So whatever happened to the whole PGDCE thing?

[phibermon]

I think that making tutorials about specific graphic API is a bad choice. Why?
Correct me if I'm wrong but isn't the purpose of graphic API to provide a uniform way of using graphic hardware regardless of which programming language is used for the application/game development? Or in order words if you want to create same graphic scene in let us say Object Pascal, C++, C#, .NET, Python or JAVA you would in the end always end up calling same graphical API functions. Right?

Hey man I agree with you but where do you draw the line? do write all our examples in pseudo code because we can't garuntee the future of pascal? do we not talk about games because people can learn general programming elsewhere and apply those principals to game development?

Yeah somebody can go learn OpenGL anywhere - they can also go learn programming anywhere. Is not teaching them Object Pascal because they can learn general programming and apply the principals to Object Pascal - exactly the same as not teaching them GL because they can go and learn general GL and then figure out on their own how to apply it to Pascal?

Also why should we bother people with learning about graphic basics when there are several quite capable graphical libraries out there which make the whole process about working with graphics a lot easier?

You literally just dismissed OpenGL because it might not be relevent in 10 years and then you suggest they invest the entire future of their project on an even smaller and less supported graphics library?

Why bother teaching game programming or indeed programming at all because they'll be irrelevant when we have holodecks and the computer interprets our requirements?

In fact why do anything whatsoever because the universe is going to end rendering everything ultimately pointless?

You have to start somewhere - you have to make some assumptions - believe me - there's *plenty* of 3D specifics that your highly generic categories will not cover, there's entire designs that are specific to 3D hardware - compute hardware.

Like it or not hardware accelerated 3D is a massive part of gaming and has been for nearly 2 decades and there's far more complexity, far more to learn in the 3D realm (NOT just graphics) than in a thousand collections of generic 'timeless' catch all principals.

Definitely what you say is a good idea, I'm all for general principals and good coding practices - give a man a fish and he'll eat for a day but give him the means to catch his own fish and he'll eat for a whole lifetime.

Totally agree - but by the same token teaching him to fish isn't going to let him build a spaceship.

A game with great gameplay running in software at 2fps is a game with bad gameplay