Greetings, I am fairly new to programming and want to start playing around with the basics of creating 3d games.
My programming background (what little of it there is) consists of pascal back in the early 90s in high school, and a good chunk of php for websites. I understand and am decent at a lot of programming concepts. Loops, variables, functions, arrays if/then … and am using a book to transition to C++. The book is quite good, but I know most of it. So far it all seems like I just have to learn some new syntax which will make debugging fun for a while, but I think I can manage.
But, I tried out Ogre and couldn’t even get past the second tutorial. Either their tutorials are just confusing or I am just not very good at this. I also just couldn’t get the kind of support I needed.
I am more of the artist when it comes to games, but I have always felt a little handicapped not being able to mess around with the code a bit to try out different things.
So the advice I need is whether or not Panda (or some other engine) is the something I can poke around in on a novice level. I don’t imagine creating a game by myself from the ground up or anything. As a base I would like to be able to simply bring my models into a 3d engine and move them around a little bit to get a feel for how they would play (outside of a team environment).
How hard is it to install, setup, and get to work adding a camera, light and importing a model from 3dsmax in Panda?
And finally, in trying Ogre I used VC++ Studio 2010, and was a bit lost tbh in that software. With php I did 99% of my coding in notepad and since I didn’t need to compile it … I have no experience with an IDE. Any suggestions along this front would be helpful as well.
I appreciate any and all feedback!
Thanks!
Joe