Nick Young

On behalf of a friend,does anyone know of the best sort of Home self teach programming packages available on the market?

Whats the best! And where to purchase!

Also for anyone in this field,whats the best way of getting in to the industry?

Ta

Nick Y

SiCotty

The best thing to do it get a good understanding of Maths and 3D graphics and programming directX. Any good C/C++ programmer can pick this up rarther easily. Most of the good effects in games are all to do with the maths.

The best way to get into the Games industry is write to a lot of them and work for very little money to begin with. If you are good you will get your reward. Most people I know in the Games industry do it because it's what they want to do and they enjoy doing it, the money is not wonderfull if you are not established. Get onto a good game though and £££.

You have to bee good though, non of this VB rubbish.

You could also go back to Uni and do one of the Games programming
course which I've been told are very good.

Si

PS. What the above says is that he need to be a geek.

KF

This question is tackled in great depth (and with high frequency) on the Lionhead forums.
Best get a broadband connection to view that site - it's a monster.
KF.

madfiddler

I'd go with SiCotty points. Also, the uni idea may be a good one. At Electronic Arts, where I work, we are starting up a Uni graduate scheme for gap year students - getting them into the industry, experience, possible sponsorship, and when you get the grades, a job. At the moment, as we're just starting it off, the uni's we're dealing with are quite local, but it's worth keeping a look on the www.europe.ea.com website, as details will be posted eventually.

stevencotton

Also a good idea to get in the demo scene, s'where most of these guys start out.

Steve.

madfiddler

That's true too. I started off in the amiga demo scene

Comedy_Gaz

If I was you, I would not do the full 3 years of a programming course at uni. by the time you will have finished, it will all be out of date.
Its the same with web biuling courses - I mean, who wants to employ someone who knows HTML that they learned on a 2 year course?? For web development you need XML, PHP Java etc...
Anyway, back to games. Visual basic is quite easy to pick up but rather basic. C/C++ is very powerful, but can be a bit of a pain to get used to.
The best bet is to use Delphi. At its simplest, you can just drag and drop components onto a screen adding a few lines of code here and there. In its more complex state you can write utilities and any other kind of software - even with 3D engines!

Don't expect an easy ride though.