My Journey

Clearly, this is the question on everyone's minds!

Well I have the most terrible news, my laptop broke. Luckily I always back up my data on an external drive; alas that too broke.

Yes that's just my luck goes, I lost a lot of work including games I was working on but luckily nothing that can't be remade easily. I've learnt my lesson, on bigger projects I'll be backing everything up on three separate drives.

So you can see why I haven't been on in a long time, luckily my laptop was fixed today so expect a large influx of updates over the coming couple of weeks!

This week was a week off from university; what did I do you ask? Learnt C++ of course!

I've covered all the changes from C to C++ and started learning a bit about classes.

Beginning C++ Through Game Programming is an excellent introduction to C++ and I greatly recommend it. There is a problem though, where to go from here? Every book I've found is either for beginners or advanced, where is the intermediate books? I may have to teach myself through experimentation or move onto another language such as Java.

But I like C++, it's the industry standard, so I'm going to learn OpenGL or SDL (graphics libraries for making games I believe, I want to start in 2D obviously).

More info soon, I promise!

Well that was my final C assignment (more information coming, be patient please!); so now I'm getting ready to move onto C++.

The course officially doesn't start C++ until 3rd of October but I'm getting a few weeks head start to ensure I do well.

The book I'll be using to begin with is a book I bought a few years ago but never attempted very far past chapter two: Beginning C++ Through Game Programming.
Amazon has it listed at $5.91 (US), I recall paying a lot, lot more than that so it's certainly a bargain now.

I'll also be using the last few chapters of Engineering Problem Solving with C and C: How to Program as they include introductory chapters to C++ (the former has C++ for almost half of the book!).

So finally, finally, I should be able to make games as C++ is such an object oriented language. Hopefully you'll see playable games, albeit not great ones, within the next few weeks!

Alright here's a little information on the assignment I'm currently working on:

We have to be highly modularised, which means pretty much every minor action in the program gets its own function and is all stored in separate files instead of one chunk of code. Apparently this is less confusing, whoever believes this is stupid.

We have to make a program that generates random numbers, then subs those random numbers into an equation which somehow integrates the equation, not sure how sound the mathematics is but who cares it's worth 15% of this subject.

It's not going too well at the moment, it's due in two days. I'll post more progress up until then but don't expect me to do very well as it pretty much covers all the topics I'm yet to learn.

Well I finally picked up the 6th edition of C: How To Program, the only difference is that some chapters are removed as far as I can tell; a little disappointing.

Also an update on what I've been doing: working bloody hard! It's mid-semester which means loads of assignments are due. Specifically programming this Monday, a program using random numbers; an audio editing assignment next Friday; a piece of fiction due tomorrow and a maths test every week with an extra maths test on Tuesday.

I'll post more information on the programming assignment this weekend where I'll be working most on it! It's certainly been a busy time.

Also: I received a reply regarding posting code. Unfortunately I cannot post it all since it might be plagiarised, what I can do is post parts and discuss what I did without giving future students something to copy and paste. So expect that soon too!

Enjoy this big update!