Game Engine Toolset Development [Paperback]

Graham Wihlidal (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 1592009638 | ISBN-13: 978-1592009633 | Publication Date: March 6, 2006 | Edition: 1

Toolset development is an extremely broad topic. Game Engine Toolset Development provides you with a core set of skills and a comprehensive insight that will aid you in the development of game engine utilities, significantly reducing the time period associated with the construction phase of a project. The book starts off with topics regarding development methodologies and best practices, and then proceeds into advanced topics like swap chain management and MVC object model automation with CodeDom. An introductory working knowledge of C# and the .NET 2.0 framework is expected, allowing the content of each topic to be directed towards the subject and avoiding trivial and introductory explanations. Readers are not required to have any experience developing game engine tools. Terminology and design fundamentals specific to toolset development are clearly depicted and explained. The companion Web site provides downloads of all source code from the book, as well as several bonus chapters.

Product Details

• Paperback: 621 pages
• Publisher: Course Technology PTR; 1 edition (March 6, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1592009638
• ISBN-13: 978-1592009633
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 7.3 x 1.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 3.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (11 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,066,456 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

22 of 23 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Good book.. but it's not what you think it is, March 31, 2006

By 

Jon Redfield "that1guy" (Salt Lake City, UT USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Game Engine Toolset Development (Paperback)

I bought this book thinking it would help me write a new tool for, say, building 3d models, or some other general tool. When it arrived I got excited just by the shear size of it, it's huge!

However, I started flipping through it browsing each and every chapter (didn't read them all in detail of course, but quite a few) and it doesn't teach you how to make a NEW tool for your game, it teaches you how to make an EXISTING tool better. While that knowledge is extremely valuable (and the reason I gave it 4 stars instead of 3), it's not what the description of the book stated: "Readers are not required to have any experience developing game engine tools." If you have no experience developing a tool, you're going to have a little trouble getting started. If you know enough math and have good enough coding skills to get a game engine going, you'll be able to write a tool for your game, but you don't need this book to do it.

Now, with that said, this book IS quite good and worth your money so long as you don't expect to read this book and then write a tool, you're going to need more info. Get the book anyway and use it as a guide, it's usefull in that aspect.

This book is so good at making a tool better, most of it's "gems" can and should be applied to ANY application, game tool or not. Also, it covers some good highlevel (or lowlevel, depending on how you view it) .Net functionality such as interfacing with COM and code documentation, as well as few other excellent techniques. These "gems" are quite valuable on their own.

So, in conclusion, if you know nothing about writing a tool, or you don't know C#, hold off on buying this book (make sure to put it in your wish list however). If you have a tool but find it's difficult to work with, or you want to broaden it's appeal, or just simply make it better, get this book, you won't regret it.

6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Great book!, March 15, 2006

By 

Ryan Hummer - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Game Engine Toolset Development (Paperback)

I have been awaiting the arival of this book since I first heard about it over the summer. Now that I have it and have begun reading it, it as lived up to the expectations that I had hoped for. I hope many other game dev studios have someone read this book to get them to switch to .NET for tool development.

I hope to use this book to help influnce the company I work for, Raven Software to switch to .NET at some point.

Great book, I recommend anyone interested in Tools Development read it.

Ryan Hummer
Tools Programmer
Raven Software

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Recipe book for tool developers, March 11, 2007

By 

Ambrosian Spactor (UK) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Game Engine Toolset Development (Paperback)

This is an excellent book, which covers a lot of important aspects of game/engine tool development, but it is more like a recipe book, as each chapter subject is almost stands on its own - just like game programming gems series. My favorite is how to integrate native code into a managed application. The book is well written (one of the best I've read recently), and the only thing i missed is a few chapters on how-to integrate into an existing pipeline - like importer/exporter for a common 3d package at least. A better title for this book would be "(game)tool programming gems"