J. S. Harbour said
This book was not intended to be a game project book, like "Build your own RPG MAKER in 10 easy steps", but unfortunately that is the impression that many readers seem to have, and it's a false assumption. This book is about learning to program VB.NET 2005 or 2008 with Managed DirectX. That's a very difficult subject, so the game was intended as a way to improve learning. This book teaches how to program 2D games in VB.NET and Managed DirectX, with an emphasis on top-down tile based scrolling. A very large scale tile-based game world is developed using a world editor called Mappy, with tutorials on how to create your own game world. The book even recommends creating your own game levels, and that the one presented in the book is only an example.
Please, if you don't know VB.NET, don't buy this book as your introduction to the language! This is a very difficult subject to master! DirectX9 should only be approached after one has learned VB.NET first. So, please read a primer and learn the language, and then give DirectX a try. =)
Here is the outline for the book:
Part I: The Game Engine
Chapter 1: Getting Started
Chapter 2: Introduction to Visual Basic .NET
Chapter 3: Introduction to Managed DirectX
Chapter 4: Sprites: The Key To 2D Games
Chapter 5: Printing Text and Getting User Input
Chapter 6: Tile-Based Scrolling
Chapter 7: Entity Management
Chapter 8: Playing Sound Effects and Music
Part II: The Game World
Chapter 9: Designing The Celtic Crusader Game
Chapter 10: Creating The Game World
Chapter 11: Exploring The Game World
Chapter 12: Adding Scenery and Objects
Part III: The Characters
Chapter 13: Creating The Player Character
Chapter 14: Building The Celtic Crusader Engine
Chapter 15: Keeping Track of Inventory
Chapter 16: Adding NPCs and Monsters
Chapter 17: Engaging in Combat
A. Singta said
The book was interesting for the first few chapters, but then it became frustrating. The classes for the games were constantly modified on the source disk from chapter to chapter without notifying the reader of any changes. The reader either has to open the source file for each chapter and type the changes into their source code, or the reader has to use the source code itself. One thing not to do is load the whole map. Its okay for a small map, but the author loaded a 48000 X 64000 pixels or 1500 X 2000 32X32 pixel tiles. In addition, the map is refreshing every 10 milliseconds. When I tried to run the completed game from the source disk and found out it took 300+ MB of RAM, and this is not a complete game. This takes more RAM than some 3D games I played like Orochi Warriors on PC. The game also drained 30% of from the battery from my friends laptop in less than five minutes. When testing out the actuall game play, I found that I was killing enemies behind me when I was attacking the one in from half the time. When printing text on the screen, the author .png files and placed the them on the screens like tiles. This method would make it really difficult to print text in other languages like Japanese and Chinese that contain thousands of characters. It will take a lot of effort to modify the author's code to make the a more efficient game.
Michael J. Dolan said
I like the concept of the book, but there are a lot of inconsistencies in the code for the projects. Up until the fifth chapter I was fully ready to endorse the book to my district as a textbook for an advance Visual Basic class on game programming. I like the fact that he builds a game one step at a time, starting with an experiment to illustrate the concept, then building and testing a class for the game. However, when he got to the fifth chapter, he changed his naming conventions and added code to the classes with no mention in the book of these changes. This can be frustrating especial to high school students or any new programmer. There are several places though out the book where he made changes to the classes on the CD that he does not mention in the book. Then he adds the class method to the current project and your left wondering where it came from. I felt he needed to make changes in the book, so that the code was consistent though out the book and matched what on the CD.
In my opinion, His editor should have caught this. Thomson as a publisher is starting to get a repetition for there badly coded books. It is obvious that an editor should be reviewing the code in a book along with the grammatical errors in the book and Thompson fails to do that. If you understand visual basic and you are looking for a book on game programming concepts the book is good. However I would not recommend this book if you are new to Visual Basic and I would definitely not recommend it for teenager, it will only frustrate them.
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