Help me out guys and girls

Miscellaneous Topics
#1

I’m going to have to pick some electives for my BSc Computer science and maths course.

This:
http://www.vu.edu.au/Faculties/Science_Engineering_and_Technology/Undergraduate_Courses/Bachelor_of_Science_in_Computer_and_Mathematical_Sciences/SCM2111/
Or this:
http://www.vu.edu.au/Faculties/Science_Engineering_and_Technology/Undergraduate_Courses/Bachelor_of_Science_in_Computer_and_Mathematical_Sciences/SCM2112/

I LOATHE networking but I wonder which of these are more
worthwhile for game development.

#2

I did both of those courses in my degree, and they were both 99% useless. I’m sure that the status quo hasn’t changed in the last decade either. I’m rather surprised they’re even courses now, when in reality everything you might want to know about can be read about at leisure as background information, and everything you need to know about is the very hard bit that the rest of us deal with daily for a living which they won’t tell you anything about in the courses.

Cas :slight_smile:

#3

eeeewww :slight_smile:

Two of my friends are in a Networking class, and they’re spending most of their time outside of class writing a GameBoy style Tetris clone for a grade for it to work across a network. So in that regard it could be somewhat useful :wink:

#4

The uni course I did had mandatory Networking and elective Operating Systems. Both were rubbish courses. You should know the basics of both, really, but practically you are more likely to use networking than operating systems, although I seem to remember the networking course I did was so abstract that I gained literally nothing from it apart from understanding a couple of TLAs and knowing the names of the networking layers.

Even so, I would go for that rather than the OS one. I can’t imagine a single university module would be able to teach you enough to really understand how a modern operating system works and even if it does, are you going to write your own OS?

#5

I personally would pick the OS course.

I tend to disagree with Breakfast. I know when I took the OS course for my degree it was informative. We were also required to implement a real-time pre-emtive multitasking executive and write a few processes for it that demonstrated the multitasking abilities. This was on a simple 68k experimentors board connected to an ANSI terminal. I really enjoyed it.

Though that is just more where my interests lie. If you are keen on doing network-based games perhaps the other course will be of more use to you. Though I still think the core knowledge gained from the OS course is likely to be more useful in terms of providing a solid foundation in the basics.