The male members, which I'm sure is going to be pretty well represented at Mensa, is far better off joining a local yoga club if they want a chance at love ^.^ The females just need to go to a bar.

Better off putting it in the bottled water and whiskey instead. Those wankers wouldn't lower themselves far enough to drink tap water.

Spot on.

If you really want to learn to program games, start with Lua instead of C# or C++. It's a tiny little scripting language that can be learnt in a few hours and is used by an enormous number of game development companies. Lua is often tasked with providing a UI for the game, logic flow, rapid prototyping of features, anything really except for the critical loops - which are all handled in C++.

Once you have Lua under your belt you should learn C++, because at the heart this is what all performance sensitive games are written in. The game engine will be a mess of tight, sometimes obscure C++. If you want to make changes that are at that level then you absolutely need to be able to write C++.

Finally, think about learning C# if it's supported by the game engine you have chosen to use for your game. It should perform about the same speed as the Lua code and it's used for the same tasks - game logic, etc.

Since you're a beginner, I'd recommend you go with either Unity or Unreal Engine as these are both easier to learn and have a lot more community support. Unreal Engine now comes with the complete source code in C++, so you can take a solid look under the hood and see what's happening in there. CryEngine is moving towards releasing more of their source code, but are not there yet.

Really your first question should be which language to learn, but which engine to learn. The engine will dictate which languages you need to learn from there.

" I doubt you could write a balls-to-the-wall Crysis-like shooter in C#, but I don't imagine there'd be any performance-related reason you couldn't write an RTS in C# and have it run just fine on any machine not so old that its OS wouldn't support the .net framework anyway."

You might be surprised to discover you are completely wrong on this account. I'm currently write a game using the CryEngine 3. The code comes as a mix of C++, Lua and Flowgraph (a graphing system that allows rapid prototyping). There's an example implementation using the engine which is a complete FPS game, and that is a mix of all three languages. The hardcore stuff is done in c++ and access is provided to this through script binding for Lua and other means for Flowgraph.

There is also a working implementation of Mono (c#) which can be added to the system. Several teams are using that to produce various games using CryEngine.

Of course, the rendering, and main guts of the system is all nasty looking, balls to the wall c++, but a large amount of the game logic, AI, character handling, and the like is all in Lua, a simple scripting language.

I won't post about boys vs girls in this post, that's not what's salient. What matters is temperament.

I used to work for the company that supplied the London Stock Exchange with internet services. They would tell us what they wanted, and we would make that appear on the internet for them. This was around 2001, a difficult time for any company providing internet services, particularly those who supplied the top 1%. We built a lot of software for them, fast, and brilliant.

I had a pool of about 8 people I could call on to create any project. Five of those eight people were males, typical males. We drank down the pup together, yelled, expressed our innermost feelings, fought, cheered, and did what males do together in the pub. The other three were women with social responsibilities, children, spouses and the like to watch after and almost never came to the pub.

Many of the males were what you might call brilliant, and some, genius. We hired well. But when assigning a project I would never place two or more of these "genius" males on it because they would, for sure, fuck it right up. The women, although they would never be recognised as genius provided something essential, temperament.

I would always assign one or more of the females, whoever had the temperament to reign in the and counterbalance the males on the project. Without them, the males tended to do a "half assed job" or worse. With the females, together, they put out excellent code.

Now, this isn't based on sex, though it is frequently divided along sexual lines, but rather the approach to code and work.

I for one support more "women" in CS, whether they are male, female or somewhere on the spectrum. Balance is greater than genius.

I use 3 x 24 inch 120hz monitors. The source code goes on my middle screen, the right screen has a browser open to whatever information I need to be looking at while writing the code and the other monitor usually has a mix of things open e.g. another copy of VS 2013 with another (dependant or co-related) solution open to the code I need to be viewing, designer screens parts of the game (when running the editor for that), etc.

My three screens have a combined resolution of roughly 6000 x 1080, allow me to have three separate apps running windowed fullscreen, and can do so at a refresh rate of 120 hz. Even better, I don't get a crick in my neck from looking up and down all the time. I can simply rotate a little in my chair if I need to give one of the side monitors most of my attention for a while.

You can learn LUA pretty damn quick.

You're dead-weight. If you haven't bothered to learn any new languages since C, Bash and Lisp were the kings you don't have the chops, initiative or motivation to learn anything relevant today. You gave up decades ago, time to lie down and die now.

Maybe I'm getting old, but a 24" monitor running 1080p about 40cm frrom my face seems pretty damn good. About as good as I will ever need. My eyesight is not likely to improve, and despite the fact it is pretty good for me age, I don't really see any gains to be had from doubling the resolution of my monitors (x3).

I'm the sort of guy who buys the 42" TV because...he knows he can just fucking sit a few feet closer to it if he wants the pixels and screen to appear larger!

The day I need a 4k monitor for programming is the day I need neckstrain from looking up, down and all around.

I would take the complete lack of sound from a monitor over the fucking awful shite that passes for sound on TV speakers any day. Save me $2 and don't include the speakers thanks.

The problem is not with calling memcpy, it's calling it without sanitising or knowing the extents to which it needs to be bound.

Inuit, not Eskimoes as you put it, don't have 50-100 different words for snow. There are many references for this, but one should suffice. http://curiosity.discovery.com...

Don't be confused by the nice guys girls like to spend their time with, and the arseholes they end up fucking in the back alley.

And for the brave, formatting their SSSD disks as DSDD.