Customer Reviews

Advanced 3-D Game Programming with DirectX 8.0 (With CD-ROM)

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3 star:		(2)
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1 star:		(1)

 

 

This book is a great reference. There is alot of material here that is covered. The author goes thru his book building his code library for you to use and tries to explain some of it.

The problem is that alot of us learn via examples. This book has page upon page of code for the author's library, but only a handful of examples in the book. The biggest gains I get from a book is when I can work thru the most basic example, isolating each piece as the author covers it. A full fledged networking game comes with the book for you to improve and build upon. This is a great concept, but I would have learned sooo much more if the author would have isolated each part of the game that pertains to the topics covered and gave mini examples so that I could see how everything works. If the author produced a "workbook" to go with this text, alot of the concepts would be easier to learn.

The author slacks on Collision Detection and Game Physics as well as descriptions to some of the code. He lets "the code speak for itself". It is a great reference book, but it will not teach you how to be an Advanced Game Programmer. I consider myself an intermediate game programmer, but I didnt advance much with this book because I couldnt visualize the concepts the author was trying to get across.

Good luck with this book. I would recommend buying it, but dont plan on it being the only book you buy.

I think Peter Walshs book The Zen of 3D Game Programming in DirectX 8.0 is the best book written for Direct3D beginners to own for initially starting out in Direct3D. Period. This book, however, isn't in the same league, It feels like something he inherited from somebody else and tried to fix up rather than something he did from scratch.
It does provide some interesting insights into network based game interaction and an interesting chapter on game AI. It also provides some interesting source code relating to a networkable game engine.
However, it covers the same old entry level "this is how 3D stuff works" and "this is how to initialize direct3D" that Non-Advanced books cover as well as numerous other introductory features out of place in an "Advanced" book.
And, unfortunately, when all is said and done, most of the really Advanced material is covered in a less than thorough manner. Many truly important topics in advanced Direct3D like Animated character mesh objects (Skin and Bones) are covered skimpily at best.
Also, at least on my system (1.4ghz 64mb Geforce3), the example codes performance was much less than you would hope for. The main Game engine codes primary example is only usable in a networked client / server environment. Maybe if theyd said Networked Game Programming instead of Advanced it would have been better.
All in all, If you are a Direct3D programmer and especially if you have a genuine interest in client server based games, it is probably worth owning this book for the odd bits you can pick up. Peter still knows a great deal more about D3D than I do and I will no doubt buy any more books that he continues to make.
Frankly though I wish Peter would go back to the style of his previous book and make a Advanced version of it. Perhaps building on the starter Game engine he provided in that maybe adding collision detection, character animation sequencing and actual game construction info.

Having enjoyed Mr. Walsh's Zen book so much, I purchased this book without thumbing through it first. Big mistake.

Chapter one is a rewrite of information you can get from the help disk included with Visual C++.

Chapter two is a rewrite of parts of the DirectX SDK.

The name of chapter three should have been a signal of the true content. What is a chapter entitled "3-D Math Foundations" doing in a book with "Advanced" in the title? This chapter covers, yet again, basic 3-d math, vectors, matrices, etc. This chapter also contains a rewrite of some of the DirectX SDK. The only thing here worth noting is a minor treatment of Binary Space Partitions.

Chapter 4 is a complete disaster. Beginning with more basic chase algorithms, the author attempts to describe genetic algorithms and neural networks, failing miserably. The description on page 248 is minimal at best, the examples are not really explained at all. A huge misprint occurs on page 252-3.

I cannot comment on chapter 5 as I am not interested in network play. Quite simply, I haven't read it.

Chapter 6 another rewrite of another part of the DirectX SDK.

Chapter 7, the only part of the book which might be called "advanced" never really covers any subject in detail. A lot of this chapter, like a lot of the book is page after page of unexplained code taken directly from the included CD.

Chapter 8 is yet another rewrite of yet another section of the DirectX SDK.

Chapter 9 finally describes how to use the BSP trees which were touched upon back in chapter 4.

There is almost nothing here which would justify the word "advanced" being used in the book's title.

An almost laughable situation which occurs throughout the book is when the author explains that he cannot cover some subject or other in detail due to space limitations. One wonders how much he could have written if 80% of the book wasn't a rewrite of the SDK.

This thoroughly disappointing book is saved only by the fact that it contains very little of Andre LeMoth's gnarly rad surfer dude vernacular.

I really like the style of this Author, as he does not *rewrite* *SDK* helpdocs*. He tries to give you his understanding
of what he sees going on from his experience of coding. I find this very helpful, as he is always turning over lots of things,
and illustrating them so I feel I understand them better.
The title of the book is DirectX 8, so there isn't alot of handholding on constructing the C++ end of the code.
You are warned about this in the intro, and it is true. Wrappers, and alot of *advanced*
coding stuff are used, and It is up to you to puzzle the language of it through.
Also, alot of necessary details regarding changes Microsoft made to Direct3D, which the Author had no choice but to cover.

After recently purchasing SAMS learn DirectX 7 in 24 hours I was put off programming for a while, it contained a lot of unexplained code, that the reader was expected to remember without understanding.

When I received this book for christmas however I was delighted to find that right from the start every peice of code is explained. The author also explained the advantages of various operating systems and programming langauges, which I found quite usefull. I was also pleased to see that the book not only explained just the direct X programming langauge, but also covered many other aspects of game programming, such as the creating of windows, using the message pump and various other functions in the windows API. The CD which comes with the book also contains some very usefull source code including the Quake 3 engine source code.

To sum things up this is a great book, for programmers who wish to write efficient code and understand what they are actually writing. I would recommend it to Advanced programmers, Intermediate programmers and possibly even ambitious beginners.

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