Advice for studying engine

#1 Hi James,

There's the Official Documentation.

There's a lot in there, so Burning Rose wrote this to simplify things.

I wrote this if you want to jump right into the thick of things.

Then there's Ed Maurina's EGTGE

And of course, Ken Finney's book, which is available at Borders, last I checked. (They have a couple of shelves dedicated to game development)

#2 Thanks Eugene.

I guess I have to be clearer. I mean the c++ codes in TGE.
I think i should just dive in. hehe.

Regards,
James Yong

Edited: corrected some grammers

#3 Search through the code snippets and pick one that draws your attention and do it, actally do them all, :) well alot of them. I think thats the best way to learn is by doing it.

Just keep a clean "head" around for copys have a big hard drive and save the cool stuff for later references.

Probably not the fastet way to learn but its fun.

#4 @James: The most important step for me was to find a foothold and for me it was the GUI system as it's relatively simple to understand. After understanding how the scripts interact with it, I delved deeper into the C++ code got a good feeling of how it worked. This taught me other aspects of the engine in nice bite-sized chunks that I could manage without being overwhelmed with hundreds of questions. Things such as the DGL code, texture-manager, console-methods etc. I could then look further into each of those ad-infinitum. This approach is not for everyone but it works well for me and is probably only good if you want a broad aspect knowledge of the code-base rather than a particular aspect of it.

Understand the core C++ hierarchy and the reason for each level and don't get too bogged-down in the detail, simply get a rough idea of what/why then you can start looking at it from either a top-down or bottom-up approach in more detail.

Another way to get instant satisfaction is to jump straight in and, dependant upon your interests, simply try stuff out. Goto the documentation that Eugene pointed-out and add a function in C++ and have the pleasure of calling it from the scripts and getting a response in the console or perhaps read/try my fxRenderObject and get something rendering from within the scene. There are some awesome resources available from the community and they can provide lots of answers but be prepared to also be confused but not discouraged at the same time.

Start small, be humble, don't get too ahead of yourself and work on the bread-and-butter stuff. Then when you're confident/bored move on. Avoid the urge to start work on a large game idea for a few months but there's nothing stopping you doing a very simple game as a challenge.

Hope this helps in some way.

- Melv.

#5 Yes, they helps. Thank you Melv May and Ace ;-)