creating a new thread on /prog/

because fuck you, that's why

My semester has come to an end and I need to choose between Graphics Programming and Mobile Game Development as my elective subject next semester. Which one should I choose?

My semester has come to an end and I need to choose between Graphics Programming and Mobile Game Development as my elective subject next semester. Which one should I choose?

Graphics Programming

Game Dev class
waste of money, just go on the internet and search or apply all the logic you've learned in previous years to make a game

>>2,3
choose to come back to 4chan after you've grown up

Take graphics programming. A game dev course on your resume will not get you hired for game dev, only experience will. Usually that starts at a testing company, who won't hire you if they think you're overqualified (you'll leave and they'll have to replace you.)

Graphics programming will teach you most of the hard stuff anyway. Additional stuff you can learn on your own:

* Path finding (A*, etc) and clipping techniques.
* Games oriented memory management (preallocation techniques etc.)
* Event handling (eg. polling loops) and time slicing.
* Finite state machines.

Each of those are individually simple enough to digest without much assistance. There's also the topic of audio, which can be as complex as you want to make it. It rarely gets very involved, most games use music streams and sound effects playback with L/R positioning and gain. The odd game might be clever and use effects to process the audio (like reverb).

A good graphics programming course will be more demanding than all of that combined.

>>6

audio effects in games are so cool. I love it when they implement the doppler effect, it makes things so much more zoomy.

Geometry-based sound effects are much better, like reverb and echoes inside confined spaces. There are some people on it, but still primitive.

>>8

I've heard that techniques for that are similar to ray tracing.

>>9
Yes, waves after all. But sound is way slower than light, making a single sound pulse travel between many frames.

>>7
Doppler is cool. I am more fond of positional audio (psychoacoustic 3D panning essentially), but doppler effects come in second.

>>8-10
Ideally that will encompass everything I said above. I looked into it but never tried to implement it because I didn't think I'd be able get enough quality out of it to make it worthwhile.

There are two approaches, however. A cheap way seems to be to precompute filters for the entire geometry and ignore any moving obstructions (e.g. player) and forbid destructible environments. You can degrade the effect quality without ruining the sound quality. The effect might not sound great, but you won't get bursts of noise or whatever.

The ray tracing style approach needs realtime effect computation and when the effect quality degrades the sound quality goes with it.