On Mon, 2002-10-14 at 10:22, Jason Stechschulte wrote:
I know there are a lot of programmers on this list, so I'm hoping
someone might be kind enough to help me. I already am a so so
programmer. I'm comfortable using Perl and PHP and I have a little
experience in C/C++.
I'm now thinking of taking the next step and starting a real programming
project. I'm thinking of writing a game. My question is this: Does
anyone know of a book that doesn't teach you a language, rather it
teaches you how to do an entire project. I'm more interested in
something that says by going through this book you will create this.
Then the book focuses on that one task from planning to final
implementation.
I don't know of any book like that, but there are many books that are
language specific, and can be interpreted in terms of your own chosen
language.
If your project is 2D and you want to develop it rapidly and robustly,
and want it to run on all sorts of machines (not just linux) then I
recommend using Python with the pygame library (bindings to the SDL
libraries). Python has extremely string OO including multiple
inheritance. Pygame is a high powered and cross platform game dev API.
The games will run on Windows, Mac, Linux and BSD. Its also an ideal
chance to teach yourself IMHO the second best programming language in
existence today. Ive been programming computers for over 10 years in C,
C++, Java, Assembler, Perl, PHP and when I found Python it was like
discovering a hidden secret. Only LISP will server you better (all IMHO
of course... no fundamentalist language flame wars please).
Python can be slow, especially in large nested loops, but coding half
Python, half C is very, very easy (many, many times easier than in other
languages like Perl, Java etc). So in the end you may wish to optimise
parts of your code in C functions. Optimisation is always best at the
end of a project (Python even has a complete code profiling system built
in so you can work out where delays are!). But with todays computing
power, and a 2d game, your bound to have oodles of CPU cycles to burn.
Check out the pygame website www.pygame.org
You can distribute your python games as standalone executables (carrying
all .dll or .so dependencies) using "Installer" when its finished. You
can even sell it (Python's license is quite liberal).
If you want to sell your game, and need it to be *high speed* binaries,
then C/C++ is probably the way to go.
Kind Regards
Crispin Wellington