What level of education is required to do this kind of work..?

I'm kind of curious: What kinds of Classes should I try to take if I ever want to help create things like Beamng.. Or any game for that matter? Seems like it is a fun, and possibly rewarding career option even if it is not the easiest.

 

The colours..

You need to know programming, for programming you don't need to go to college or uni or take a class in school, those are generally no good if you want to do any type of programming - best to learn it yourself: google (C++) tutorials or go to an apprenticeship, but for that you need some sort of programming knowledge I guess (reason for apprentice is that they will do programming..)
If you want to make games like BeamNG and physics games specifically, it is probably worth learning C++ over anything else.
You ought to be quite good at programming to make something like this, anyone can print "hello world" to a console.

As for the physics part, you want to learn well in school then go study it at uni, something up to fluid dynamics or so.

About modelling, you learn how to use Blender, 3ds max or Maya and just model things, probably the easiest of the 3.

If you are interested in learning programming I can direct you to some places and give you some tips.

 

Oh, well if you don't need to go to college for programming I guess I should tell all the programmers at my school to just quit then, right? And that the diplomas of the graduates are useless...?

Also, if you want to go the artistic side, you don't need to be a programming wizzard at all(helps if you know a little about it though). If you want to do the programming side you don't need to be an amazing modeler at all, but again, it helps if you know a little about it.

And mass/spring physics(BeamNG) is not even close to fluid dynamics.


There's definitely good courses for programming, but good colleges or unis are hard to find on this subject. I'm currently going to the 4th year of a Game Achitecture and Design course in the Netherlands, which is said to be the best dedicated Game Design course in the whole of Europe. You can learn everything yourself if you want, but companies will always hire guys from a good school, with experience in releasing/making games as part of the education, more easily than someone who learnt it as a hobby and have only been modding or something. Plus, you get a TON of contacts in the game world through your school.

Problem is, most people who want to do this type of education think they can sit around playing games all day, when really, you do nothing of the sort. Our school has a 50% drop-out rate in the first year because of the sheer amount of people who have no clue what kind of education they'll be following... So unless you're absolutely sure you're willing to make your whole social life suffer due to not having any spare time anymore, and willing to stay up till 2 at night multiple times a week to finish a project, there's no real point in following proper courses at college/uni on this stuff...

Also, you should decide if you want to do the artist side or programming side... If you think you'll really like making characters, cars, buildings, etcetera, or if you wanna write code all day. You're not likely to do both jobs well at the same time...

 

I worded the first part wrong talking about programming:
You don't need to know programming to make models or do sound, no.

But what I said about learning programming; different people learn things different ways, but going to schools for programming/CS generally teaches you outdated information and techniques. If you want to be a good programmer, you will still have to learn almost everything yourself. A CS course, you would think gives you great knowledge of programming, but it barely scratches it.
Although, like you said: there is many people that have no idea, they will still come out barely knowing programming and get hired, while the people who actually want to do this sort of thing will have no chance. I missed the point there; if you go to a school to do this sort of thing, it's basically the only way to get hired by a big company.

I didn't say fluid dynamics was spring physics.
I meant you should have great knowledge of physics

Also, I assumed he meant the physics wise things that's why I went straight to talking about programming.

Besides, if there is something that interests you and you want to do it, you learn those types of things by yourself, right?

Kind of off topic, but what programming do you know Mythbuster?

 

I've coded a little game in Flash before as a school course(and was helping a lot of people ), and when I'm working on a mod that requires a feature that isn't in a game I sometimes think "hmm, I wonder if I can combine the code of these 2 features to do the thing I need", so then I start roaming through some code and fail at making something useful. When I read code from a game I can usually figure out how it works and what the code does, roughly, though I'm not very good at coding anything myself. That's usually enough if you're a 3d artist though, cause it means you can sort-of make it clear to programmers what you want, without them thinking "This dude is nuts...".

That said, I think it really depends on the school you're going to, wheither or not you're learning new things. Our school is pretty up to date when it comes to latest tech. For example we had 'Gamelab' teams making games in a real-time ray-tracer engine years ago, which was designed by a teacher(Jacco Bikker). Not many real-time raytracers exist at the moment, especially since they require monster computers(my gaming pc doesn't even come close in specs). It really depends on the school, I guess. I'm not familiar with other game design schools, I just know ours is very up to date since the students are very involved with the teaching too. Lots of new tech videos(including the very first BeamNG videos) get shared by students on our forums and facebook page, and the teachers regularly read those pages too...

 

As a job what I would love to do is create maps just like you what would that be called in a career is it level designer? I have always enjoyed creating maps. When beamng is released I will hopefully plan to create some maps for the game p.s thanks for the link I will take a look at the careers when I know what a map designer is called

 

I think Portal 2's builder is quite good for level design.
Unless you just want to start making your own levels(designing and creating), then you could either make maps for T3D or any other game really.