programming

Oh come on, ignore the previous review, he obviously hates all the Course PTR books, so I take his review as null and void.

I am fortunate enough to be lectured by Stefan Zerbst and all I can say is that he explains things really well, and knows what he is talking about ! I have also been fortunate enough to have seen screenies from the engine and level editor that you get to develop in this book. The screenies are amazing !

You get to develop a deathmath FPS style game by the end of the book !!

I have placed my order, having lots of material by stefan zerbst from gameversity ( ie, his first book ) I know what to expect, and I know this will be a gem !

I give it full marks !!

If you are considering buying this book then I suggest that you do not. Instead get the Game Programming Gems 1 through 4. I have ordered each from amazon and even to this day I don't regret ever buying them. Those 4 books are well worth the money (only books so far in game development that have been worth my money) and are full with a lot information on game programming in all areas. 3D Game Engine Programming by Sefan Zerbst is not.

The book is not terribly bad but it is missing a lot of topics and information that goes into modern engines. There is no memory managment, no profilers, no scripting system, no journaling system, no real physics engine, no scheduling system, etc. Instead this book is majority about creating a few wrapper classes around DirectX for the Windows OS and calling it a "basic engine". When I brought this book I thought it would have some real "worth reading" topics in it. Instead it only has basic information about topics you should already know and be familiar with if you are actually trying to make an engine. Some of the explanations could have been done better in my opinion but like many other books in this series it is all short explanations and follow "my" code. It would have been nice to have sections on occlusion, an implementation on creating a portal engine, and artificial intelligence but sadly it does not.

The book does have a chapter on shaders which goes over topics like dot3 bump mapping, per-pixel lighting, etc. But the problem with this is that things like dot3 bump mapping (which is nothing more than a type of per-pixel lighting) are simple effects to do. You would think in an engine book released in 2004 that if you are going to cover things like per-pixel lighting then after you go over the easy stuff maybe it is worth going over the more recent, harder techniques such as HDR lighting, spherical harmonics, curvature simulation using normal mapping, etc. Instead you are given short explanations of effects (that anyone trying to create a shader system in their engine should already know) that you can easily learn by looking up its definition and some sample code over the internet.

I think this book is more for kids that want the illusion that they can be game programmers much like all other primer press game development books. I am glad this book does not have the ridiculous "introduction to win32 programming" section like many of the past priemer press game development books had. I think that if you want to learn (the keyword is learn) about creating a game engine then I don't think you want to read someone else's code on creating wrapper classes around a API such as DirectX. For example the book Tricks of the 3D Game Programming Gurus is a pretty good book because you are learning how a rendering engine works and you are learning how to create one from scratch. In other words you are not learning how to memorize a few existing API function calls (which you can get from reading the API's documentation and not from buying a book). Even though the software renderer in the Tricks of the 3D Game Programming Gurus is not as fast as an hardware renderer, the point is that you are learning how to create one and how it really works underneath. I think this is important in all areas of game development that the books of today seem to ignore. I rather learn how to make my own renderer then it would be helpful to learn how to use Direct3D as a way to speed up my application, not to learn how to use Direct3D or OpenGL as the end all way to rendering.

With that said I think this book is a 2 out of 5 star product. If your experience in programming and your skill level in game programming is not that high then I recommend you go to your local book store and flip through this first before you spend money on it. All in all you can get a heck of a lot more information from half of one Game Programming Gems book than in this whole text. If you are a beginner programmer/game programmer then you might find this stuff new and fascinating but to those of us that have already done all of this stuff in our spare time years ago in high school, you might want to use your money on something more useful.

If you want a way to increase your skill (assuming you have the time and patience) then I suggest you get the game programming gems 1 through 4, get tricks of the 3D game programming gurus, get a Playstation 2 Linux kit, and create your own games on your PS2. Working with the PS2 is like the GBA where you are programming to the metal and not using API's like OpenGL or DirectX as a crutch. That'll make a man out of you when you have to read documentation and experiment (not by reading short, bad explanations out of an expensive book then copying the code for some wrapper class). If you do get the PS2 kit then get a compatible monitor since using your TV isn't the best thing on your eyes.