Game Programming Gems 7 (Game Programming Gems Series) (Hardcover)

by Scott Jacobs (Author)
Key Phrases: graphics hardware, advanced debugging techniques, linear feedback shift register, General Programming, Charles River Media, Game Programming Gems (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Product Description
Welcome to the seventh volume of the must-have reference series for game developers, Game Programming Gems, the series that helped define the standards for game programming and continues to be an essential source for new, innovative techniques. "Game Programming Gems 7" provides the tools and inspiration that game developers need to excel. Featuring cutting-edge, ready-to-use techniques contributed by industry veterans and experts, this new collection is a key resource for inspiration, insight, and a plethora of time-saving, ready-to-use methods for the developer’s tool box! Gems 7 answers the needs of passionate developers, eager newcomers, voracious production requirements, and the demand for innovating and entertaining gameplay. Covering all the key development areas including math and physics, artificial intelligence, audio, and even scripting and data-driven systems, each section is edited by an expert in the field to ensure that the ideas are original, accurate, and useful.There are gems that contribute directly to a player’s experience of the game, including audio production gems and human-game interactions. Does your development team include a DBA? Inside you’ll find a gem that suggests ways to integrate your object system with a relational database. Recognizing the need for good solutions for managing ever-increasing team sizes and facilitating efficient internal and external communications, there is a networking gem that applies tools to multiplayer development that are common to many network administrators, but may not yet have widespread use in our industry. Dig into this new volume of useful, practical ideas and techniques and get ready to make games that are more inventive, entertaining, and satisfying!

About the Author
Scott Jacobs has been working in the games industry since 1995. Currently he is a Senior Software Engineer at Destineer. Prior to this he has worked as a software engineer at the serious games company Virtual Heroes, two Ubisoft studios including Redstorm Entertainment, and began in the game development industry at Interactive Magic. He also served as the Network & Multiplayer section edition in Game Programming Gems 6. He lives in North Carolina with his wife and a house full of creatures.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 586 pages
• Publisher: Charles River Media; 1 edition (January 22, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1584505273
• ISBN-13: 978-1584505273
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 7.4 x 1.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 3 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #58,468 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

  Popular in this category: (What's this?)

  #46 in

  Books > Computers & Internet > Programming > Game Programming

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Articles are decent; I hope the CD is a joke, October 21, 2008

By	K. Kelley - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

There is some decent written material here, although the articles are typically vague and seem to omit important implementation details more often than not. However, if you're buying this book thinking you are going to get working examples... you're not.

The CD is absolutely ridiculous. Of the half-dozen examples I've looked at so far, one was completely missing and all but one of the others just didn't work. The binaries died with strange errors; trying to build the source gets you a laundry list of nontrivial errors. One example appears to have been built on top of a very old version of the DirectX sample framework, and doesn't include a copy of any of the headers that it needs from that framework; another throws errors about missing arguments in function calls.

Even if the code did compile, though, it's generally absolutely horribly organized. One example chose to pile everything into a single source file--including a TGA loader class cribbed from GPWiki, some basic utility classes, a bunch of DirectX setup code, and (somewhere in there) the several dozen lines of the actual example. Comments are generally sparse.

Despite the fact that the book has been out for almost a year and that there are a significant number of problems, there is also absolutely no errata available via the publisher's website. In fact, the only way I found the missing example was to find a forum post discussing the fact that it was missing which included, in a reply, a link to the author's blog. The blog was, of course, being "updated" and so the post in question was gone; it took a trip to Google's cache to get the download link on that page to get the source.

Read the articles! They're decent stuff--but the CD is a bad, bad joke. Since most, if not all, of the articles in this book are simply about implementing techniques that are well-covered in the literature, that detracts significantly from the book's usefulness and appeal.

5.0 out of 5 stars Get This Book Despite the CD!, February 26, 2009

By	ETI Gunengine.com "gunengine.com" (Prescott, AZ, USA) - See all my reviews

The previous reviewer is right about the CD, which is full of errors, with a publisher that seems intent on dropping support, and an author who is obviously too busy to care about today's standards of updates and communications. That said, this is a MUST HAVE if you're a serious game programmer and have enjoyed the previous titles in the series. Our rating here is to balance out the CD defects and to let you know that the contributors in each section are at the top of their game. For the price, you could go to a conference and pay $2 grand to hear the same contributors present. The field of game programming is moving toward new applications using tensor calculus and databasing with the advent of NVIDIA supercomputer workstations, even though DBMS itself is in need of more than cosmetic surgery in the innovation department. Each article is a great starting point for delving into the cutting edge evolution of that topic, whether you're DX, GL or C++ oriented. If you get this to sharpen your code, you'll be disappointed; if you get it to "get to know" the contributors (5 of whom --so far-- answer their emails personally, and have their own deeper books on each topic), you're in for a treat. In other words, don't let the CD turn you off, manage your own expectations, and you won't be disappointed by this one.