Well, as I mentioned in my previous entry, I have been playing with Ruby on Rails. Well, it wasn't as good as I first expected. Sure, it's a powerful system and I love how it's free and all the great features it has but it has issues. Primarily the difficulty of setting up a server which took me about three days to figure out due to documentation incompatible with the latest version. Second, it seemed to be a lot more complicated than it needed to be especially for a simple application. And thirdly, there seems to be only one way to do things and a lot of the actual work is handled by the framework which makes it less interesting.

So, I switched back to PHP but Dreamweaver takes care of everything for you, no code required which while it makes app development faster, it also makes it boring. Yep, programming wasn't fun any more.

So, I switched tack and bought myself a book: "C++, A Beginner's Guide" which is a 540 page tome dedicated to teaching C++ to people who are completely new to the language. As the syntax is very similar to PHP and ActionScript, I felt right at home. Now, C++ is FUN programming. It is a very nice language and you know what the best part is? DirectX!

Here's what I recommend if you are at all interested in programming games:

1. Download the Dark Basic Pro trial [link] and see how easy it is to make a cube appear on the screen (about 3 lines)

2. Download MS Visual C++ Express

3. Download the DirectX SDK and Windows Platform SDK

4. Install and set them up for use in Visual C++

5. Follow the tutorials at [link] and see how easy it is to display a cube using C++ and DirectX (about 240 lines)

6. Understand that if you are interested in following a career in game programming, C++ and DirectX/Open GL are the only way you will get you dream job at Bungie/EA/Rockstar


I followed these steps and look where I ended up: A hugely motivated amateur programmer with a game engine in development with simple DirectInput support, text support and (almost) able to display loaded models.

Anyways, this is what I've been up to (besides revising for by AS exams) you can keep up with the development of the game engine here: [link]