Product Description

The newest edition of the essential hands-on guide to developing commercial-quality games, this book takes a look at the entire process and challenge of creating a game. An excellent introduction to game architecture, it examines all the major subsystems of modern game engines, revealing professional techniques used in actual games. This third edition features expanded content and coverage of the latest techniques in Shader programming and LUA scripting using both C# and C++.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #50049 in Books
• Published on: 2009-04-09
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 908 pages

Customer Reviews

Excellent - Useful, Practical, Compelling and no padding!
At last a book on the real experience of Game development. How much money have I wasted on 'learn game programming in C++ DirectX for dummies in 3 weeks'? Well none, because I leafed through them and left them on the shelf.

This book will not teach you to program. Good. This is a book, like Code Complete, for people who know how to program and want to know how to program well. Even if you've been a game programmer for years there will be something new and worthwhile here. It covers the stuff you really need to know but nobody ever tells you, like event handling, caching and memory management, initialisation, source control, testing and scheduling, all without unnecessary padding.

The only possible gripe I might have (and this is very minor) is that a few areas aren't covered due to space restrictions. on top of the author's noted omissions I'd have liked to see more coverage of after-sales support, demos & OEM versioning, outsourcing, cross-platform development and console development, and perhaps more guidance on team sizes (particularly testing).

Overall this book is pretty much all meat, I can't recommend it highly enough and I've praised it to my entire team. Its probably the most useful game development text I've read.

CdrJ

Best games programming book yet
I must own 30+ games programming books and this is the best of the lot. It is very easy to read and is full of funny and interesting anecdotes about the authors experiences writing games. It is rare to find a book that covers all areas of games programming and not just graphics or AI. I am an experienced games programmer and yet each chapter I have learned something new. So highly recommended.

Simply the best games development book there is
In all my life, I have only ever once bought the second edition of book I already own as a first edition, and that's for Game Coding Complete. The first edition was just brilliant, and the second edition surpasses it in every way imaginable.

The author's writing style is easy to follow and his explanations are clear and simple to understand. The "war stories" he gives from his experience over many years making games lend the book an air of immediacy and relevance. The book is written with a sense of honesty and a genuine willingness to encourage the reader to do well.

If you are hoping to get a career in games development, or want to do it as a hobby, or maybe you already do it as a job and just want some good ideas to get better at it: you must own this book. It really is that good.