[jordan0day]

My first 3D graphics course in college was the same story. You go in thinking you're going to learn to make "Crysis", and you're lucky to leave with a texture-mapped plane. In fact, we probably didn't write a line of code for the first month, we instead spent all our time deriving the mathematics involved in 3D graphics.

As an analogy, it's like taking a "basics of the web" course, and instead of the expected lessons on HTML and CSS, you learn to write a web server and a web browser.

That said, in retrospect, I'm glad we learned those things. If they would have just turned us loose with Ogre (http://www.ogre3d.org/) or something, no one would have spent the time going back to actually learn how 3D graphics really works.

[gabbo]

> As an analogy, it's like taking a "basics of the web" course, and instead of the expected lessons on HTML and CSS, you learn to write a web server and a web browser.

Funny you mention this - when I was an undergrad, the first complex group project in my EE/CE curriculum (second year; first year was all individual) had us building a web server.