Coding

The heart of game development - All the artwork in the world won’t do you any good if you don’t have a way to make it go. There are many, many options here, and I will only cover a few that I know to be handy and available. There are also 2 different routes to go:

1. Plain text editor and command line compilers. Not something I can highly recommend for newbies, as it can take a while to learn all the proper command line switches, and which programs to run to get it all going properly.
2. IDE - Integrated Development Environment. This has pretty much become the defacto standard for coding in this day and age. For the most part, you set up your project, and from then on all you have to worry about is your code. Also makes creating GUI based apps easy, as most IDE's include some kind of resource (i.e. Dialog, Menu, etc) editor.

Then you have the question of languages: There are probably many more out there that are also viable languages, but I will stick with the ones I am most familiar with: Java and C/C++. So here goes.

Java

There are a lot of freeware / open source Java editors, compilers, and utilities available on the web. The one thing you will definitely need is the JDK (Java Developer’s Kit). It is available for Win32, Linux, and a few other *nix OS’s. There are ports to other systems, as well. Once you have the JDK installed, you have 2 options. One, use the text editor of your choice and the Java compiler included in the JDK, and go to town. The other option is to use on of the many IDEs available.

I, personally, am learning my way around Forte, which is Sun’s free IDE. The nice thing about Java tools is most of them are written in Java, so once you have the JDK, almost all of them will run on your system with no problems. Another good IDE for Java is JCreator, which is written in C++ for Win32 systems, so it isn’t portable like the Java based ones, but might be a little easier to get used to working with.

C/C++

When it comes to C/C++, you have more options then you can shake a stick at. I’ll stick with listing the Win32 environment ones, as I am not familiar with all the options that *nix users have.

• Compilers
  • Borland CPP 5.5 - Ultra high-performance 32-bit Borland ANSI C++ native code compiler (from the site). An excellent compiler, especially for the price
  • Cygwin -Win32 port of the well known (and loved by developers) GNU development tool chain.
  • MinGW -Minimalist GNU for Windows. Similar to Cygwin, but not as comprehensive of a set
  • DJGPP - A complete 32-bit C/C++ development system for Intel 80386 (and higher) PCs running DOS. Very good for getting your feet wet with console programming
• IDEs
  • DevC++ - A full-featured IDE, which is able to create Windows or console-based C/C++ programs using the Mingw compiler
  • VIDE -An IDE for both C++ and Java… Can use the GCC toolkit, the Borland compiler, and Sun’s JDK. Quite the nice package

There are quite a few more options out there, but these ones are (IMHO) the best, especially for free. They might not have all the bells and whistles of Visual Studio, CodeWarrior, or C++ Builder but they serve their purpose quite well.

3D Modeling