Hey guys,

I am starting this series. I am coming from a Unity3D background. I am familiar with C/C++ and OpenGL (Learnt tutorials for self teaching and some for Coursework). I am super interested in building a full fledged scalable project and hence I found this.

1.There are almost 490 Episodes to catch up. What is the best advice you guys have for me? Is it helpful to Code as I watch the videos to build up along side?

2. Do I need Eamcs or other text editor like Casey uses in the videos? I like Visual studio and I know his Emacs have special config and all that for shortcuts, has someone progressed without text editor?

Finally, this looks like a lot of commitment, did you guys stick to tutorials or ventured off building own projects as you progressed through the videos.?

Thanks,
Lak

You don't need emacs or later 4coder to work in. You can use whichever environment you like. One catch is if you reproduce how Casey writes his code (a single translation unit), then you need to make sure whatever your environment you are using does not build each source file separately. The other is if your environment differs too much from Casey (for instance, not using Windows), you might run into problems. If that happens, you can reach out to the community for help.

Treat the archives as "daily" blogs of an engine programmer going through the entire process of making a game. There is value in going through each video in order; however, there is also a lot of content (over 800 hours). So you should ask yourself: what do you really want to get out of it?

I tend to tackle it two ways:

1. Going through in order to learn the entire process.
2. Picking and choosing certain topics, learn those and apply to real-life situations.

(1) is how I want to do the entire series, but the time commitment is just too great for me right now. So instead, while I'm working on my personal projects, I may run into an area that Casey has covered and I just watch those. Depending on the topic, it can lead to a rabbit hole for you might want to learn other things; but, I find if I can focus on the specific thing I can get just enough information for my needs.

to help with picking and choosing you topic all episodes are annotated and you can search the annotations.

Literally following along sequentially with the code is probably a terrible idea, especially for someone who's not already sufficiently advanced. For one thing there are like 500 episodes that are roughly 2.5 hours each, that's 1250 hours - there's a major opportunity cost there. You'll almost certainly learn far more through conventional means and working on your own stuff. HMH's real utility is more for advanced devs looking for deep dives on obscure low-level topics. And definitely if your interests lay more towards actually building and shipping games, then HMH is probably not a good learning resource (at least not following along sequentially) as you'd inevitably end up spending for too much time getting pulled into one arcane technical rabbit hole after another at the cost of far more practical work you could be doing.

It may be worth watching the first few dozen streams sequentially, since most of the foundational ideas are introduced in those episodes. And then from there, you can browse for specific topics using the episode guide as they become relevant to you.

NelsonMandella
For one thing there are like 500 episodes that are roughly 2.5 hours each, that's 1250 hours - there's a major opportunity cost there.

The streams were 1 hour until episode 350, when they switched to 2 hours. So the total time cost is more like 650 hours, plus Q&As which probably add another 100 to 200 hours. So if you watch at 2x speed it's around 350 to 400 hours. A smaller undertaking, but still not at all worth it to watch the whole thing in my opinion.

notnullnotvoid
It may be worth watching the first few dozen streams sequentially, since most of the foundational ideas are introduced in those episodes. And then from there, you can browse for specific topics using the episode guide as they become relevant to you.

100% agree.

hey guys,

Thanks a lot for taking your time to respond. yes I have like 3 years exp in programming, mostly unity and with C++ I have some side projects experience. I definitely want to dive deep and learn some hardcore low level programming as it will strengthen my foundation. I believe I am going to watch until episode 25-30 Sequentially and see how much I am able to get out of it or if it even makes sense to me.

In General,
I have no idea how to break into C++ industry which I really want to. My current company will eventually let me jump into low level C/Graphics roles in a year or so. I want to prepare myself and skill up. Please give me a headsup if there is a better way to handle this ? (maybe tutorials on LearnOpenGL or Vulkan tuts). I know handmade hero focus is not API and I am totally fine with it too as it focuses on teaching the developer how to think in the lowest layer close to hardware.

shrikky
I want to prepare myself and skill up. Please give me a headsup if there is a better way to handle this ? (maybe tutorials on LearnOpenGL or Vulkan tuts). I know handmade hero focus is not API and I am totally fine with it too as it focuses on teaching the developer how to think in the lowest layer close to hardware.

The most important learning happens when you're forced by necessity to have to figure things out for yourself (there is no shortcut here), as opposed to following along a lesson plan/book/tutorial. The key is to work on something where you're constantly being pushed just sightly beyond your comfort zone in terms of knowledge/ability, while maintaining motivation. Obviously you want to avoid staying too far within your comfort zone or going to far outside of it, staying in this sweet spot is important to maximize your pace of learning. Use books/articles/resources as aids not roadmaps, chart your own course by choosing the stuff your most passionate about (within an area) and use them when you need to elucidate a problem landscape once you sort of already have your own ideas about it. Figuring out stuff on your own, even if it's horribly inefficient/sloppy/ugly, is far more valuable to the learning process than stepping through someone elses solution.

Thanks to everyone. This is definitely one of the most helpful communities. I will come back and leave some update on my progress in a week along with future plans and ideas so it may help other people like me who are late starters.