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I want to teach myself programming for game mods (NWN Battlefield etc)

A

Acanthus

Lifer
I want to learn basic scripting code for games and possibly some C++, this is solely for leisure and not work so obviously paying $60000 to go to school and learn outdated languages no one uses on top of taking a pile of useless liberal arts courses is not an option 😛

Is there a good place to start? What would be good reading materials for learning this kind of thing? I picked up one of those sams teach yourself programming in 24 hours books expecting to gain some very basic knowledge but its a total joke. Its basically "copy this code into a text file and compile" yey youre a programmer!! They dont tell you why it works or even how to change the simple crap they make you do.
 
If you go to the computers section of your large local bookstore you should see at least a small section devoted to game programming. I couldn't tell you exactly where to start because I'm not all that interested in games but I'd be willing to bet that you won't get far with c++. I think most professional developers would be pretty challenged by such complicated low level programming. Hopefully there's some higher level sdks aimed at game mods and extensions.
 
programming != modding games
Unless you are actually planning on modifying the engine and you have the source code.

If you want to learn C++, I actually found the Sam's teach yourself in 21 days to be pretty good. You can also download Bruce Eckel's "Thinking in C++" book for free on his website. We used his "Thinking in Java" book in one of my programming classes and I thought it was really good.

But again, if you want to mod, as in creating maps, changing object placements, creating new models and skins, etc., etc., you don't need to be a programmer. Because games differ in how they work, your best bet is to pick ONE game that you are interested in modding. Pick one that has an active mod community and find out where these people congregate online. You could probably find a ton of info about modding for Quake or HL for instance. I don't think there is really one language you should learn because all these games are designed differently. Many games even have sdk's with tools for mapping, etc.
 
You mentioned NWN in the title, and seeing as how I'm fairly good at NWScript I'll give you my thoughts. For anyone with a CS background it'll be very easy. I don't have a CS background, but I do have a Geek Background and am competent in C.

NWScript is basically C.

If you can handle C++, then C shouldn't be a problem. I never got into C++ but I did dabble in Java.

Nice thing about NWScript, is that NWN has been around for a while so there are a lot of resources on the net.

Like this one: http://www.nwnlexicon.com

 
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