c plus plus

[Grey$cale]

oh man, on monday i will be starting my c plus plus class for game desing..lol..for you ppl that know about it... is it hard...i mean difficult to pick up? my course is gonna be 2 months...

[Arpit]

only made console applications out of it...

pretty alright actually...before it gets downright ugly...but by then you'd know your way around it :)

[Grey$cale]

hehe i hope i do...we are gonna do c plus plus this 2 months for pc gaming and the next 2 months will be c for CONSOLE gaming...yeh..i can't wait to get into it..hehe

[Spyder Veteran]

moved here

[PeterHammer]

C++ isn't all that hard conceptually...It is just like C as far as syntax goes, and if you have OO experience in other OO languages (BTW: don't count VB6 and earlier as other OO langs) then it should be easy enough.

If you don't know any programming, C++ is probably the best language to start with. It teaches you all the basics in a very unrestricted format. And because it is low level, you actually learn things about programming that are very important, even if you never deal with them directly. For example, one always hears that java and C# can do automatic garbage collection. But I find that having learned about garbage collection in C++ helps me a lot in designing Java apps, even though technically I do not have to think about. If you start with Java or C#, chances are you will miss out on a lot of the behind the scenes details, and it is those details that will make you a really good programmer.

My big problem with C++ is that it is really hard to get good at it. In my younger days I was determined to get really good at it. But then along came Java, and it was love at first sight. I have not touched C++ since 1995. But here is what I remember I did not like about it:

For one, overloaded operators are a bizarre concept. Some of the more esoteric bugs I wrote throughout my career came from overloading operators. Two, inheritance is hard enough to deal with on the single case - multiple inheritance just opens up the space that much more and makes the design decisions one has to make far harder to deal with. Three: memory management is hard - though IMO C++ MM is actually easier conceptually than MM in C; for some reason writing destructors gives me a good framework for freeing memory and collecting garbage. It is just too easy to forget to cleanup all the memory you allocate in C without that framework. And FOUR: the plethora of different libraries out there is just overwhelming. It takes time to learn how to use libraries effectively, and then you change jobs and chances are the new dev team uses a completely different set. I suppose that in time they all look the same, but that to me was one of the biggest turn offs.

Don't know much about game programming, but I hear that DirectX is actually pleasant to work with. A friend of mine uses it and loves it. He said it runs laps over OpenGL. Hopefully you will be using some of that in your class. Good Luck!

[Grey$cale]

lol....thankx