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by fellellor 3265 days ago
Handmade Hero is over 380, hour or two long videos last i saw. How far are you into it?

Regardless, it's an amazing effort.

2 comments

I've watched pretty much every episode, mostly live. It is pretty amazing. It also pretty much single-handedly reinvigorated my love of programming.

But there are definitely entire weeks (or weekends these days) of video that aren't all that useful unless you're trying to build exactly what Casey is trying to build.

https://hero.handmade.network/episodes is a must if you want to cut some corners on what you watch.

Off the top of my head, here's my suggestions:

* Weeks 1-15 are all useful - it's really a great introduction and kool-aid provisioning system

* Week 20 and 21 has some introductory lighting stuff.

* Week 23 and 24 has some good performance profiling stuff.

* Week 25 and 26 has some multithreading job queue stuff.

* Week 28 and 29 has SIMD/SSE sound mixing implementation

* Weeks 36-38 has debug/performance infrastructure

* Day 235 and weeks 48 and 49 are the start of OpenGL initialization.

* Week 74 discusses particle systems

* Weekend 3 discusses compression

* Weekends 6-14 are the core software-renderer-to-OpenGL days

* Weekend 23 is a re-implementation of lighting

The other stuff is exploration of concepts that are either specific to Handmade Hero, or are much deeper implementation detail type stuff - not entirely necessary if you're skimming.

>But there are definitely entire weeks (or weekends these days) of video that aren't all that useful unless you're trying to build exactly what Casey is trying to build.

That's been one of my biggest problems with Handmade Hero - Casey isn't teaching people how to write C/C++ and build a game engine, he's teaching them how he builds one specific game and mixing his personal habits (and idiosyncratic prejudices) along with some very useful programming knowledge.

And he also shut down comments on the Youtube feed at some point, which I find very unfortunate. The commenters helped me gauge the BS factor for any particular episode before jumping in.

'he's teaching them how he builds one specific game '

While I would agree that there may perhaps exist a better alternative, most of us have learned a difficult concept or two by finding a working example. This is that, but taken up to 11. Assuming you actually follow on and try to make -small- variations to ensure you understand whats going on, you will probably be in a great position

Yeah, it grossly understates the effort required to create a decent game.