Customer Reviews

3D Game Engine Design, Second Edition: A Practical Approach to Real-Time Computer Graphics (The Morgan Kaufmann Series in Interactive 3D Technology)

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This book gives you an excellent foundation upon which you can begin building a game engine. It covers all of the essentials (matrix algebra through artificial intelligence) wonderfully. It isn't so much a cookbook that will show you, step-by-step how to build a game engine, it gives you all of the tools to do so though.

Are you a professional or student working in game development? If you are, then this book is for you. Author David H. Eberly has done an outstanding job of writing a second edition of a book which focuses on the design of the scene graph management system and its associated rendering layer.

Eberly, begins this book by discussing the details of a rendering system, including transformations, camera models, culling and clipping, rastering, and issues regarding software versus hardware rendering and about specific graphics application programmer interfaces in use these days. In addition, the author discusses rendering from the perspective of actually writing all of the subsystems for a software renderer. He also takes a look at the essentials of organizing your data as a scene graph. Then, he focuses on specifically designed nodes and subsystems of the scene graph management system. The author then looks at some general concepts you see in attempting to have physical realism in a three-dimensional application. Next, he discusses a lot of mathematical detail for much of the source code you will find in Wild Magic. Then, he takes a brief look at the basic principles of object-oriented design and programming. The author continues by discussing memory management. Finally, he takes a look at a handful of sample shaders and the applications that use them.

This most excellent book is very much enhanced, describing the foundations for shader programming and how an engine can support it. Perhaps more importantly, the book is the most comprehensive reference available for the development of shader-based 3D graphics engines!

This book comes with the author's own 3d engine, and the book itself is like extremely detailed documentation about how the engine is put together and why. This is both a good thing and a bad.

The good part is that he walks through the entire engine, piece by piece, and explains in detail how it works and why it was built that way.

The bad part is that in some sections, you get a very narrow view of how to build that piece of the engine. There are many alternative ways to do some of these things, and they're not explored as much.

Overall though, I find the book very good.

Trust me, this is the book you are finding everywhere if you interesting 3D game designing and have enough mathematics background. it worth to read page by page. ---Chen ShanJun

I began to read this book as soon as I got it, and was amazed instantly. Although I would suggest to first read 3D Math Primer and then get into this book. Because It's way to technichal and mathematicaly oriented. Lots of heavy words.

But it's a title that you MUST have, definitely.

This book is fantastically comprehensive, though I bought it more for the CG algorithms than anything else.

My biggest gripe is with the pseudo-code. My C++ is not great, but I can get by - I found the code in general under-commented for a textbook. If you were writing software, it might be fine, but the purpose of the code is to explain the algorithms, and to work in concert with the text, which it does not. Furthermore, I found the text did not fill in the holes - I was left to try to figure out what Eberley was doing by going through the code. Possibly if I had read the whole thing through from cover to cover things would be clearer.

If you're just looking for an algorithm reference, you could do better.

Identical to the First Edition of this book, the title would have programmers to assume that this text would lead them to designing a game engine; nothing could be further from the truth.
If I gave you rigorous mathematical treatise on transistors and Ohm's law, do you think you could design a radio from it?? Not likely, and certainly NOT practical. This book is well written entertainment for mathematicians (and perhaps source of income to a few)... period. As a "practical approach to Real-Time computer Graphics", it is a fraud.
Anyone seeking to design a 3D engine should consider referencing Tomas Moller's and Eric Haines's book, "Real-Time Rendering" for example, and simply working backward from there which applies simple linear algebra (eg. matrix multiplication, transformation spaces, etc.), and not be lost in the minutia presented in Eberly's treatise.