Thursday came, and I presented my project. Seemed to do well, and that brings my graphics class to an end.

In the fall, I take the advanced computer graphics course. I’m already planning my project - a 3D game. Of what sort, I have not decided. I do know, however, that the GLUT toolkit that I used for my paint program won’t cut it. So, I am going to use SDL (Simple DirectMedia Layer), a cross-platform multimedia library that has been used for porting commercial-level games to Linux (like Civilization: Call to Power, and America’s Army). It should prove to be much more suitable than GLUT was.

So, I went to Barnes & Noble and bought the only SDL book that I’m really aware of: “Focus on SDL” in the Game Development Series of books by Premier Press (I own another book in this series on game design). I also bought a book I’ve been wanting for a while: Herb Sutter’s “Exceptional C++”. It’s a book on solving production-level code problems with C++. I want to step up my C++ coding, and these killer books in the “C++ In Depth” series of Addison-Wesley publishing should help me do that (“Accelerated C++” is still the best C++ intro text I’ve yet seen, and is still recommended by many pro programmers to newbies).

I never stop working. :) One quote from Game Developer Magazine still sticks with me. Someone said something along the lines of, “there are virtually no great programmers in gaming, and even good ones are rare.” So I want to be at least a good programmer, though that won’t be achieved without some years in the industry. But every bit of work now makes the learning curve that much shorter.