Thanks for all the support good or bad. Smarson, do u think I am going to make pong? Yeah right. Am I some cocky teenager? Know but I am a teenager. Just because most novice programmers dont succede in making a big game doesnt mean all won''t. What am I going to say I suck Ill never make it better stick with pong and end up on some gay credits list that has 1000 other people on it. I just bought to C++ books and I am reading now. its not me alone that is making my RPG I have a team of 10 people, 2 that know C++. How did Bill Gates succede? He built stuff in his garage. If u were there smarson u would say start small Bill, build a calculator like I did. I will get the software I need, I am writing the storyline right now. I know how to build web sites. I have artists that are very very good. I will build and engine. Dont worry Ill pull it off. I cant wait till I do(Be like 4 years but oh well..) finish. You probably think Im some punk kid but Im not. Also, thanks forall the support tothe guys that backed me up. I appreciate it. Its just what I need, advice as I go along.

hehe....

you think Bill Gates wrote MS-DOS??? LOL.

He bought it off another company for $50,000.



Regards,
Nekosion

Bill Gates (AKA William Gates) succeeded because he was the best in what he does best, or the oppisite of Smells like teen spirit
He''s a uni dropout who had no experience in any field of any significance, which gave him his fresh and dominating edge
Sure, he bought MS-DOS from 2 uni students changed a bit of code made a deal with IBM and failed to acknowledge the uni students, but he and his team were able to build up on this product, which constituted almost an entire rewrite, and make one of the most stable MS products in time
All employee''s got their job not from experience, rather from a lack-of, all of whom had no idea''s conflicted by other corperate influence
Gates manage to structure his corperation such that every product remained in a seperate department, and were still similer in workings and presentation
Windows was successful due to a Gates risking the high-end (at the time) 386+ x86 area...or IA-32
Were it not for this risk, and many other well-decisive ones, Windows would proberbly be in less use the OS2Warp is now

No, im not a microsoft supporter, nor do i find bill the most sincear man
However, give the man some credit, at least until you are smart enough to constuct a several-hundred-billion dollar corperation that knows how to play its game

eh?

Damn... what''s wrong with pong, everyone? Why does pong, one of gaming''s founding fathers, get such little respect?

Pong teaches collision detection, player input, basic AI, and the concept of the game loop.

Breakout expands on pong, taking collision detection into the 2nd dimension, as well as teaching the basics of level design.

If you can succesfully create these, grasshopper, then you are in a much better position to take on an RPG. Your experience in 2D collision detection and level design will go far when you''re making overhead maps ala FF2 (or FF4). Your ability to create a well-thought out game loop will come in handy as you design the battle system.

The "aim where the player isn''t" methodology that your AI used in pong will help you design enemy AI that does more than swat away blindly at the player.

Do you see a pattern forming here?

"Stick to pong?" Pffft...

If pong is the type of game that get''s you "stuck", trust me, you NEED the practice.

---

I''m just trying to help, man. It''s tough love! There aren''t that many of us game programmers around! Most of them wise-up after they start having to pay rent.

And another thing, all programmers are punks. Didn''t anybody tell you?

Bill Gates didn''t try to write Windows 95 when he was just learning C either (not that he wrote Win 95). Just stating that I''m sure he wrote many many small programs before attempting anything large.

I''m not saying you can''t succeed at making an RPG for your first program, and I do wish you luck.

What people are saying tho, from their own experiences, is that there is SO much you''ll learn and so many problems you''ll have attempting to write your first game. It''s almost an absolute certainty that you''ll write your second game VERY differently from your first because of the expirience you''ll get.

The way I see it, doing something like Pong won''t take very long at all, and you''ll learn a lot more about game programming than you think. You''ll be able to apply all of that to your RPG to make the code even better. Odds are that you''d get the RPG done FASTER be doing a small Pong game first, than by doing the RPG first.

Anyways, if you do decide to write the RPG first I wish you luck. Having a few other people that already know C++ will be a big help I''m sure.


- Houdini

What can I say, either he will learn, or he won''t. Only advice i can give is say that my first games, well, the more ambitious they were, the bigger the failure they turned out to be. Not that I regret the months of time (yes, it can turn into months) writing essentially worthless code because it gave me a smack upside the head and taught me to try to slow down. Mind you, my designs are still more ambitious than what I end up actually doing (thats just my nature), but failure upon failure (failure in the sense it wasn''t completed and the code was crap, not failure as in waste of time) has taught me to establish what i know, and build my concept around my strengths, throwing in some harder stuff to make sure the project i attempt will result in learning something (if it doesnt, then coding quickly becomes boring). I have successfully finished several small programs this way, meanwhile learning a wealth of stuff, and eager to press on, so that when the time comes, i have the skills i need to create the next killer game.

Mcloude_IGN: don''t give up, work on ur RPG. No matter what the outcome, it will ultimately be a positive experience.

>> Am I some cocky teenager?

The answer is YES, definitively. You''re such a fool to think you can create the greatest RPG of all time while learning how to program at the same time. Heck, you don''t even know what you''re talking about. A beginner *could* make a good, simple RPG as his first project, but a project involving 10 people, that''s purely crazy. I''ve read that story a hundred times. 4 years to make a game ? Man, there won''t be anymore IA-32 architectures by the time. Playstation 3 will be out, and that crappy game that you started when 5 millions polys/sec was an impressive score will look like shit compared to the other games available. That is in the unlikely event that you''re able to finish your game.

You need to learn the basic concepts of game programming first; you need to PRACTICE. Even the most clever guy in the world would fail at it without practice. Do you realize that ? Do you imagine that Squaresoft pulled out Final Fantasy 9 from the get-go ? These guys when through 8 other games before (much more actually).

If you were that good, you wouldn''t be affraid to make a pong game. It would only take around two hours for a decent programmer to make one. There''s nothing complicated it it, it''s just to make you learn the CONCEPTS. Because to a beginner, some ways of programming might seem good but they are not. But you obviously didn''t get the point of smarson''s comment.

There''s only two ways to go, either you start coding your great RPG right now, and give up in a few months because you have to rewrite your engine every two days just because you figured out that you didn''t do it the good way, or you start by learning how to make games like pong, and then maybe you''ll be able to have your project done one day.

I can give you all the advice you want on RPG programming, because I made quite a few RPG engines so far, but I tell you, attempting to make the RPG you''ve dreamed of all your life before knowing your stuff is purely hopeless. So good luck.