Re: newbie here

[Jan Ekholm <chakie@infa.abo.fi>]

On Tue, 12 Mar 2002, Paul Berg wrote:

>Hello all,
>
>Just joined the list, My name is Paul an i am 15 from the Gold Coast in
>Australia. I am quite interested in game development(especially linux)
>and are just requesting information about where to start.. (language
>choice, essential parts of linux to learn.. stable kernal and x to start
>with... etc, etc, etc)

If I were you I'd just install some recent distribution, such as Debian
Woody, SuSE, RedHat etc. There you should have most things you need, such
as "stable kernel and X".

Personally I'd suggest you evaluate what you're prepared to learn. If you
want to go for C/C++ I'd suggest checking out some mature gaming toolkit,
such as:

        SDL   http://www.libsdl.org/
        PLIB  http://plib.sourceforge.net/

Learning C/C++ for a gaming purpose can be quite a lot of work, so maybe
some scripting language would be good too. I personally like Python, and
thus use Pygame (http://www.pygame.org).

And as a last advice: start simple. There's no chance in hell that you'll
succeed with doing an advanced FPS or MMORPG as your first larger game
project. Do something simple, complete it and then move onto more complex
games.

-- 
   Kids! Bringing about Armageddon can be dangerous. Do not attempt it in
   your home.
                             -- Terry Pratchett & Neil Gaiman, Good Omens