Customer Reviews

Black Art of Macintosh Game Programming

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Game programming gurus was an interesting book. I am an average programmer and trying to use this book for a tutorial didn't work real well. I wanted to make a game like Unreal or F/A-18 Hornet 3.0, or at least start with a poor version that I could improve over time and optimize. I installed the files from the CD and they didn't compile (the triangle drawing one did though, kind of ironic). I wanted to use this tool to speed ahead in a programming career, but I crashed and burned. Now I have to wait for a newer age programming book to go on the market. This book is the start to a good work, but overall I'd advise you not to buy it.

The book is easy enough to read, even though the maths is complex. I found it a great reference for the parts about graphics, offscreen bitmaps, sprites and optimisation, and even for basic things like menus and windows. The parts about 3D algorithms aren't very useful, especially the texture mapping which doesn't look too convincing. Nothing about hardware acceleration (on the other hand, it's not a new book). Otherwise, it's a great reference lookup for new game programmers.

I had tried to read many a reference for the toolbox but found that there were a 1000 pages telling you about the code and only one page with the code. This book made it so apparent what the code was!

It took a little messing around to figure out exactly how to compile a toolbox related file in codewarrior though. I just asked a friend and had it going in ten minutes!

I purchased this book in hope that I could learn 3d game programming. What I learned is that none of the source code compiles under Any version of Codewarrior, Think C or any other C compiler. The book itself did not explain things well and the 3D flight simulator crashed my computer. I own about seven game programming books and this one ranks last.

Very good for people new to macintosh gaming. Has instructions on sprites and 3d. Moves at a nice pace.

This is an extremely good book for people just learning to program 3D games on the Mac. It specifically focuses on 3D graphics, 3D environments and how to make them real. Unfortunately, you can't produce a Doom tpye game with it's help - the section on optimization is sketchy and his mostly for PwrMacs. (None of the programs described will ever go that fast.) If you are intrested in starting to learn how to create 3D games, I think this is a great start.

This book is excellent reading for anyone considering writing games for the mac, especially using fast 3D graphics and optimization techniques. Also covers (briefly) sound, input devices and basic sprites. Some reasonably complex maths involved. However, it is clear and comprehensive, a must buy for all considering creating mac games. Example code is very usefull.

The book briefly describes some Mac essentials. Covers quite some aspects of games programming : sprites & graphics, ... . However if one is really looking for an in-depth book covering Quickdraw or OpenGl-tricks for games, this isn't the book.

Black Art of Macintosh Game Programming is an Excellent overview of what is needed to program a macintosh game program. Basic game graphics to simple 3d enviroments are covered.

Overall the quality of the content that the book provides is quite good, however its scope is rather limited. While they do cover drawing flat textured polygons in detail, they don't cover - or glance lightly over - many other important issues. These topics include other depth-soring methods (they only cover painter's), fast collision detection, BSP trees, rudementary scripting and event handling, translucency, smooth shading, drawing quickly in more than 8-bit color, etc, etc. If you allready know how to program and know the basic mac-specific speed tricks, you'd be much better off going with something by Foley & Van Dam.