I got sprite world but I cant get it to do anything. What do I do with it. It just loads it into my codewarrior LE V.3 and I cant open any files or anything. I don't know how to start with making the engine. I don't even know what they are supposed to do. I'll be trying though and just plain old messing around.

Quote:Originally posted by ThePenguin
I got sprite world but I cant get it to do anything. What do I do with it. It just loads it into my codewarrior LE V.3 and I cant open any files or anything. I don't know how to start with making the engine. I don't even know what they are supposed to do. I'll be trying though and just plain old messing around.

Take a look in the "Documentation" folder the PDF stuff is good. Also look at the example projects and check out how they work.

Sounds like you're jumping in over your depth. Don't worry, most everyone does this, and you will learn. However, it's a slow way to learn.

Game programming is an area of programming where it's really easy to develop a bad style, or an incomplete mental toolkit. This is because the needs of a game are so specific that you may not need a broad programming ability to make something, and you can hand off a lot of tricky problems (audio, displays, rendering) to OS or third-party APIs. Much game programming is a series of hacks, and tricks culled from this book or that demo source. It doesn't have to be this way.

A MUCH better way is to learn the basics, and learn them right. Before trying to blit something with OpenGL and trying to get immediate satisfaction, I suggest you start with small, non-graphical programs. They are not as fun, but you will learn a LOT more. Learn about pointers (what they really are, what their purpose is, how memory is laid out, what you are doing when you move memory, etc.), file management (not Mac file management yet, but standard file stuff), basic algorithms and data structures (linked lists, sorting, etc.) and so on.

Write small programs that will accept input without the aid of a Mac dialog, write data to file, read it in, put the data in dynamically allocated lists instead of hard coded arrays, sort those lists, present the results. This will teach you much more than drawing polygons ever will. Don't get too hung up on language features, and don't use esoteric language features. Keep it Simple! Once you have a basic understanding of the fundamentals, then it's time to move on to higher level, platform specific APIs such as Carbon on the Mac, or cross platform APIs such as OpenGL.

Your first books should probably be things like "Learn How to Program in C" or "Programming Fundamentals", not the OpenGL Red Book or "Cocoa for Beginners" or even "Game Programmers for Newbies".

Good luck! Take it slowly, and chew on bite-sized pieces.