Customer Reviews

3D Game Programming All in One (Course Technology PTR Game Development Series)

5 star:		(15)
4 star:		(7)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(5)
1 star:		(8)

 

 

Book isn't actually written badly. I was completely mislead by its Title, though; It's a book on Torque (and maybe video game "design"), definitely not a book on Game Programming. I was expecting something (much?) more from it ("Look Inside" wasn't available at the time of my purchase, so title mislead me). It turned out as a disappointment.

PROS:
Quick & smooth to read
Comprehensive - from a game design point of view (at the end you can come up with some game)
Easy, even for Beginners

CONS:
Too Specific to the Torque Game Engine (the word Torque is actually repeated infinitely through the book; really, you'll get bored of reading it ...after page 2)
Game programming fundamentals (transformations, math), theory (graphic pipeline) and libraries (DirectX and OpenGL) aren't covered at all.
It's for REAL Beginners (it even teaches you how to use Paint Shop Pro and other tools which can be, in my opinion, easily self-thaught)
Repetitive sometimes


OVERALL:
As the heading says, calling this book 3D Game Programming All in One is misleading, whereas "Creating Games From Scratch w/ the Torque Engine" could have been a much more suitable title. Go ahead and get it if you're a real beginner and you're interested in learning how to make a game from scratch, just from the designer/"product manager" (but NOT the programmer) point of view. You'll be taught some TORQUE, Paint Shop Pro, Ultraedit 32, Milkshape and other tools/game design issues, to make a complete game; even if not in depth, a bit of everything is covered.

It's not the book for you though, if you already know something about programming and especially if you expect to learn (like I did) some real-time rendering and game engine theory. For that matter, I can suggest you to get both "Real Time Rendering" by Akenine-Moller & Haines (more theoretical) and OpenGL Game Programming by Hawkins & Astle (more practical. There also you end up with a working game, but you really get a grasp on how things work under the hood... definitely something you don't with this reviewed book).

This is an awesome, and essential, book if you plan on doing development with the Torque Game Engine (TGE). I had purchased my Indie Developer license (...) before discovering this book. The codebase for TGE is so huge (hundreds of files, thousands of classes, 100's of thousand lines of code). The online tutorials and Garage Game DOCs weren't really enough, I felt, to get started. So, I bought this book to get me started.

I will admit, the title of this book is a bit misleading. It does cover most aspects of 3d Game Programming (coding, textures, 3d modeling, sound, level design), but it is mostly dependent (except the artsy topics) on the TGE. Someone not expecting to work with TGE will be disappointed as all the code in the book is written in TorqueScript, not C++.

Another thing I will say about this book: The beginner-intermediate rating is a bit untrue. I would gear this book more towards the intermediate level. The 'introduction to programming' chapter is a good start, but really doesn't prepare an unexperienced programmer to the concepts of inheritance, scoping, program flow, among others, covered in the book.

Final Conclusion: Buy this book if you are working with TGE. Even if you're an experience TGE user, the references (function/class listings, etc) are extremely valuable. If you are not a TGE user, you should give a good look at it, as it is a great tool for an indie developer (...). If you're working on making your own engine from scratch, this book probably won't help you too much (there are probably better books on texture creation, 3d model creation, and sound that you could pick up instead... along with an actual 'engine development' book in C++).

Torque badly needs a book like this, but I hope some of the faults in this work are addressed in a second edition.

First, the good stuff. There is no book to offer a holistic overview of the mighty Torque Game Engine. This book has broken that sad deficiency. The author also writes at a level that will not alienate the experts overly as it offers the neophtes a leg up. The text is playful and fun, but not caked in silliness as I've found similar volumes seeking the same touch. As such, it is a true invitation to explore and learn how to use a complex and capable game engine that has suffered from a "by coders, for coders" darkness in the documentation department for years.

