A friendly request for advice.

[Hades]

Hi everyone,

I find this forum fascinating and I'm often inspired by all of your efforts. The Q-gears project is a fantastic idea and has inspired me to start hacking games.

I'm a PHP programmer by trade and I love my work, but I would love to get my hands dirty with some C++ and crack into a game. I learned C++ quite a while back so my first port of call is a refresher day on the language (Gonna get my books out).

Ultimately I would love to code a replacement engine for some of my old windows favourites such as Starcraft or Blade Runner (I use Linux exclusively now), but I am fully aware of the fact that this is firmly out of my reach.

I was hoping you guys would be able to point me to the starting line and post any articles or sites you found useful when you were starting out, or possibly share some stories from your early days with me?


Thanks for taking the time out to read this post, I'll look forward to any replies. 

[Rixorster]

I was just gonna make an thread like this, but yeah, I'd love to find out more about how to do this stuff
I've been coding in PHP, VB6, Pawn/Small, Ruby(On RMXP) and some else minor stuff, but I'm totally intrested in stuff like Q-Qears and basically anything that has part in FFVII & FFVIII 'hacking'.
So yeah, thanks for any help, if any will come ^^.

[Otokoshi]

For C++ check out the forums at GameDev.net.  jwalsh started a fantastic C++ workshop that goes through the exercises found in this book.  Their entire forums have just about every aspect of game design, theory, and production.  I used the workshop myself and that is an excellent book.  I'm pretty sure they have older editions available for free online.  At least Sam's previous Java editions were free if my memory serves me right.

[Hades]

Thanks man!
I think I'll get started with those when I get home from work tonight

[mirex]

It should be possible to play Starcraft on Linux, there are some how-to's for it on internet. I'm going to try them tomorrow, as I'm buying Starcraft + Broodwar today.

http://www.google.com/search?q=starcraft+on+linux&start=0&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla:sk-SK:official

[Hades]

Thanks for the link

I also found that there are people out there (two separate projects actually) that are actually working on a Linux engine for Starcraft!