I am interesting in working on a very basic First Person Shooter. I want to use an existing engine. Nothing at all fancy, just for the experience... as a hobby. My local Electronics Boutique sells a piece of software entitled "Game Programming Starter Kit" (or something similar). It is in yellow box, and it comes with a smaller version of Visual C++ (I''m sure something''s missing from it), a 3D Level Editor and a couple of graphics programs. Does anybody know anything about this product? If so, is it useful? Would I do better with something else out there? My other option was to work with Quake. I''ve downloaded a level editor - but have yet to install it. There''s also some editors out there for skins and MDL''s. Again, I''m not looking to do anything fancy at all. I just want to learn more about the 3D side of gaming. Just a basic understanding. I''ve done some visual C++, and did a simple little 2D game using a tile based map.

Well, I have never used a starter kit like that since I tend to be a little too ambitious, but I think that would be a better choise that working with the Quake engine since it is probably aimed toward someone with your level of experience.

Everyone likes to learn things differently, so I can''t make a decision for you. You may concider looking at some older books. If I am not mistaken, one of the old "Tricks of the Game Programming Guru" books was based around first person shooter. It would be out of date by today''s standards, but there should be an engine with the book and you can learn more about it by reading the book.

Ask about this before you buy it though. I would hate for you to buy it if I am wrong.

The old version of the kit you''re talking about came with an engine (ACK3D) that works for a Doom style game. The new version comes with Genesis3d. Probably the one you''re looking at is the one with Genesis3d. And probably at this point not even the latest version of Genesis3d. It''d probably be less expensive to download the Genesis3d libraries yourself.

The version of Visual C++ it comes with is the introductory version. Which I think is restricted so that you can''t sell or distruibute programs you create with it. I might be thinking of a different license, however.

On the introductory version you cant even make an exe file. You can only run the program within vc. Honestly the starter kit is a terrible buy. In fact the best way to go is with Andre Lamothe''s new book Tricks of the Windows Game Programming Guru''s. It comes with the introductory version, genesis 3d, and a bunch of articles and sample code on the cd. Plus its a really great book and probably the same price as the starter kit. Its 35 at amazon.