Every once in a while, a non-programmer interested in game programming will ask me where they should start learning. They’ll usually know that most modern programming languages are derived from or related to C and that most games are developed in C++, so the first question I hear will usually be:

Should I learn C first? Or C++?

My answer is: neither. I recommend learning C# first.

There are so many bad habits and terrible practices you can develop by starting with C or C++ first that it’s a bad road to go down. By starting with C# first you’ll be forced to learn how to develop object-oriented code instead of being able to mix an ugly blend of procedural and object code with no method to the madness.

The transition from C to C++ can be very easy — almost any code written in C will run unmodified in C++, with the biggest danger being that you might have used reserved keywords as variable names.

That’s very dangerous.

In C++ there are a lot of things that can be done that just shouldn’t be — especially global variables and constants, un-encapsulated data and procedural code, etc. The C++ compiler doesn’t care how badly-written your code is as long as you follow proper syntax. Some people spend years trying to “unlearn” C programming once they transition to C++. I know I had a hard time with it, and entire books have been written on the subject.

Instead, if you eventually end up making the transition from C# to C++, you’ll already be used to the idea of being able to use library functions and be less-inclined to “roll your own” version of things when you can find a library to take care of it for you. This will result in faster development — after all, it’s often far easier to plug something in or look up what’s available in the standard library than it is to write and debug new code, which C trains a programmer to do more often. Remember: an architect doesn’t reinvent the nail every time he designs a house.

Some other reasons to learn C# first:

• C# is also good as a first language because it’s a very easy to make a transition to Java. Some people refer to C# as a “child of C++ and Java”.
• With Microsoft’s Silverlight (designed as a Flash-killer), C# is also becoming more relevant for developing web-based games.
• Every person I know that has tried to learn programming and given up has died at the same point: pointers. With C# you don’t have such a mind-boggling mess of things and are far less likely to have weird pointer-based crashes and glitches. You never have to learn the abstract insanity that is pointer arithmetic and memory manipulation. (void ** pointers still make me wake up screaming sometimes.

No, I didn’t just have some rich relative kick off and leave my name in the will. The closest I have to a rich relative is an uncle who can afford to buy a new pair of shoes every two years.

In the original MUD code and in most C-based codebases I’ve seen, mobs have one set of data and players have a similar but different set of data. They all have things like hitpoints and movement points, but mobs have things like AI scripts and behavior flags while players have extra things like skill values and guild memberships.

There are two ways to handle this in C: either have completely different sets of data for each, or have a core set of data and a pointer to the extended data depending on which type it is (player or mob). The first way is sloppy and dangerous, while the second is sort of a “poor man’s inheritance”.

I’ve rewritten this to use parent and derived classes and all of a sudden some things that were very hard to do are incredibly easy. It’s also become incredibly easy to have things work differently for mobs and players by being able to use overridden functions for the player versions of code.

For example, since mobs don’t have skill training, almost every check for something like a bash or headbutt is based on a combination of that mob’s level and racial statistics. For players the check uses skill values modified by actual attributes like dexterity and strength.

Instead of writing a huge function riddled with lots of “if” statements, I can now just write different versions for each. The code is cleaner, easier to write, and automatically smart enough to “do the right thing”.

I love C++. Even though I’m getting a bit addicted to C# lately, it still rocks.

I never could have made this change without massive use search-and-replace, since the way to access most of the data members of players has changed completely. I did not want to change 2000 data references by hand.