How to program graphics applications using Microsoft's Direct3D Software Development Kit. Code is updated for use with MSVC++6.0.
Book Description
Editorial Reviews
Review
"This is the most detailed book on the market covering Direct3D Retained Mode (RM). In addition, it provides an overview of other DirectX technologies, such as Direct3D Immediate Mode, DirectDraw, DirectInput, and DirectSound. This book is part developer's guide and part reference." -- Clipcode.com
Product Details
Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images?
|
More About the Author
Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.
Customer Reviews
|
Share your thoughts with other customers:
|
||||||||||||||||||||||
|
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
25 of 25 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
If you like reading ugly code, this is a great book,
By Zachary Turner (San Francisco, CA) - See all my reviews
This review is from: The Awesome Power of Direct3D/DirectX - The DirectX 7 Version (DVD-ROM)
Generally when I read reviews on Amazon.com that simply say "This book is horrible, don't waste your money", I tend to ignore them. I find that probably half the people posting the reviews don't know how to program anyway, and so when they see a few lines of code they freak out and automatically decide the book sucks. That's the reason I bought this book, because not many of the reviews actually backed up their complaints with valid arguments. I have a slightly higher opinion of the book than most of the other reviewers, but I still find the book to be fairly bad. Specifically, the author has got to have some of the worst general programming skills I've ever seen. Maybe I'm spoiled because I'm a professional in the games industry, where code is usually very clean, efficient, and professional looking, but the code in this book is just absolute garbage. Every time I look at his code I get sick to my stomach. Some of the stupidest things I've seen in this book include (but are not limited to), the following:1) The use a global "Info" object to describe the state of D3D and the window. Even though it's global, the author uses SetWindowLong() to attach it to the window "so that it's always accessible". I've never seen anything so ridiculous in my life. 2) The use of static C functions ALL OVER THE PLACE. Not static class member functions, but plain old static C functions (not that the use of static member functions all over the place would be any better, but I don't think I've ever used a static C function in my life). In fact, the sole PURPOSE of declaring a non-member function static is so that it's not visible from any other file, so that you can use the same function name in other files. I really hope I don't need to explain why that's bad. 4) The inconsistency used throughout the book. Sometimes return values are compared to D3DRM_OK, sometimes SUCCEEDED()/FAILED() is used. He may as well not indent his code at all either, because sometimes he indents line and sometimes he doesn't. All in all it's very inconsistent, and I've decided that I absolutely hate looking at his code. If I ever had to work with this guy I'd probably beat him with a 2x4 for making my life hell. 5) The way in which he wrote the main windows message loop was probably the dumbest implementation I've seen. It was just downright silly. 6) The use of the hPrevInstance parameter to WinMain(). Anybody who's ever done anything for windows knows that this parameter is always NULL under Win32. 7) The way the code on the CD is COMPLETELY out of sync with the book. He uses code from the way later chapters very early on, and code from the early chapters later on, while the chapters mention nothing of this code. It's clearly not supposed to be there, and not alot of work was put into making sure the CD was correct. 8) The way he wrote his CreateLight() function. Of all the bad programming habits I've found in this book, this one was just flat out absurd, and makes it blatantly obvious that he's never worked on anything high performance. There are 5 types of light, and he wanted to write a generic CreateLight() function that would create any of the 5 types, based on a parameter. So he decides to pass in a *STRING*, which was ASSUMED to be one of the following: "DIRECTIONAL", "SPOT", "POINT", "PARALLELPOINT", or "AMBIENT". Every time I think about this I laugh. I really don't think there's a more inefficient way to do this, especially considering that Direct3D already comes with an enum specifically for specifying the type of light to create. Now that I'm done ranting about this guy's pathetic ability to write C/C++ code, I guess I should say that he does give a fairly good explanation of *SOME* aspect of Direct3D. Not many, but some. As most people have said, most is pulled directly out of the SDK docs, verbatim. Not one changed word. Some of the stuff, however, is actually explained in a mediocre fasion. I'm going to finish reading this book because I've already bought it, but for everybody else who is considering buying it, please don't. There have GOT to be better books out there. I'm actually learning the material because I'm a good enough programmer to where I can figure out how to rework his trash into something neat, clean and efficient, but I would much rather have just purchased a book where it CAME neat, clean, and efficient.
7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Precious Information normally difficult to get,
By A Customer
This review is from: The Awesome Power of Direct3D/DirectX - The DirectX 7 Version (DVD-ROM)
It may be true that this book is not easy to read, there are BIG advantages of this book: 1: animation: by reading this book, reader can easily import 3D animation sequence. This is usually a tedious work without high-level animation implementation. 2: collision detection: basic idea of collision detection and code examples are included. Collision detection is usually hard for a beginner to implement but this book present a working example of collision detection. Beginner 3d programmer will find these features very useful, because none of other popular APIs such as Direct3D immediate mode nor OpenGL does not give any examples of animation import and collision detection. Moreover, the book does not hide any thing to make win32 3d-program, while elegant C++ codes often hide implementation purposely. Hiding implementation prevent readers to extend or modify the codes even when they need to do so. Game industry persons may hate this book because readers will able to program 3d graphic easily, which may not be welcome to current professionals.
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Very very imformative -- ashame the code is laid out poorly,
By A Customer
This review is from: The Awesome Power of Direct3D/DirectX - The DirectX 7 Version (DVD-ROM)
This book really has some good stuff in it and for someone who doesn't know where to start in rendering a 3D environment, moving around it, adding collision detection, special FX - including lighting, sounds, animation sets, loading pre-built 3D objects into your world and adding textures & mipmaps it's great. It shows many other features of Windowed mode and immediate mode programs, and will greatly enhance your knowledge of creating advanced 3D virtual environments. The main problem this book has is a lot of the code in the book is snippets from the accompanying CD so the only way to understand which parts of the program the code is from is by loading the appropriate chapters from the CD and searching for it. I will agree with an earlier comment that the section on terrain creation is not very well explained and the code is a nightmare to understand. It's not all bad though because this book is definitely worth a read. Your knowledge will be increased from none to huge amounts within a few days of reading and fiddling with the code. All round this book is worth having in your pogramming library.
Share your thoughts with other customers: Create your own review
|
|
Tag this product(What's this?)Think of a tag as a keyword or label you consider is strongly related to this product.
Tags will help all customers organize and find favorite items. |
Sell a Digital Version of This Book in the Kindle Store
If you are a publisher or author and hold the digital rights to a book, you can sell a digital version of it in our Kindle Store.
Learn more