However, as I work through the book, I find a considerable number of errors in the text/code and comments of the sample scripts in the book. There is a threaded post or two on the www.garagegames.com forums where Ken is patiently noting corrections offered by the enthusiastic readers, but one cannot help but feel that the barriers these mistakes will present true newbies are more considerable.

The CD ROM is a misfire, in my opinion. One of Torque's greatest advantages over other game engines is that it support Linux and Mac in addition to Windows machines. But the CD ROM has setup.exe's and such whose function is nothing more involved that to extract compressed data from the CD and place it on your hard disk. This is just a sad mistake which alienates the subset of his audience who would most keenly benefit from having good documentation for such a gem as Torque in that they have so many fewer choices available to them. I strongly urge the publisher to replace such executable archives with plain ZIP files... at least for those containing only chapter "RESOURCES" materials. This would allow Torque to reach its greatest possible audience and put all platforms on a more even footing.

I look forward to finishing the book and walking through its lessons, but the CD ROM has failed to expedite my quest.

But was is it? To answer that I will first say what it's not: An all-in-one guide to 3d programming. Far from it.

I would, however, say this book is *the* title to pick up if you are serious about making games using Garage Games' "Torque" engine (the engine behind the "Tribes" series). This book *is* the definitive all-in-one beginners guide to creating 3D games with Torque. I I have been making online games professionally for the last 5 years and I can tell you from experience that no single individual has a chance in the proverbial hell to achieve a high production value, AAA Massively Multiplayer title (which seems to be the first thing on many people's mind).

MMO's are out of the grasp of 99.9999% of all indie developers. Fun, exciting and *profitable* multi-player games, however are well within the reach of one or few indie developers. The Torque engine gives you to the tools you need to develop a top-end multi-player 3D game. There are a *lot* of issues to be considered in such a game, but most of them are gracefully handled by the Torque engine.

In this book you will learn how to harness the various tools within this engine... all in one book. :)

I wholeheartedly recommed this book and this engine for anyone with some programming background interested in making a game within a reasonable amount of time. The engine is only $100 bucks (no royalties unless you make over a quarter of a million bucks on the game) with all of the source code, but you get a copy of the engine on the CD included with this book.

Definitely pick this one up

I'd probably rate this about 3 1/2 stars for one major reason.

The book itself covers a huge area of game development and in that respect is a great resource. Yes it uses the Torque engine but a lot of the concepts and art aspects can be shared with any 3D engine. My one major gripe with the book is the amount of errors in the code and in the working of the artistic aspects. I find at least one error every chapter, syntax, filenames being wrong, wrong function names, etc. which could give some people some frustration if they are a complete newbie to scripting. Another problem seems to be that when installing the base files to work with, some of them are actual final versions. i.e. when editing graphic A to B, graphic B was already installed as the file that was supposed to be A so you work with file B instead of A.

There are some forum postings on gargagegames.com that help fix and resolve some issues but there is no one page that lists all the fixes of the code or in the writings of the book.

This is a hard review since I do enjoy the book and it's been great, but it has been frustrating at points due to some of the errors, some easily fixable, some not. I do recommend the book with the note, don't expect anything to work right away and you must have access to the garagegame forums to help fix some of the larger issues in the book. Keep that in mind while reading and using this resource and it would be a great intro into 3d gaming, if not in a rush, I'd probably recommend waiting for the next version though.

Lets start off with the good. I'm 11 years old and I was able to follow the easy written text and understand the code. Obviously this means the book is definately made for beginners. The other game programming books, most of them, either tell you have to make your own game engine or create 1980's style 2d games. This game will definately teach you how to make games in 3D so there is no doubt about that. Oh and if your looking for a game written in C/C++/Javascript, go to some other book.This book is written in Torgue script.When you go through the book, aside from the intro, you never get the feeling that there is too much text and not enough code, or too much code and not enough text to explain it. The author gives it enough code and balances it out with a good thorough guide explanation to the different things in the code.

