New to it all

[student79]

Hello ALL

I am a 29 year old student at college studying Software Engineering. I would like to get into the gaming industry but I am not sure what skills I need. The 2 areas I am interested in are 3d graphics and programming. I would like to know what laguages I have to study and what math is involved.

[jillduffy]

Hi student79. Welcome!

The best place for you to start is here: Game Programming: An Introduction.

There are more links at the bottom of that article, if you find it too elementary. It does discuss the issue of programming languages and math.

Take a read and let us know what other questions you have.

[student79]

Thank you for the advice. My next question, is there anyway I can Improve the logic in my code. Is there a book of some sort that can help write simple and easy to read code?

[DTR]

My recommendation would be:
Code Complete 2.
http://cc2e.com/

Might even be "too rigid" for game programming purposes, but its always good to know the "general" coding conventions before improvising too much.

I was recommended this one back then when I produced less than "quality" code :P

[mordekai]

The best way to improve your code is to code
When you feel comfortable enough (and have the time between classes, eating/sleeping & maintaining good hygiene, participate in a game programming competition. www.shmup-dev.com does bi-weekly side-scrolling shooter competitions.

There was also a competition done in these forums recently, and there will hopefully be another in the future.

also, i'd like to recommend the Angel SDK. It's a 2D OpenGL game engine written in C++ that is very simple and takes care of most of the hard stuff (rendering/sound/input/etc) for you.

[nef]

Originally Posted by student79

I would like to know what laguages I have to study and what math is involved.

Languages include C and C++. Remeber, knowing C++ does NOT mean you know C. They are different enough to consider not putting C/C++ on your resume, IMO.

As for the math, I don't rememeber the technical name, but understand these concepts in detail:

Vectors;
Matrices.

If you understand these to a required value, you already understand concepts like the Dot Product, Cross Product, Identity Matrix, Unit length vectors ect. If you dont, just google the concept you don't know. I believe this math falls under linear algebra.

Lots of companies require strong math, but IMO (I'm not a lead or anything) math isn't as important as strong code. To be honest I don't work on games requiring strong math skills, but I care less about their implementation of a moveTo algorithm than how they've designed their system.