Programming 2 thoughts

So I finished the PG2 course, it was a very difficult course for some people when my group went in there was 14 of us, only 7 made it through. PG1 - PG3 are intentionally hard to pass, they call it the gauntlet, the purpose is to teach you programming and to fail anyone who is not serious about it, if you fail twice in any of these courses your out of the program for a year. This way Full Sail ensures that very few people can just skate by, which is good you do need to know how to program well to make a game. I wouldn't want a slacker on my team for finally projects, I will have enough to do I don't want to teach someone who never paid attention how to do stuff they should know how to do. However most of the people in our group studied very hard, and they still failed. So even with a lot of work if your just not getting the topic you can easily fail. From talking to other gamedev students I have found that most people have to retake PG2, the good thing is that's its free to retake the course if you fail for bad grades. You have to pay again if you fail for attendance (which happened to two people). Most people get it the 2nd time around, its better to spend the time learning than to rush ahead I think.

So PG2 is over - yeah, I'm 2 days into PG3 now but I will just recap some PG2 topics. We covered Classes, Linked Lists, Queues, Public Inheritance, Dynamic memory with classes, and with inheritance, a lot of operator overloading, operator overloading with friends, bitwise operators, base conversion, Recursive functions and function pointers, and I think that's about it. Of course there was a test everyday of class, for PG2 they alternated between programming tests and written tests.

Overall the class was laid back and the instructor was very cool. The most difficult topic to get down is probably the inheritance topic, a lot of new jargon is introduced and can get confusing so pay close attention and take lots of notes. Also one annoying thing, the final is based off of the book, not the lectures, if you didn't read the book you will probably do bad on the finally which is a ridiculous 40% of your grade (remember they want to fail you if your not putting in the effort). There are questions on the finally that assume you remember a class object from an example in the book and how it was used.

Next post - linear algebra and some cool things I was able to do with.