General questions..

[Ace_Man]

I havea few questions on OpenGL and its use. These issues are still unclear to me.

In the real world, does everyone use model loaders? Would they build their guns/trees/people/levels in something like 3DStudio Max and simply load them? In other words is this a skill that will make me more marketable, or just something cool to do..

When people develpop games for consoles, would they use OpenGl/C/C++? I love programming in this stuff, but am I learning something that will will directly benefit me(if I wanted to make games for a living)?

I'm trying to pick up as many skills as I can before I finish school and I want to focus on what are the most important ones.
I realize that all skills are important in some fashion, but in a game oriented future (hopefully) I don't want to spend too much time on something that just isn't used/practical...

If any of you have any oppinions (or acually know from experience) I'd love to hear what you think...

Thanks

[Michael Steinberg]

Oh, hi!
Uhm, it definetaly necessary to write model loaders from any modelers, since you probably won't enjoy writing 3dsmax a second time. But I don't think that the actual game would still load the 3ds files, but rather self generated files that are more specific but easier to read and contain things that 3dsmax wouldn't support.
I think it's not bad to program opengl in c/c++, it is probably the most commonly use combination. I prefer C, but I think I'll move to C++ somewhen in near future, when I get myself used to it, I think it's the ugliest thing I ever saw, okay, behind basic and fortran.

[Nutty]

Well as someone who works in the games industry, I can tell you that knowing how to write an exporter for max or maya would be a big help. Prety much everything is done in modelers and then exported for the game. Though new "off the shelf" engines sometimes come with their own exporters.

As far as consoles go, they all use C, even though C++ is becoming very popular, often it's support on a platform isn't as full as the C support.

As regards what would be the best stuff to learn, I'd say maths. The more power we have in computers in the future, the more realistic games are gonna become. An excellent knowledge of maths would help enormously! Physics too. Also make sure you have a good understanding of how hardware works, so you can quickly pick on some native assembler, for when you need to routine hand optimizing.

hope that answers some questions.

Nutty.