Product Description

With ideas, techniques, and algorithms, this text aims to provide game developers of all levels with tips and tools. Written by game programming experts, each contribution provides a hands-on solution to a programming problem, or a creative method for reducing programming time and redundancy. This collection covers the major topics needed to develop a state-of-the-art game engine and provides coverage of audio issues. From animation and artificial intelligence to Z-buffering, lighting calculations, weather effects, curved surfaces, audio tools, multiplayer Internet gaming, music and sound effects, all of the major techniques needed to develop a competitive game engine are covered. All of the source code for each algorithm is included and can be used by advanced programmers immediately. For aspiring game programmers, the text for each algorithm explains the algorithm in detail, gives suggestions for beneficial modifications and optimizations, and includes references to related material.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #475759 in Books
• Published on: 2001-07-26
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 575 pages

Customer Reviews

Tips 4 intermediate to advanced, not tutorials for beginners
It's a great great book, with excellent source code and well edited. Covers a great deal and has things in there to keep even the genius among you busy for months.
Code is talked through, and is well commented. Will not be much use to you though if you haven't touched OpenGL, DirectX or Windows API before - and is for the C++ developers among us.

Make sure the articles are of interest for you before buying
This is a collection of articles, covering several fields related to game programming. They are the same articles you could find in a good game programming magazine but -supposely- of greater interest and better edited.

The articles are:

MATHEMATICS:
Algebraic Techniques, Trigonometry and Geometry, Linear Algebra, Matrix and Vector Operations, Advanced Mathematics, Ray/ Polygon/Polyhedra Intersection Algorithms, Handling Large Amounts of Polygonal Data, Triangle Stripification and Fanning Algorithms, Using 2D and 3D Billboards

LIGHTING: Multi-texturing to Achieve Lighting Effects, Shadow Algorithms, Using Simple Radiosity, Projected Texture Lights

TEXTURING: Using Texture Matrices, Bump Mapping, Cubic Environment Mapping, Procedural Textural Mapping

DYNAMIC POLYGON CONTROL: Parametric Curves and Surfaces, Subdivision Surfaces, Multi-resolution Meshes, Spatial Partitioning Schemes ,Camera Techniques/ Movement Techniques

GRAPHIC EFFECTS: How to do Lens Flares, Weather Techniques, Sky Domes, Effective Clouds and Fog, Aliasing Effects (Anti-Aliasing, Motion Blur, Depth-of-Field),Teleport Portals, Particle Systems

ANIMATION: Inverse Kinematics, Blending Keyframed Animations, Solid Skinning vs. Hierarchical Skeletons, Using Motion Capture Data

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE: Finite State Machines, Heuristic Tree Searches, Flocking and Crowding Behavior, Path Planning and the A*Algorithm

MUSIC AND SOUND EFFECTS: Blending Phrases in Interactive Music, Dynamic Audio Generation, Simulating a 3D Sound-Effect Environment, Using Music Cues to Initiate Game Events

NETWORKED PLAY: Minimizing Latency in the Network Pipeline, Dead Reckoning Algorithms, Client/Server Design, Encryption Techniques

The good:

. The real value is that the topics covered here are hard to be found elsewhere. Most of them (but no all whatever says the publicity) came from seasoned and sucesfull professionals in the game programming scene.
. The articles are clearly written, and directly to the point.

The bad:

. Some articles can be found in the web. Moreover: they can be found in a clearer, deeper way (i.e. Skin animation, where there are excelent resources online, and even in the web page of the author !)
. The quality, while great, is somewhat less than the first book.
. Some articles are written by people with a terrible background (some articles are written by people behind the ATI OpenGL Driver R&D, and if you have worked with Ati OpenGL, well, you know how they are at it)

All in all, it's a good book, with great content where there are some articles that somewhat found their way in without reaching the overall quality level (that in some articles is *excellent*)

Even with its defects, it's a book to be in your shelf if you are into game programming.

If you are on a budget, make sure the book covers your work/learning area before buying it.

A very good and useful resource
Some areas of this book are given odd amounts of coverage - for instance networking - clearly a large topic in game programming - has only a couple of pages. Other than variable levels of detail this book is great.