damon chastain said
A very dry read, even for a programmer. It eventually gets interesting but its annoying when it constantly wants to remind you that game programming is hard and taxing.
James Swaine said
As a newcomer to game development, this book has been worth its weight in gold to me. There are many books out there which can teach you how to use specific API's and mathematical concepts you need to build games, but few address the architectural and design-related questions as well as this one does. The author is obviously an experienced game programmer who can offer a lot of insight into how you should approach designing your project so you don't end up with a tangled, unmaintainable mess. Examples here include the author's recommendation for decoupling game components via the use of an event system, and a lightweight cooperative scheduling system for "processes" which must span multiple frames (e.g. animations). There's also a thorough example of how you should create a base "application" class that can abstract the plumbing associated with initialization and rendering, exposing simple methods to subclasses such as "Init", "Update Scene", and "Draw Scene". This sort of pattern can be seen in high-level frameworks out there today such as the XNA API. I'm an experienced programmer who had never done any game programming but had a really good idea, and this book helped me figure out fundamentally how I should build the game from an architectural point of view. It's surely saved me a lot of development man-hours.
There is also decent treatment here of the math fundamentals and some graphics programming, though I think programmers should probably look elsewhere for more comprehensive treatments of these subjects. If you're looking to get into game development, pick this one up and maybe another book on DirectX/OpenGL/whatever your graphics API of choice is.
a. s. hunt said
I bought this book a little bit early, and had to go review my C++ before i could fully use it, and when I did, I came to realize that I was holding THE book on game coding.
This book covers nearly everything, in that what the author doesn't cover (or one of the other guest authors) he gives you the next path you should go down in order to achieve your goals in that certain area of coding.
He also offers tons of tips and inside stories on what it's like working as a game developer in a recurring section called 'tales from the pixel mines' which are all very informative, and i enjoyed reading all of them.
Do not think, however, that this book will hold your hand throughout the process. In some parts of the example code the author literally says some thing like: "//type your own code here". this opens the readers' eyes to the fact that learning to make games is not a process of just being taught, but is mostly about discovering it for yourself (didn't Galileo say something like that?). Rest assured, when something has to be taught, the author teaches it, after all, at some point it wastes time to 're-invent the wheel' and that is where the true magic of this book comes into play. It leaves enough for YOU to do on your own, instead of just showing one way and expecting you to copy it. really is like having a teacher that you can open and learn from whenever you want.
in short, this is the best book on game programming I have ever had the pleasure to read, and once you have a good basis in Direct3D and can understand some advanced C++ concepts, you need to pick up this book. You NEED to.
M. Bateman said
The book covers many topics. I was interested in more info on how to use Lua and was glad to see some pages about it (about 50 pages worth). The code is neat and easy to read. You may not like the idea of having to download the code though. All coding is done using DirectX. Was hoping to see some use of obj (even better fbx) file loading of meshes and wanted more info on XAudio2 or XACT3 but no such luck. So, it has a dated feel about it. Otherwise still a good book. BTW Thief was a good game.
cdietschrun said
This book has lots of pertinent information for designing/coding games from an industry veteran. The book discusses many aspects of the process including handling input, user interface issues, networking, all the things that go into making a game.
The problem is that he is a bit schizophrenic at times in his audience. At some points he talks at baby programming level, and then he can jump to talking about things that he never explicitly assumes you have knowledge of (graphics programming, for example) and makes a trite statement at the end of a section like "That is also why this model is a negative z-buffer axis model rotational handle function, of course". Which just makes close to 0 sense.
But it's a good book to have and I wish I have version 3 for more up to date ideas in making games.
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