Average Customer Review:  
| A great book. now ...a reference book in the future | |
This book is , in my opinion, the best choice for a serious amateur or a shareware games developer. Most of the games programming books now available on the market, explain, step by step, how to design a 2D or a 3D graphic engine. As a matter of fact a graphic engine is just a tool for a game developer. It is not needed to go through in detail a so complicated and boring code, to develop a game. Even some professional software houses purchase the graphic engine. My ideal game programming book should focus on graphic techniques and game logic, instead. This is what Mr Watt and Mr Policarpo do.(1) They provide a detailed explanation of computer graphic, even exceeding the needs of a game developer (2) a powerful graphic engine. Look at the demos,they are impressive (3) 12 tutorials to get familiar with it. (4) All the needed facilities. Some other books do not even supply a utility to load a .3ds file format (5) The foundations of A.I. ,collision detection etc (6) They use OpenGL instead of Direct X The MS library seems to become a standard for professional games developers but,in my opinion ,they are a nightmare for an amateur (7) Last , Vol 2 has been announced by July 2001. If Mr Watt and Mr Policarpo take note of the critics of the readers who rated this book , 1 or 2 stars, a reference book for our wonderful hobby will be, at last, available
| A good general 3D reference, if you don't own others | |
This book sits nicely between the uber-advanced likes of Eberly's "3D Game Engine Design" and the basic (and largely worthless) 3D programming books that seem to get churned out every year. It covers some of the same topics as Eberly, but explains things much more, and includes many diagrams to help make things clearer. It does, however, stop short of giving you good example code in some of the more advanced techniques, mainly because it comes with it's own engine API. At these points you should turn to Eberly for the nitty-gritty. Covers a good range of topics and explains them well. It duplicates a lot of stuff from other books and www resources, but it is a very nice collection of techniques in my opinion and worth the investment if you don't own others of it's type, because it is very well presented.
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