Well, i left school yesterday getting excited about working on my first game engine. I have input, a window manager, and an fps counter. Then (using thebennybox tutorial) I saw Vectors. The pythag theorem was simple for me, but the cosine took me several minutes to understand. After that he got into matrices. ArrayLists containing Ms, no way. I was confused and just stopped there. I know he has those side videos, but I’m not sure if I can handle this. I already know up to VBOs and loading 3D models with the coding universe, where do you suppose I continue?
Make a game.
O.O
Agreed. Try to make a game first, then you will see what you actually need and from there you can consider to make a game engine.
I’m assuming you’re following his 3D engine tutorials? Don’t, that will just confuse you at this point. Just make a simple game and look up basic LWJGL tutorials.
[quote] (0,1,0)
| /(0,0,1)
| /
|/___(1,0,0)
(0,0,0)
[/quote]
They represented Cartesian coordinates in text… I think I’m in love.
I thought I could make a basic 2d game engine, but ive made a game with lwjgl before (2D).
Good! Then keep making games. If you’re trying to be a better game dev, then re-inventing the wheel will just slow you down. Sure learn vectors and matrices, but I strongly recommend use a pre-made for game development.
whispers: …mercury … libgdx…
But would it be possible to make a COD like 3D game with LibGDX and such?
EDIT: I didn’t mean “I want to create an advanced Call of Duty like game”
Yes. On dektops, libGDX uses LWJGL as a backend.
“For my second game, I’m going to make Call of Duty!”
- And he was never heard from again…
I challenge you to make a polished side-scroller with collision, enemies, and level-loading in 1 week. GO! DO IT NOW!
I second this challenge.
Me and a friend are actually working on one at the moment. Expect great things.
In college and universities, do they teach you LWJGL or any OpenGL? Before internet tutorials that help people (Not so much me :emo:) learn LWJGL, did people just base it off of OpenGL they know?
Secondly, does anyone recommend an order in which to learn LWJGL? For an example, would anyone say there’s a certain direction you should take to climb the latter of OpenGL?
What I can do:
- Use immediate mode to render textures and polygons
- Draw shapes with VBOs
- Render textures to quadralaterals
- Make a basic game using my game dev knowledge and immediate mode
- Create and obj Loader (or was it parser?)
- Render 3D obj files (Without a texture)
I’m having trouble figuring out what topic to cover next, so can I have some of your 2¢?
I’m almost certain you won’t find any LWJGL in a college course. You may see opengl if you took some sort of niche game design course, but even then it’s still unlikely. People learn Opengl from tutorials and practice. Practice will help you understand concepts the best.
Try shaders. Or, you can make a game with the concepts that you already know (VBOs, textures, etc).
I just mess around with stuff…
I just find something and go ‘oh! I like that! I wonder if I can do that…’ Then I just try to make it…
Like recently I made a simple 2D terrain generator…
I learned OpenGL by just making games (Okay, I didn’t finish them, but I was viewing it from the angle of games nonetheless).
Every time I needed a new graphics effect or something, I would search for ways to achieve it, and inevitably learn how to use a new OpenGL feature. More importantly, I learned what it should be used for as well.
At first my render methods were a disgusting mess of OpenGL calls, but as I used each OpenGL feature more and more, I began to notice which bits of code fit together and how I could extract those pieces into my personal “library” (I prefer to call it my ‘boilerplate collection’).
If you’re trying to design an OpenGL-based engine with no knowledge of how OpenGL applies to games, of course you are going to feel lost. As others have said, make a game with the knowledge you already have, and if feature creep is anything like it usually is, you’ll end up learning new things anyway,
for 3d with libgdx you can take a look at GDX-Proto for some ideas
Step 1. Learn math.
Step 2. Learn OpenGL.
Step 3. ?
Step 4. Profit.
- Jev