Focus On 3D Terrain Programming (Game Development) [Paperback]

Trent Polack (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: December 11, 2002 | ISBN-10: 1592000282 | ISBN-13: 978-1592000289 | Edition: 1

This book is one-of-a-kind. Most 3D programming books on the market today concentrate on only one (or two) of the four algorithms that are presented in this book. Terrain engines have applications in games, but also in various simulations and they play a very important part in military flight simulations. Terrain engine programming is not only hot and widely applicable, it's fun!. This book is an informative adventure through the world of 3D terrain, packed full of demos, figures and information.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Trent Polack has been programming for several years now. Trent is the OpenGL forum moderator GameDev.net.Trent is a contributing author for the book "Game Programming Tricks of the Trade" and the author of the book "Focus On 3D Terrain Programming" both by Premier Press.

Product Details

• Paperback: 220 pages
• Publisher: Course Technology PTR; 1 edition (December 11, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1592000282
• ISBN-13: 978-1592000289
• Product Dimensions: 8.6 x 6.7 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (23 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #841,838 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

13 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Very inadaquate., August 26, 2004

By 

Reader "Reader" (Texas) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Focus On 3D Terrain Programming (Game Development) (Paperback)

The text doesn't come close to describing any of the terrain rendering algorithms adequately. For this, the author refers the reader to whitepapers on the companion CD written by the original authors. After a short search on the Internet, I turned up a wealth of better written descriptions on 3d terrain rendering algorithms. I suggest others to do the same.

The author makes a big deal out of the importance of morphing vertex points to minimize the effect of popping but provides no implementation description. As he says in the text: "I didn't want to limit your imagination..." What a cop out!

The c++ code provided on the companion CD is cleanly written, compiled and ran without problems, but is also clean of any useful comments further mystifying the subject. Another search on the Internet turned up many source code examples with better documentation.

14 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent Beginner's Guide to 3D Terrain Programming, January 9, 2003

By 

Matt Hissong (Apalachin, NY USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Focus On 3D Terrain Programming (Game Development) (Paperback)

Wow. Let me just start off with that. I started this book with very little understanding of terrain algorithms. Now I know 4 major approaches to terrain and how to implement them, with many different possibilities for texturing, lighting and culling. If you are a beginner in the world of 3D terrain, then this book is the best one you can have right now. It can take you from a complete beginner with some basic openGL knowledge, like I was, to someone who knows how to write a very effective 3D terrain engine.

This book is NOT for advanced 3D terrain programmers. It will be very useful to a beginner, like I was. If you know how to do 4 chapters' worth of this book- the basics and one of the more advanced algorithms- then it's not worth it. If you know any less, I'd strongly recommend it! It teaches the main algorithms that have stood the test of time in 3D Terrain Programming, and ONE NEW ALGORITHM THAT'S SO CUTTING EDGE, IT HASN'T EVEN BEEN OFFICIALLY PUBLISHED YET- ROAM 2.O, the next iteration of possibly the most major CLOD algorithm yet developed!

Here are the contents:
Introduction
Ch2. Fractal Terrain Generation, Heightmap Loading/Unloading, building a base terrain class and a Brute Force implementation.
Ch3. Texture mapping, procedural texture generation, and detail texture mapping.
Ch4. Height-based lighting, hardware lighting and when you shouldn't use it on terrain (too much normal recalculation in CLOD), lightmapping and slope lighting.

The three major CLOD algorithms:
Ch5. Geomipmapping theory and implementation.
Ch6. Quadtree theory and implementation.
Ch7. ROAM, improvements to ROAM, new ROAM theory and the implementation of ROAM 2.0- the latest in CLOD.

This book culls together information that is scattered over the web, various books and conference articles into 203 pages of very useful information. It teaches you 4 major approaches to terrain: brute force, the initial algorithm for all developers, and 3 advanced Continuous Level Of Detail algorithms. A beginner would spend a month, easily, finding all of the resources to learn this material. Then when you want a quick reference, you have to rehunt for all of this material, which can waste a half hour or an hour. I read this book in 3 days. Whenever I want a quick reference, I grab it off the desk next to my computer. You be the judge.

10 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Well done on all counts., February 4, 2003

By 

Devon Zachary (British Columbia) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Focus On 3D Terrain Programming (Game Development) (Paperback)

This is an excellent book, well worth purchasing if you're interested in terrain rendering and don't have a good idea where to start, or have never coded a terrain engine before.

It starts out with simple explanations of the basics of terrain rendering. Many of you will probably be familiar with the techniques in the first portion of the book.

The meat of the book, however, evaluates ,in a non biased fashion, three different CLOD algorithms. Along with the whitepapers included on the CD after reading this book, you should have a throuough understanding of how to implement these algorithms yourself.

The code included on the CD is well written, and very concise. If you're a hardcore C++ programmer, you may be irked by the lack of fancy template usage, or C++ streams; but the way the author has structured everything makes it very easy to understand the code whether you are familiar with C or C++.

The last chapter is a nice add-on. If you are familiar with techniques such as sky-boxes and particle engines, you probably won't find it very useful, but for the uninitiated it could prove to be quite useful.

What this book will not teach you, however, is API specific details. It assumes you are comfortable using your API of choice. It will not teach you any 3D math either. You should be fairly comfortable with matrix and vector operations/basic linear algebra before attempting to code the algorithms discussed in the book.

It's not a book for the graphically-uninitiated, but if you're allready familiar with either Direct3D, or OpenGL and you understand some basic 3D math (rotation and scaling with matrices, vector normals and such) it's an excellent book, well suited for teaching you terrain rendering.