Customer Reviews

Delphi Graphics and Game Programming Exposed

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(16)

 

 

Simply put, this book is not that great. It's not BAD, per se, but it certainly doesn't live up to the title. What is actually "EXPOSED" by this book is the dire LACK or depth in the Delphi community for people who want to seriously tackle this subject and publish something in-depth about it. Given the fact that this book is really the only book quite like it, I do have to give Ayres credit for venturing out there and doing something about it. Also, I have no gripes about the writing QUALITY or style. I think Ayres has a fluid and readable touch. HOWEVER, that's as far as I can go to really compliment this book. Frankly it just skims the surface of DirectX and Graphics programming in such a way that if you are an experimental or semi-experienced programmer you'd think it's overly simplistic information. There's just not enough MEAT in this book. You can get much more out of some C/C++ books that are MUCH older and that tackle the subject better. Many of the techniques explained in this book can be found in so many other places in superior depth and detail it surprises me that Ayres would spend so much time on the basics. Still, the book has its good points and serves its purpose. The title is very misleading, and this is really the crux of my gripe with the book. If this book were titled: "Delphi Graphics and Game Programming PRIMER" I would say this is easily 4 or 5 stars. But the word "EXPOSED" in the title is so far from true I can only recommend it for BEGINNER Delphi game programmers. Better to spend your time searching for good websites and emailing colleagues to get the real dirt. If you want to get serious about DirectX you're going to have to buckle up and learn the DirectX ropes in C/C++. I have no doubt about the capability of Delphi to deal easily with the challenges of serious game programming. I think it's a perfect platform, but you'll have to look deeper. The manual for Ted Gruber's FastGraph graphics library has more insight to game programming than this book.

I too thought there would be a little 3D in this book, but I can understand why there isn't. 3D Game programming is absurdly complex. You need to get the basic concepts and feel of game programming down in 2D (well, it's a good idea anyway).

Many complain about not finding the CD Key... it's on a card that sticks out like a sore thumb in the back of the book. Look a little harder.

This book is not a comprehensive guide to game or direct x programming (or Delphi). However, what it can do is provide you with the means to jump right in and make a game. What I'm talking about is ready-made basic 2D game engine's that can be modified to do just about anything. The book gets you the basics on graphics, sound, sprites, controls (even force feedback), special effects and a bit more.

I was introduced to this book by taking a graphics class in my 4th year of college. We barely used the book (because we only touched a little direct x at the end), but I spent the end of that winter break and much of the following months making a Tetris style puzzle game. If you can get the example programs to compile/run, you should be able to modify them to do your bidding.

I own the John Ayres "Tomes" titles and they aresuperb. That proved to me that John is an excellent author. However,this book falls short of its title of "Exposed." It is written very well, explained very well, and the CD is what it should be, but this is not a book for the serious game programmer. It is a good start but other than that, shop the Delphi web pages for code samples and look to C++ code for help. This book is a primer for beginning programmers and NOT for the advanced or intermediate like the back of the book says. END

I almost didn't buy this book after reading all of the bad reviews on it. After looking at it in a bookstore I decided to pitch in the 60 bucks to see if I could get anything out of it. All of the people having problems apparently don't have much experience with delphi's ide. I had no problems getting any of the examples to compile and work. I think it had more to do with readers skipping the first few chapters which happened to have a paragraph explaining how to add the directx header files to your delphi environment so it would compile. Also you can't expect to pick up a programming language and start writing games in it. I wonder how much experience some of the reviewers had with delphi itself. You should have a decent amount of experience using delphi before trying to tackle this book. The book covers 2d games, sound, input, and basic force feedback. If you are an intermediate delphi programmer looking to design 2d games with delphi this book is a very good place to start. Nothing 3d is covered in this book but if you don't know how do write a 2d game why would you even attempt to design a 3d game?

Also this book includes the retail version of delphi 4, the directx headers, and all of the book's examples on cd.

Thank you John Ayres!

I really looked forward to getting this book, partly because of how long it took to publish and partly because there is a real shortage of technical Delphi books on the less common topics. While there is some useful information for a beginner, I was sorely disappointed.

This book certainly does not live up to the hype - here is an extract from the Wordware site regarding this title:

"() from the most basic sprite movement through tile-based scrolling map engines, voxel engines, texture mapping, and 3-D first-person shooter engines."

Voxel engines? 3D engine? If mentioning it makes a book, I'm becoming an author.

The book is so basic that it isn't even worthwhile for a beginner - rather buy the excellent books by Andre LaMothe and learn a little C so that you can translate it. The chapters in Charlie Calvert's Delphi Unleashed books are more than adequate to get you started with DirectX and Delphi.

One thing that concerns me about some of the reviews is that some people that claim (not that I dispute it) to be professional game developers dropped Delphi as a result of this poor book. I don't get it! Why do you need a "Delphi" book? Can't you apply your C/C++ knowledge, after learning Delphi? To those people, my only suggestion is that you read a couple of general Delphi books (and there are a number of excellent ones), dabble with the JEDI DirectX translation and get going - you certainly don't need a book to teach you what you already know just because you changed language.

And a last request - someone please write a decent game programming book for Delphi.

