode.com and http://www.gamedev.net also have tons of useful articles and resources.

http://www.gametutorials.com has tutorials on networking, opengl, directx, win32 programming, and loads more.

http://nehe.gamedev.net is a great place to start learning about OpenGL coding. If the game you're thinking of is a 3D game, I strongly advise you to go with OpenGL as your graphics API - it's easy to learn, widely supported and very powerful, especially in combination with the latest hardware and shading languages (like Nvidia's Cg language).

If I could give you any advice on game coding/design : design before you code, plan before you design, and think before you plan. If you don't, you'll be knee-deep in code before you know it, without ever getting anywhere.

I should know - I've been trying to program little games for years, with very little success. But now that I'm a little older and I've come to my senses, I'm just reading all the articles and tutorials, making notes, writing little test programs, slowly working on a design document for my game, and building up the confidence I need to jump into my game project. So should you.

Good luck !

[T.U.B.]

Activision has released their sourcecode for Return to Castle Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory Multiplayer. It's worth a look on how major gamedevelopers are working!
(Enemy territory Multiplayer was released for free after production was halted because there wasn't any money left...)

You can download their source from gamershell:
http://www.gamershell.com/news_Sourc...bEnemyTe.shtml

[Jack Ruby]

It should always be mentioned that the RTCW:ET source is the GAME source code, not the ENGINE source code. The game source defines the rules and interactions between everything in the game itself; the graphics engine, networking and everything else is not included.

Some game developers do make a habit of releasing the full source code to their games once they have become unprofitable; id Software for example has released the source to every game they've made from Wolfenstein 3D to Quake 2. Likewise, the Quake 3 engine will probably be made open-source in a year or two. If you want to get an idea what the full source to a first-person shooter looks like, check out the Q2 source code. It's written in pure ANSI C though, so don't expect to gain much high-level C++ knowledge from it.

Well that, or you could look for the leaked Half-Life 2 source on IRC...

[cheerios]

and beware the FBI while you're at it. I hear the FBI has been making raids...

[HFrankenstein]

I'm surprised no one's mentioned the Freespace 2 source yet.

pythonite: most likely C/C++ and OpenGL, for Windows.

[Cuball]

you'll need a lot of time before understanding source code like a Quake2 game, I think as a starter you should start looking at something a bit smaller

[webfiend]

Everybody else's ideas are best, because they seem to have been written by people who actually know something. That won't stop me from throwing in my 2 cents, though

You may want to play with PyGame (http://www.pygame.org/) a little as you get the basic ideas of game programming down. It relies on SDL (http://www.libsdl.org/), a cross-platform, open source multimedia library. Don't let that scare you off, though. SDL and PyGame both get used for making games in the real world - even in the Windows world that I hear about on occasion.

The big advantage of PyGame is that it is written in Python, which is a very easy language to get up to speed on. You said you hadn't programmed any games before. I don't know whether that also means you hadn't done much programming at all, but Python and PyGame are worth considering.

There are several tutorials available at the PyGame Web site, and I recently bumped across a book on using Python for game programming in my local giant mega-bookstore. I didn't have time to take a good look at it, but you could probably find something out poking around at Amazon.

[Sexodus]

See this is why i love Tilted, (and the search button)

This is Exaclty what i was going to post. The info here is Great all! Thanks a bunch, even though it wasnt my post!