pouët.net

I have already gotten the book you've recommended: Real-time Rendering :)

There's a bit of math in it even in the beginning chapters; it's linear algebra right? it's been a while since I've taken this class. But Linear algebra is the most important math when it comes to 3d graphics/animation?

I will try to look for a book on it as well and just focus on learning the basic of C++, linear algebra, and slowly digesting that real-time rendering book.

amazing job on " fermi paradox" by the way ^_^ i showed it to a friend in irc and all she could say was OMG lol :D

nehe tutorials and
http://www.iquilezles.org/code/index.htm

Just found out visual studio 2015 is free? (the community version at least... though i hear the MFC is only on the enterprise paid version. Is that important at all or no?)

would've never guessed windows putting out free software.

In addition, ther's also a vim extension for Visual Studio as well !!

Now i'm kind of considering switching back to windows :D

I think the drive and discipline to do something is a lot more important than what tool you pick. I spent a ton of time learning a bunch of stuff that ultimately I didn't end up using, but the important concepts still carried over to later, and they contributed to having "routine".

I mean that in the sense that the more you play around with things, the better definition you will get of what you want to do, and as a result the tools you want will become more obvious.

For me, the best way for that was picking demos I liked that were roughly on the same technical level and trying to emulate those.

MFC is also available in the community edition and no, you won't need it for demo making. Only maybe if you want to make a demo tool. ;)

I understand that you'd like to code in C or C++, but I also think Processing is just fine for beginners to experiment with. At Graffathon total novices produced pretty fun stuff with it. Getting cubes spinning is very straightforward and you don't have to deal with all that boilerplate stuff so you can focus on the graphics part. It's also useful to have a nifty little tool to work on visualizations and prototypes.

Personally I use VS2015 with VsVim. I use GL Load to load OpenGL stuff and SDL 2.0.4 to deal with windowing and input.

Never. Not anymore. Don't even think about it. Outdated and belongs in a grave dug very deeply.

@cce - I thought I'd look at processing for my daughter (she's learning java and python atm)

@therue - I don't write demos or do a lot of coding (avoid it like the fucking plague if I can tbh) I taught myself asm and c when I was younger. From what I've seen (see above) modern lang. (visual anything) have a much easier and straight-forward syntax to learn. Altho they may not be as succinct and have the same finesse they are far more forgiving and easier to learn

KISS principle - figure out what you want to do and then how to implement it otherwise you'll end up

That's slightly out of context - the important half of that sentence is that even though you don't end up coding in that specific language later, you still learn how to code on a higher level. Most languages are close enough anyway to be interchangeable, and routine earned is a lot more important than what you use to earn it.

that's on point. i learned object methodology in pascal for dos. it's the same concept in c+.

this is a part of why using a modern gfx api is crucial; the old ones are more tied to the specific (more limited and fixed) hardware and don't translate to anything newer. the current ones might deprecate with the evolution of hardware, but there are no huge paradigm shifts in the foreseeable future. and they're more abstract (the good "not tied too closely to the implementation details" kind, not the bad "can't even begin to comprehend what these concepts are" kind) to begin with.

btw, by "modern", i still refer to gl4 or dx11. dx12 and vulkan don't seem to be worth the trouble for hobby projects. (at least try out something less tedious first and make an informed decision.)

indeed - get pcgpe!