How to become a Good Game programmer

General Discussions
#41

A programming language that can “compute anything,” for a certain (pretty reasonable) value of “anything.”

Turing completeness is a really low bar to jump for a language, because all you really need is some state (a string of memory) and a way to move around that memory based on its state. Any language with arrays, boolean ops and a goto statement are pretty automatically Turing complete, at least to an approximation (a “true” Turing machine requires infinite memory). Clever folks have shown that you can build Turing complete machines with just about any physical object, too (balls and sticks, water and valves, etc.).

The main reason you’d use a non-Turing-complete language for scripting is if you wanted to allow users to do scripting but limit their power. WoW does this with its in-game macros, which use a very crippled Lua that is not Turing complete (it’s also limited to 255 character scripts).

See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_completeness for more.

gouessej wrote:

[quote]Lots of people here seem to think that concentrating on Java game development is not the best thing to do to become a good game developer
[/quote]
I don’t think that’s what people are saying at all; the OP said "but i want to become a 3d game developer like in gta, spiderman, etc…in gud companies… ", and I think people are just pointing out that Java game development is not going to land you a job doing something like that, so it’s not the best thing to do to start a career in AAA game development.

If coding is just a hobby, then maybe it’s fine to learn one language and stick to it like glue, but if you want to make it a career, familiarizing yourself with several technologies is a no-brainer - it’s better for your employment prospects, it helps you become a better programmer overall (there’s a lot of anecdotal evidence that single-language programmers tend to be worse even in their favorite languages than programmers with more varied experience, esp. when it comes to Just-Java programmers; correlation or causation, I don’t know, but it’s still something to think about…), and there’s not much of a downside.

#42

Ah. Fair point. Of course, the main language could be forking a process to execute the script language rather than interpreting it itself, but I think this is getting miles off topic.

#43

Here are a couple funny languages that are Turing complete:

Brainf**k
http://compsoc.dur.ac.uk/whitespace/]Whitespace

Those are pretty hilarious, and are complete Turing languages.

#44

I prefer Ook! over Brainf**k (http://www.dangermouse.net/esoteric/ook.html) ;D

You can also write OpenOffice plugins with it: http://extensions.services.openoffice.org/project/ookscriptprovider ;D

#45

Haha, that’s great. I love orangutans, and Terry Pratchet is funny too.

#46

Hi Friend

i’d like to make my career in flash game programming.

finding good resources to increase technical knowledge.

working from last 1 year.

Good post about discussion of become a good game programmer.

Thanks
Jay

#47

hate to shoot you down, however. this is a java forum.

google a flash forum if you want help.

P.S: I am not even sure what you mean.

#48

No need to shoot him down. Although we are all united here by interest and expertise in Java, a lot of people work Flash jobs and also know how to use Flash. I just did contracting work in Flash to make a few extra bucks 2 weeks ago.

In any case, I don’t think he was saying anything other than that this was a helpful thread for him. It probably came up on Google when he searched for “how to be a game programmer” or something.

#49

ok.

I thought he was asking “hey can someone help me with flash?”

so I obviuosly said, this is not the place ot ask taht.

sry if I sounded like a gerk.

#50

No it sounds good for me as I agree with you, this website is called javagaming, your reaction is logical.

#51

I would def agree. I spend about 45 hours a week at day job, 3 hours a day of commuting and about 3-6 hours during the weekday, 8+ hours on Saturday and Sunday blistering the fingers crunching code. Thank god the wife plays video games next to me! I always tell her even though I only make 3 cents a day at it, its still a second job or the equiv of going to school.

I would suggest sticking to or Learning Java. My main reason for using Java is online deployment. To me Java was the natural selection for this. In the end, if what I am looking to build requires something else, I will learn the appropriate language to make it. Learning Basic gave me a great understanding of programming architecture and structure and learning Java has definitely expanded on that exponentially. Personally I believe the web is a great place for game development and deployment and as such, Java was built around this. I myself will stick with Java until Java doesnt work for what I aspire to create.