I don't know what it is about this book but I liked it a lot.
The book has a special vibe; it is casual but it leaves no detail out in what it's aimed at.
Unlike other technical books where you would skip sections this book keeps you reading from begin to end.
Sure it's not sophisticated, no 3D for instance.
But it's great for example for people who're coming from Turbo Pascal like me and want to explore Delphi and games(using DirectX). So it is a good primer presented clear and understandable. And no no not beneath beginners.
And great 2D games can be made with this book as a background.
2D games still have their place in the entertainment world.
I'm not saying that you should necessarily learn how to make 2D games to be able to make 3D games but it's an asset. You people shouldn't ignore the "gamemaking thinking" that comes with 2D game manufacturing. But as the author points out in the book if you really wanna make 'em big, you hafta have artists involved in your project.

ps: if you notice that im from Belgium: I have the same edition and in English.

I work for a Dallas-based PC games engineering firm. We produce several popular games and a couple of them have even been bestsellers. We first began targetting Windows DirectX development about four years ago. This means that we've been working with DirectX from the start. In that time, we've built and shipped a 3-D "build" engine for DirectX 3D and two new games that use it, so I'd like to think we know the technology pretty well.

About six months ago, we began looking at Delphi to see whether it would allow us to turn around projects more quickly than C++. It had a faster compiler, great 3rd party support, and, after all, there's something sexy about using a language no one else is using for games development. Our one reservation was that we couldn't find any books on Delphi games programming -- they were simply nonexistent.

Finally, someone came out with one and we enthusiastically ran out and grabbed several copies when it first shipped. We had reservations because we'd never heard of the author and the gaming community isn't that large. We usually bump into one another at conferences, tradeshows and the like, but had never heard of this guy. Still, we assumed he was the expert the book purported and happily plunked down our hard-earned cash for his book.

To say that we were disappointed by the book would be putting it mildly. Without exception, everyone on my team felt the book was very poorly done, and, despite the title, was a beginner book at best. The reasons for this are many. First and foremost is its inexplicable focus on 2D sprite games. This alone makes it virtually useless for modern games development. Second, is the fact that the examples don't work. I'd like to think that few people know DirectX better than we do and, yet, we weren't able to get many of the example games in the book to work consistently from machine to machine. The book claims to target DirectX 5-7, but, really, much of the code appears to have been developed for DirectX 2. Whatever the case, the examples simply don't work consistently.

In large part due to the dearth of good works on the sujbect, we ended up scrapping the idea of using Delphi for games development for right now. If you are looking for decent coverage of games development in Delphi, keep looking.

** The Anticipation : I purchased this book in order to get into serious games development. By the description of this book (on Amazon) it covered all sorts of games programming using Delphi and Direct/X. I ordered the book before the book was even released / printed, and after 3.5 months of waiting, it finally arrived at my home in Australia.

** Wrong Level : So far, I am reading it from cover to cover, and am in Chapter 3, but the book does seem to start off extremely basic indeed. The level indicator on the back suggested that the book was for "intermediate to advanced" programmers, but this doesn't seem to be the case so far, and I was expecting something much more meaty and detailed. An indicator level of "begineer to intermediate" might be more accurate. Also, now that I have started reading the book, it is suddenly clear that the book is only for 2D sprite games - not "all types of games" that it previously suggested.

** Bad Examples : Also, the first real example in the book "Shoot Em" (Chapter 2) refuses to run on my Windows NT machine at work (with Direct/X installed), or on my Windows 98 machine at home (with Direct/X 5 installed). The error messages I get are completely unhelpful : "The specified interface is not supported by the object. This value is equal to E_NOINTERFACE standard COM return value". What a patheric, useless error message. The error is reported from the ExceptionHandler. Why, or what is wrong, I haven't had a chance to look yet. Expecting readers to fix the sloppy or bad code included with books is rotten !

** Delphi 4 Autorisation : Also, installing Delphi 4 is a nightmare. I already own full versions of Delphi 1, 2, and 3, and I was glad to obtain the FULL version of Delphi 4 with the book. However, where the hell is the Serial Number and Authorisation Keys for the installation - there not in the book, on the CD, or in any text or pdf files on the CD. I went to Borland's site to register thinking I might get them following registration, but to register I need to type the codes in there as well. What a mess !

** CD Errors : To top this all off, the CD included with my book seems to be bad, and my brand new 40x CD-ROM here at work is having extreme problems with it.

** Conclusion : I am a very experienced developer (20+ years of eating, sleeping, and breathing computers so far), and have a very good knowledge of Delphi and a reasonably good knowledge of Windows API. I was expecting some real meaty examples with lots of good code and descriptions to really kick off my games programming big time. I can't help feeling badly let down by this book.

Unlike some of the reviewers, I had no problems with any of the examples (remember to change the read-only status of the files to archive), nor with the Delphi 4 installation (a great bonus).

But this book is probably not for advanced game programmers. For me, the presentation of the basic framework for games was very helpful. Ayres' code was clear, instructive, and always worked. In addition, he does at least introduce the reader to some of the more complex aspects of game programming and shows the reader how to do some of the more interesting and useful special effects.

I've been trying to work through this book for the better part of a month. I finally gave up today when I discovered that the "pot o' gold at the end of the rainbow" was learning how to build 2D sprite games. I wouldn't have purchased the book had I known that all I'd learn was how make simplistic, outmoded 2D games. Come on, 2D games have been passe since Wolfenstein 3D came out way back in the early 90s.

I kept thinking the book would get better as we went along, so I glossed over code that didn't work, techniques that even Microsoft has said not to use, and generally poor Delphi coding. I kept thinking that eventually I'd get to the mountain top and I'd actually learn to build a modern, interesting type of game and know how to do so in my favorite development tool, Delphi. Boy was I wrong.

This book is like a timecapsule of where games development was five years ago and more. It was a complete waste of my money, and sad to say, of my time, too.