Hi - I am currently looking at unis to go to and think that a normal type of uni would suit me more than a game development uni - I was just wondering what universites have the best computer science degrees in australia - and dont say QUT - god i need to escape from here
Thanks in advanced
about the Digipen student - i know someone that went there and he said that most of the 2 year degree students were lacking lots of know-how and that if u were going to go to Digipen the 4 year was the only way to go
Still wondering what some good universites with good computer science departments are? =)
Umm, are you specifically looking at QLD or elsewhere as well?
I did computer science at monash uni (clayton), which was pretty decent as far as i'm concerned (although i have nothing to compare it to!). There was a fairly wide range of subjects, although if you were looking to get really heavily into AI or Graphics etc. you might have difficulty getting further than the intro subjects (which are still very good though), until say, an honours year. However, that was 2 years ago, and with the introduction of the (somewhat) games specific multimedia course, there may be a greater range of subjects available.
It also has a wide variety of courses, covering pretty much all teh standard disciplines, so if you wanted to step out of the CS stuff and do a couple of psychology subjects or something you wouldn't have far to go.
Anyway, my advice would be to check out a bunch of CS courses, see what their core subjects, and electives are etc., what else the school has to offer (like decent comptuer labs!) and then fire of some questions to the lecturers, co-ordinators etc. telling them what you hope to get out of the course, see what suggestions they can offer in relation to subjects, and if they can refer you to previous students etc. See if you can find other previous students for other opinions. Basically, if you haven't enrolled yet, you're probably not going to be getting into anything until next year (i dunno if you could still enrol for second semester), so you probably have plenty of time to look around.
CYer, Blitz
Magna,
I just want to say in my opinion, you're making the right choice. Although game specific programs are bennificial in some areas, the amount of knowledge you get in a CS degree is worth 10 times more! Essential, programming is just like a learning a new language (as in spanish, french, whatever), anyone can learn it. Syntax is easy it's learning the rules, the reasons why it does what it does, that shapes a good programmer.
CS will give you the science behind computers. You'll learn the importance of Big O notation in terms of assessing algorithms (you'll have it ingrained in you). You'll even learn how to make your own processer! You'll have a great low level understanding of computers and their theory which in the long run, will show in the quality of your code/games you make.
It's my belief that Gaming schools teach you a skill, where as a University teaches you the methods/ideas/reasons behind that skill.
Personal exerience here. We have one person who went to Digipen (I believe the first game specific school). The rest of our team were all uni graduates. Come 6 weeks before we shipped Generals, the Digipen person was not allowed to touch the code as his changes were very sloppy and dangerous to the product. Where as everyone else (10 other engineers) we allowed to make changes. It even got to the point that the code this guy wrote, he wasn't even allowed to fix, we had to spend our time fixing his code (first trying to make sense of it). Anyway, now he's the only one on the team not working on the LoTR RTS.
Of course, there's exceptions to every rule. And I have known plenty of self taugh kick ass programmers. Those guys usually don't require uni because they have the low level understanding through their own education.