What to learn next?

[diordna]

I'm looking for something new to explore, because I'm getting sick of BlitzMax. It's fast and convenient, but I'm starting to get a deep inexplicable urge to use curly braces instead of 'if/end if'. That's the main reason I'm experimenting with Processing.

I'm currently reading a book on C++ so I can understand what the hell a lot of you people are talking about. I also want to go through the Red Book and/or NeHe and pick up OpenGL, which I've put off for far too long. But where should I go after that? SDL? Cocoa? Cocoa always put me off because of its Mac-only-ness, and at the moment I really only care about game programming, so I don't need all of its OS interoperability. I'll also need to learn about a sound library or two.

I guess my main question is, what should I learn to prepare myself for writing games in C++? Or if that's a bad idea, what language should I look at, and where should I look?

[Nick]

I highly suggest SDL. Not too hard to use and very useful. There are also SDL libraries for other things like SDL_image for loading images, SDL_ttf for font handling, and SDL_mixer for audio. I've only ever used SDL_image so I can't comment on the other two, but SDL_image is very easy to use.

[Najdorf]

I like SDL.

Using SDL-GL-C++ on the mac is easy if you use the templates provided by on the sdl site ( http://www.libsdl.org/release/SDL-devel-1.2.11-extras.dmg )

Code runs also on windows with little changes (again you should find an example to set it up )

Transition from blitzmax to C++ isn't too hard, that is you can code in the blitzmax way also in C++, you just have to be a bit more careful if you're referring to objects or just pointer to objects ( in blitzmax they are all references actually ). Use STL for stuff such as lists and automatically resizable arrays ("vectors") and you can pretty much avoid memory management using automatic variables (at least I did).

[unknown]

I guess my main question is, what should I learn to prepare myself for writing games in C++? Or if that's a bad idea, what language should I look at, and where should I look?

To prepare yourself? Just count down from 3 and dive in :D