Hey now, enough of that. All in all, it seems that you know quite a bit more than I do about hardware programming at the very least. If anything, I'm the ignorant one ;-)

Okay, glad to hear you think that way. ((: I'll have myself some sleep now, it's midnight here in Germany and I need to be productive tomorrow.

Good, you now know what to avoid :-P

I wish I could avoid it. It's horrible :-/

Maybe this thread could be turned into a general game programming/creation advice giving and asking one?

I've been thinking about writing a game for over 30 years but have yet to do anything beyond the kind of stuff that used to be published in old computer magazines for the readers to type in. I want to create something that I will enjoy playing myself so it rules out anything with scripted events. I'm thinking of a sandbox sci-fi rpg where NPC are active beyond what the player perceives, superficially like a single player MMO. I have zero experience with A.I. so I'll probably start with the basic like tic tac toe, chess or Global Thermonuclear War.

I've decided that my language of choice would be Python, I've tried learning it a lot of times but I always get distracted by other shiny things. That has been my Achilles' heel since I got the internet: So many things to learn, so little time.

I'm giving up at least for 2015 on learning to use game programming software like GameMaker or RPG Maker as programming games is only a secondary interest to programming for the sake of programming.

So before this year is over I want to create an SF universe to play in, not because it will be easy but because it will be hard.

I find Python a pain in the ass, but if that's what you'd choose to use I'd definitely recommend Panda3d. I've been using it for my own project for about a month or two now and it's great. Loads of features, quite easy to use, reasonably well documented (for Python anyway, hence why I'm using Python instead of C++). One of the best engines / libraries I've ever tried (as in I've actually managed to get anywhere with it)

Anyone tried go programming?

https://golang.org/

Thanks for the tip. I'm not really planning on doing anything 3D in the near future but maybe that will change further on.

Ah, I think you can do 2D stuff in it too, but it's obviously not designed for it and there's probably something better you could use for 2D.

While I'm waiting for the C# reference book by O'Reilly, could someone do a "Update functions and variations for dummies" in C#. I always forget to take notes of what theorically should go in FixedUpdate/Update/LateUpdate. The "execution order" page on Unity is well done but of course, it lacks practical stuff :)

Correct me if I'm mistaken ^o^
FixedUpdate (frame independant): player input, collisions, events
Update (frame dependant): ??? (scores maybe....)
LateUpdate (frame dependant): camera

Sorry for the completely late reply. Unfortunately I haven't found any backups of it as indeed it wasn't hosted on my VPS.

If I were to start again, I would use MonoGame instead of SDL anyway, quite simply for the ease of use of C#.

I thought the point was to use C++, not C#?

How much longer is Mono even going to be relevant? Since Microsoft open sourced the .NET API, I had the impression there would be native Mac and Linux versions of it soon.

Mind you, I'm fine with using C#. I'm more used to that anyway, and you get a lot more handed to you through .NET, leaving you to focus more on the logic and less on making helper classes.

The point was to use a multi-platform framework, which monogame is.

Well, mono is probably not going to remain particularily relevant, monogame on the other hand might unless Microsoft comes up with an open-source game development platform. See, it's continuation of Microsoft's XNA, which was discontinued by MS and it might become even better if it replaces Mono libraries with the open sourced .NET ones. I sort of want to wait a bit and see what happens, I'm even hearing MS might be working on a new game development framework.