Learning C++ right away is kind of overboard, especially right on top of something like OGRE. As you're aware OGRE isn't exactly a game engine, more of just a rendering engine.

Perhaps try something that uses a simpler scripting language like Unity or Quake 1- or if you're dead set on learning how to go from the ground up, SDL is way easier to learn than OGRE.

Don't forget C++ will tend to make your projects massively larger. :P

I think you might need a tutor or a mentor to learn C++ in the background rather then try fully convert so fast. There are other things you can do with a more general programming language, making each task more complicated and varable.

I'll think C++ ist totally overrated! Not like something has been programmed is important but whether it's fun, I'll think so since my first steps in coding ;)

Go on, you're on the right side... regards, Peace

I hate C++, I have spent too much time on it, but I had no results.

C++ is unnecessarily complicated. Although the C++20xx standard looks pretty good with some nice features.. Despite making the language a magnatude more complex than necessary.. Here I am perfering C. :) Smaller grammers == better. Hence probably why PHP does better than perl and python.

Like the email notification system you have setup. :)

Yeah, the notification system works pretty well - it's just the 'notification' module for Drupal, doesn't take a lot of effort to set up.

The games and utilities on your site look interesting testaware, I'll have a go at them later.

I have some further things to say about programming - mainly I've had another change of heart and I'm playing with C++ again - will do a new post soon.

I have stuff on my site?

No no, talking about Testawares site

Ha ha! I like the art!

Heh, cheers,mate, I drew that while waiting for food to arrive at Denny's.

On that note. I would like to know how a lot of indies do their art in the game.. That might be the biggest thing that has stopped me in the past.

I was actually thinking of writing a post on tips about how non-artists, particularly programmers, can create art for games (I've always been moderately happy with the look of my games despite having near zero art skills).

In the mean time, I suggest downloading the torrent of Cactus's GDC presentation (Despite being incredibly avant-gante for what is supposed to be an educational lecture, it contains detailed info on how Cactus creates his unique art styles). It's apparently floating around on a certain Scandinavian torrent tracker.

Hrm.. I don't think it will be floating on a scandinacian torrent site for long..

Anyway I would rather hear what you (and others here) have to say before I attempt to begin.

Trying not to imply that I will make a UI centric game.. LONG LIVE RANBENCHAMAITBS.

Righto, will try to do a post on 'art for programmers' soon

Cool thanks.

I have been playing around with C# recently.. Got Microsoft Visual Studios 2005 professional and 2008 at work, and Visual studios 2005 and 2008 express (free.) It's an interesting language. You should play around with it.. Just use it to make generic applications, maybe?

Visual Studio 2008 Is the only officially supported IDE for XNA (Which itself is C#) so I have been using that for my XNA experiments. I'll migrate to Visual Studio 2010 once XNA 4.0 is released.

Not so interested in generic applications, but certainly interested in having a go at doing some Silverlight apps.

How are your experiments going?

Haven't touched XNA since I started Script Frenzy, will get back into it over the next few days.

All I've really done so far is a couple of tutorials, and started writing some libraries to simplify the management of scenes, input etc in XNA. Probably will open source it if I get any traction going on it.

Cool.. Use pastebin, twitpic and twitter so we can track your progress. ;P

And Github if it is opensource!

Heh, will keep that in mind

=) You should make some games for linux!

Also, you might want to check out Blender. You can do 3D modeling and\or games with it. It's pretty robust, free, and it works on both mac and linux (... and windows). I'll admit that I haven't used it too extensively myself yet, but you might want to check it out just the same (=

It relies on python a lot, but that is probably the easiest scripting language out right now.

Man, I suck at word verification thingy's! Took me like five tries to post my comment, haha.

Hi Matt,

Welcome :) Linux is something I've barely considered, though technically there's no reason why I could port The Kiwi's Tale and WitchBlaster to Linux (Since BlitzMax supports it).

Not sure if I'd be keen on Blender though, but I'll keep it in mind. I'm pretty happy with XNA and the Blitz languages right now.

Speaking of Blender; Sintel anyone?

Sintel..? Link me?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eRsGyueVLvQ

You have been linked.

Whoa. That was pretty awesome.