Hmmm what's new on the horizon

I've been quite busy over the past few months, first up I've signed up for several courses over at the Game Institute (http://www.gameinstitute.com). I took up the Game Maths, as well as the C++ for game programmers I and II. I think Game Institute is an awesome online learning service - the coursework is straight and focused, but since I do have quite a bit of programming background, taking it up wasn't _too_ difficult... until at least the Windows API portions :)

Am I switching over to the game industry? Heck no! Basically I was going through the Max and Maya APIs, and didn't know what was all these windows programming stuff, so heck I thought this course would be a good pick me up. And yes it is. I would suggest if you are a pure newbie to C++, check out Ivor Horton's Learning Visual C++ 6. Yes, it's old, software wise, but the contents, such as the basics of programming, inheritance etc are not. Having switched to Java programming after my graduation, I kinda lost touch with pointers and all those memory management stuff. Just FYI, I'm using Visual Studio 2005 (standard edition btw), all the code works great.

Speaking of which, I was introduced to Maya about 3 months ago, and man, it's a blast! Sure, I hated the interface at first, but I got over it in about a fortnight, and I'm able to work on Max and Maya without getting confused over the keys. Well, most of the time :) Maya's simply huge, and thankfully, I had a whole chunk of Gnomon DVDs to learn off. Check with your local library, they may stock a good part of Gnomon's Maya range. Alex Alverez is simply one of the better DVD teachers I've had the chance to learn from. Apart from that, I'm still waiting for my copy of Complete Maya Programming: An Extensive Guide to MEL and C++ API to arrive from Amazon. Sheesh, they're taking like 2 weeks to get the stuff together to be shipped. Perhaps some of the audio cds I got were too obscure lol.

Ah well, will write more soon. I'm on the last two chapters of my Game Institute coursework for Win32 programming, after which I'll be heading into the Maya API :) Since the Max API doesn't have any recent books at all, I thought i'd go with something more current.