A friend of mine is going to give me his copy of 3d Game Studio. I was wondering a few things about it, having read the wiki. 1) Would you all reccomend this as a starting place to learn the fundimentals of game development? 2) Where can I get some step by step tutorials on the basics, such as coding in C-Script, fundimentals of modeling, and basics of world design? 3) What commercial games do you know of that where written using 3d game studio?

have you tried the uh...... website?

1) Not particularly.
2) Probably the website.
3) None that sold particularly well.

I'll clarify (1) so I don't seem too snippy. I had to learn the thing to teach a summer camp course way back. It wasn't particularly enjoyable. It's not very powerful and, while it teachs you some very, very primitive concepts, a lot of the actual stuff you do with it isn't the most relevant stuff to actual game development. It's good for what it is (especially compared to competing programs), but its really not much more than a toy, in my opinion.

You should still fool around with it, because it won't be entirely wasted effort, but you just need to know that the kind of stuff you are doing won't be all that relevant to "real game development" in the general case.

(This mostly pertains to game development from a programmers point of view, and to some extent and artists as the modelling tools are crude. Designers may use tools like this, but usually those tools are highly tailored and written in-house).

What would be a better starting block as an all in one package?

Quote:

Original post by TheKnight What would be a better starting block as an all in one package?

Really, it depends on what you want. If you want to make a FPS, you might just try the world editor that comes with Half-Life 2. There's also RPGMaker, but changing the game logic is about the same amount of work as writing your own (in my opinion, of course).

The most productive route might be Blender (I'd make it a link, but the site is down at the moment), but you would have to learn how to write Python scripts. This has the added advantage, though, of introducing you to real programming.

Probobly FPS style games as if I work for a company thats what we will probobly make; they're popular.

I've messed with real programming languages before, Java and C++ (and visual basic...)

Blender, what comes in that?

It does depend a lot on what you want to be doing. Do you want to be a programmer? Then quit screwing around with tools that provide you all-in-one game making packages and start learning to program (C++, C# or Python or something). The vast majority of game development companies write real code, they don't use tools like 3DGS.

If you want to be an artist, Blender is a nice choice (its a powerful-but-hard-to-use-because-its-gui-sucks modelling program). It has a "game engine" mode, I think, but afaik that's been disabled or broken in the recent releases. In any case, its primarily a modelling tool, not a game creation tool.

Blender's gui is not half bad, just follow the wiki and remember to reference the hotkey picture. Its game engine thing, although I don't know much about it, is still going strong.

I'm toying around with 3d studio max atm for modeling stuff

I'll be learning real code in college, as I have in high school; as well as what I teach myself--I was looking for an all-in-oner for theroy or toying with.

Failing that, what would be a good place to start, if I'm going ground up? I had this one thing called 3d game programming all in one, it was a huge book that DID interest me (Used Torque and stuff) but infortunatly the trials on the CD didn't even let you get enough done to bother--and the lisence for the torque compiler (or was it engine?) is 100 alone...sorta out of the question.

Additionally, I'm also interested in RTS type games...