Customer Reviews

Black Art of Windows Game Programming

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It's striking the amount of information this book has on Windows programming. It builds a foundation in the basic concepts of Windows messaging and memory allocation, then moves smoothly into bitmaps, palettes, input, and sound. It finds fast game solutions in WinG and the WaveMix tools. Even Avi and WinToon are covered. Both 16 and 32 bit Windows programming are considered for the broadest user base. Although written before DirectX, this book is readable and understandable.

I purchased this book in late 1995, when there weren't very many game programming books on the market. I was a bit disappointed with the narration. The author did not seem to be an avid game player or programmer, and the only "real" game included with the CD was BugBots, a programmable robots game written by someone other than the other, and not discussed in any detail. As I recall, there was good coverage of the topics, but not much in the form of source code examples, and support only for Visual C. No C++ code, and no Borland compiler support. It wasn't really the "Black Art" but it holds its own for that era in game programming before Windows 95.

This book discusses WinG graphics and while that might have been acceptable back in win 3.1, these days it isn't even useful anymore. The only real game programming aspects of this book focus on sprites and clipping. Where's the networking, AI, and game engine discussions?

I can describe this book in one word. "Weak". For example, the chapter on saving your game simply discusses that it's a good idea to allow your users to save their games. No discussion on how to do that, no talk of serialization or compression or any other issues regarding saving. Just a quick chapter letting you know that saving a game is a good idea. Overall the code is outdated and the logic is weak. If you are new to game programming (and programming in general) then you might get something out of it.