Okay here goes. I’m very very new to game design and want to build my own game, I do not have a vast knowledge of c++, but have enough knowledge I can pretty much look at a bit of code and see what it’s doing. My question is this… “Where should I start?” I’ve already got myself a very basic 3D mesh and I have a texture on it. I have it in 3ds format. I don’t know that this makes any difference, but I figured I’d put that out there just in case it was.
First you should figure out the best platform to use, if you are just going to create windows applications then OpenGL and win32 found be just fine, but if you want platform independence there are lots of choice, GLUT, GLFW, SDL and so on.
You should get yourself a 3ds loader, have a peek at www.sourceforge.net for libraries and you could also search this forum for other ideas.
Have a peek a some OpenGL tutorials to figure out how everything works, there are links on this websites to some tutorials and you can find zillions of them with google.
And when you run into problems you ask questions here…
Mikael
I would start by working through the tutorials at:
http://nehe.gamedev.net/
then you could start modifying a tutorial to start the basis of your game. (be prepared to scrap and start again when you learn new tricks!)
Think of modules, you’ll need several of them:
Math library,
SceneGraph
Physics Engine,
AI module,
Scripting Engine,
etc…
For some you can use third party products (OpenGL, OpenAL, DirectX, LUA, Python) or you can roll your own depending on coding skills and will to do it. 
Good luck!
Well, I am indeed going to go for platform independance. I feel that it’s unfair to gamers to make a game that forces them to be of one OS type. Or even probably the most infuriating is if it’s for the two other types of OS than you own (ie, you have windows, but it’s only on mac and linux). I heard that OpenGL was pretty platform independant, so that’s why I figured I’d start here, but eventually when the game grows large enough I want the gamers to be able to make the most of the game by being able to select their own render engine (opengl, directx, and any others there may be). I will look at the tutorials posted here, and hope those give me a good place to start. But something I would find useful is if someone could point me to a great free program for flowcharting, and one for time scheduling.
If you want platform independence, use GLUT. It’s probably the easiest and most supported out there.
Also, that is what NeHe uses, so it would probably be perfect to start there.
NeHe?
may i be so bold as to ask what kind of game you want to program?
I wanna build all sorts of games, but the first one i want to work on is an MMORPG based around the legend of zelda games for the nintendo 64. I always loved the puzzles they had, and the unique way they made you think about how to get the end result. I figure that this could provide for a lot of fun online because, say that you’ve got one hylian character, and one goron character in the same team, they may enter a temple that require them to go separate routes and require them to each use their own unique skills and abilities to get through their part, but also they may have to come together on the same boss at the end, and this would require them to both have all puzzles solved, and they’d have to stand on certain switches at the same time to make them stick to even open the door (this isn’t going to be exact in game because i don’t work for nintendo and can’t use those names and stuff). But I figure there is a lot that can be done to make the game feel similar, but still revolutionize the mmorpg world.
Wow, omfg, I just got started on the NeHe tutorials, and today when I went to go back, the page is gone, I get good 'ol error 404 when trying to reach that page. Anyone know of any good tutorials to check into that are pretty similar to NeHe?