games

It amazes me that people post reviews stating, "Don't buy this book," or "3 stars (but should be less in my opinion)," among many others, because the book doesn't have the quote un-quote "advanced" information they were looking for. According to one reviewer this "advanced" information he was looking for was "a non-Final Fantasy type combat system." This book TEACHES you the IDEAS behind how game programming works, with an emphasis and examples on ROLE PLAYING GAMES. What's the most popular type of role playing game? Final Fantasy type. If you are an "advanced" game programmer and this book didn't help you, then you should be able to use your own knowledge and program your OWN combat system. It seems like you were looking for a book that offered the solution (combat system) that you wanted to cut and paste into your "advanced and superior code." For those that want a book to help their imagination grow and problem solving nodes start firing away after seeing some real-life examples, this book is for you. If you want to buy a book that contains code you are just going to cut and paste into your own source, then you're right, this book is not "advanced" enough.

But Master of None. Still, this is one of the better books I've read in the Prima Tech series. It starts off with the game development theory, introduces programming concepts, gets nitty-gritty with the game core, and then offers some other advice.

I agree with what the other reviewers said. This book moves FAST. What other books in the series does in 5 paragraphs this book does in about two sentences.

What I didn't like was the fact that it really glossed over some of the advanced DirectX graphics stuff, like multitexturing. That shouldn't be too much of a problem though if you pick up another DirectX book, but it would have been nice had the author included it here.

If all you want to do is to make simple RPGs this book comes very close to being the all-in-one that you are looking for. However, game engines are rarely just bunch of written functions. If you truly want to get into heavy RPG programming, you'll need to learn Windows Programming to develop your own level design tools.

Each segment has enough detail for light work and simple projects, but if you want to get more in depth there are entire books written on those topics, and I highly recommend you get them, as well as OpenGL and OpenAL books.

After finishing this book, you'll gain the knowledge of RPG development, but to seriously use it for profit, you'll need the more advanced books that I hinted above.

Prima Press has the merit of being the first company to heavily invest only in publications of game-programming books.. I find that game-programming is one of the most fascinating and well, fun
area of programming and CS in general.. so any effort in this direction is welcome to me.. but I have seen too many titles from this publisher who were too superficial to do any good, or just plain rubbish. This title stands out for the professionality and competence of the author and for the level of detail and completeness of presentation. If you are a programmer with decent C/C++ skills, a curiosity about how games like Diablo work, and a LOT of patience and enthusiasm for game programming by all means get this book. It won't enable you to write the next episode of Diablo or Dungeon Siege but still if you work your way through it studying carefully the text and especially the code presented, in the end you will know enough to create a small
2D/3D adventure game on the diablo style.

Beware this book is thick and dense, and will take time to absorb but you cannot help it if you want to learn something interesting and enjoyable about game programming.
The second edition is coming out, probably updated to the latest
release of DirectX, so watch out for it!