Why do you visit forums? Ok the answer might depend on what you are interested in and on what you are looking for but let’s take me for example. I’m a software developer and when I visit a forum a try to exchange information with people who share the same interests and/or are involved in similar projects and/or try to find a solution for a specific problem. Now I noticed on many forums and blog posts that there are people who cannot evaluate their own skills. You often step over posts with the following title: “I’m new to game programming and I started developing my own game engine to produce a game like Doom3”.
Bump!
Bump!
Bump!
Ok there is nothing against a challenge but hey be serious. Do you really think you would be able to develop a first person shooter with latest features without ever drawn a single triangle on the screen? I usually avoid commenting such posts but here is one which made me go mad. On a forum a guy opened a new thread like the title above. He asked people to help him get started. One posted a link to beginner tutorials on OpenGL another posted beginner tutorials on DirectX, some other guys pointed him to a C++ reference and so on.
Now after some days this guy answered to all the comments that he doesn’t need tutorials but source code. Again people tried to help him with posting some code snippets on how to create a DirectX device or how to get started with OpenGL’s glut library. Now some days later I stepped over some blogs where I was looking for some tutorials myself. The same guy (I suppose it was the same since the username was the same and this username was so unique that it would hurt if someone else would use it) posted on a tutorial, which was fairly enhanced with explanations and pseudo-code, that he would need the source code for the example.
This was the point where I went mad. Why people think they could copy and paste tutorial code and build an game engine out of it. I like sites with source code very much but to help you learn a topic sites with pseudo-code are more than enough. You will never learn the essence of octree rendering if you copy and paste the source code of a tutorial into your own application. You should read carefully through the tutorial and work it out for yourself. I suppose only 5% of the tutorial codes are usable for your engine and a benefit is visible.
Think about it.