Now I'll come to the bad. The major thing that brings the rating down is the fact that the about 1/2 the time, the code isn't correct. A lot of times the code isn't correct and your program doesn't do what it's supposed to. Now if you have had some experience and bought this book to completely grasp the Torque engine, this won't be a big problem. You can just fix the script on your own, with a few referals to the text you can fix it up no problem. But most people aren't like you and they are complete beginners(which I am not)who bought this book.This book is supposed to be for beginners and this script problem will stump most beginners. The second, and last, problem is the cd. It contains a full version of Torque, but the rest of the programs are demos. You have milkshape, ultraedit32, and quark6.3 DEMOS. You need to buy the full version.

Bottom line, if you're a semi-intermidiate or higher and don't find spending a few extra bucks after getting this book, buy it. If you're a beginner who has never even heard of Torque (and doesn't mind spending the extra bucks), buy it and use the online tutorials to get familiar with it. Then you can try out the book. If you are a beginner that doesn't mind the extra bucks, but wants to jump in headfirst into programming, don't get the book. Categorize youself and buy or not.

Ok, I own several game design books already and all are decent but none has been as thorough and complete as this book. This book covers nearly EVERYTHING that is neccessary to develop a game. Including : scripting, client and server side scripting, modelling(character and vehicle), animation, skinning, tiling, GUI, level building, terrain....and tons more. The only thing that this doesn't cover is actually modification of Torque's C++ code. Not that it matters because this book is more focused on the game design and elements rather than strict coding like other books. The best thing is that all the topics are broken down and easily understandable.

The Torque 3D engine is already famous for it's lack of decent tutorials and documentation.....well this is definately what we been waiting for.

The CD does not match the book text. The first edition may have been a fine book, but this edition has not been edited to match the companion CD. I am very sorry I have bought it.

My boyfriend bought this book originaly, but I picked it up to read a bit when we brought it on our camping trip. I'm almost finished it now (I'm on the sound and music chapters) and I just have to say how impressed I am with this book.

The only previous experience i've had was with VBA, and no game development. Me and my boyfriend are now planning to make a puzzle game together based on things we've learned in Ken's book. For me, the best parts were the model making chapters, but I also worked through the programming chapters. I had a few problems with chapter five and 6, but a visit to the GarageGames board that discusses the book helped me find out where I went wrong. There were some typos in an early chapter, but again, the Garage Games board had the needed corrections.

Ken's writing style pulls you in - you feel like he is sitting next to you explaining stuff as you go along without seeming too cute or patronizing. The converstation-style tone he uses is what kept me reading the book while on vacation, and by the time we got home I could not wait to get started with my computer on the tutorial things.

There is lots of reference material throughout the book and in the appendixes. As mentioned by someone else, the "Programming" part in the name is a bit of a misnomer, since the book has lots of programming ***and*** many chapters of model-making, sound-editing and recording, texture making and other things.
It is so much more than just programming.

- A much needed resource for anyone starting to work with the Torque Game Engine.

That pretty much sums up how I've found this book. It covers everything someone starting off would need to know and understanding. It is well organized and constantly discussed on the Garage Games website. While it doesn't delve into rewriting the Torque engine, it does give you the fundamental knowledge of its design and operation. It does this very well and by the end you should firmly understand where all the major components reside, and how to make a nice little demo game.

I must admit it has some flaws. The black and white pictures don't help explain the texture/terrain sections well enough. It is also a bit outdated - but the coding errors have almost all been corrected online if you have the opportunity to look for them. Lastly, this is a beginners resource. If you are of advanced skill (or a quick learner) you might outgrow the book quickly. It will, however, continue to be a great resource in the future as a result of the sparse documentation accompanying the game engine.

I recommend this resource to anyone delving into Torque Game Engine for the first time, as well as veterans of other engines that are trying to learn what Torque is capable of. And hey, with all the modeling, texturing and terrain editing advice it gives - it might just be helpful for folks using other editors as well... Until Garage Games releases more comprehensive documentation for Torque, resources like this will continue to be the foundation for learning and releasing great Indie games.