silence omo7

Hey silence! Welcome back, we missed you on the site!

Yes, I do, but I don't have a kit right now. My drumming fix comes from Rock Band. I would say I'm intermediate skill level: good enough to play in a crappy band although I've never done more than jam with friends. I'm self-taught, but I think Rock Band would've accelerated the learning curve extremely. The key is not to learn any bad habits early, and make sure to focus on technique. Think paradiddle, one-ee-and-ah-two-ee-and-ah, and double flam..

The problem with using Rock Band, is that it doesn't have the right tactile feedback and you can't work on your tone or "tightness" of your rhythm. All you have to do is hit the pad at around the right time with any amount of power. On the other hand, it's equivalent to playing to a metronome or a clicktrack. Your tempo won't wander.

I originally started playing drums as part of band in 5th grade. I didn't really learn any drumset until 7th. I took lessons from somebody, and he told me to buy some books with exercises in them Chances are you could find the same information online. Check out www.drummerworld.com. I think they may have links. Or Google "basic drumset exercises." Once you get the hang of it, try learning the drum part to songs you like. My teacher had me learn the part for "Smell's Like Teen Spirit" by Nirvana. It's a little tricky at first, but once you get the hang of it it's not bad. Also if you don't know how to already, learn how to read rhythms and know what quarter, eighth, and sixteenth notes are. I think some drumming book by Carment Apice explains everything, but I can't remember it's title. It's what I started in. Good luck!

Hrmm... I think that FFVII-Advent Children should be related to FFVII the game (which I know isn't currently on the site) since they're both based on the same universe with Cloud, Sephiroth etc. But as far as I know, FF10 and FF7 don't share story or character elements. I haven't played FF10 though, so maybe it does?

I've never heard of it before, but I checked it out and it looks good for your level. The most important things when choosing a tool like this are the documentation, the community, and what you can do with it. It has full documentation, and a very strong community with an active forum, so that's really important. I also checked out some of the sample games to see what's possible, and they have some pretty good stuff there so it's definitely powerful for doing simple things. Remember you're not making the next Final Fantasy... yet :)

I'm not familiar with the code at all, but I can imagine it's not too bad. Simple scripting language for handling the state and physics, etc. As long as the documentation is there you should be able to figure things out. I don't know if you've learned about Object Oriented programming yet, but you should at least have a basic undersatnding of that first before going further.