.NET Game Programming with DirectX 9.0 [Paperback]

Alexandre Santos Lobao (Author), Ellen Hatton (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 27, 2003

Written in easy-to-understand language, this book is a must-read if you'd like to create out-of-the-ordinary, yet simple games. Authors Alexandre Lobao and Ellen Hatton demonstrate the ease of producing multimedia games with Managed DirectX 9.0 and programming the games with Visual Basic .NET on the Everett version of Microsoft's Visual Studio.

The authors emphasize simplicity, but still explore important concepts of Managed DirectX 9.0, such as Direct3D, DirectSound, DirectMusic (using the COM interface), DirectInput (including force-feedback joysticks), DirectShow, and DirectPlay. Additional chapters discuss game programming technologies: Speech API for generating character voices, GDI+ for simple games, and multithreading. A bonus chapter even shows you how to port a simple game to a Pocket PC.

The book includes two chapters' worth of sample games. The first presents a game with simple features; the second extends that game and presents additional concepts. A library of game programming helper classes is also created, step by step, in both chapters.

Editorial Reviews

From the Publisher

.net Game Programming with DirectX 9.0 is a cool book that gets you up to speed fast on your own game projects. Balanced and complete, .net Game Programming with DirectX 9.0 is aimed toward beginners and advanced programmers alike. The first book to cover the Managed DirectX 9.0 interfaces, from Direct3D to DirectPlay, .net Game Programming with DirectX 9.0 is an indispensable guide for anybody interested in exciting new Microsoft technologies for creating great games.

About the Author

Alexandre Lobão is a passionate man. His first passion was reading, starting with large books—Mark Twain, Érico Veríssimo, Jules Verne, Monteiro Lobato, Alexandre Dumas, and others—when he was 7. At age 12, he discovered his next two passions: playing and creating games (by that time on his first Apple computer), and writing.

Many years later—he's about forty now—these passions still flourish. Now he's a teacher of academic game development courses, has written four books on the topic, and has participated in Brazilian gamse development contests, both as a contestant and as a judge. He has also written short story books, children's books, and young adult books, and in 2008 he released his first romance, The Name of the Eagle, currently available only in Portuguese. And, of course, he still loves to read, some favorite authors being Ken Follett and Paulo Coelho.

His ultimate passions—starting in 1995 and still burning—are his wife, Waléria, and his kids, Natália and Rafael. Alexandre believes that lives needs passion to be lived entirely, and hopes that this book helps light this passion in readers' hearts. You can find his work at AlexandreLobao.com.

Ellen Hatton is a computer science undergraduate at Edinburgh University. She was exposed to computers at a very early age and has been fascinated with them ever since. Her first experience of computer games was playing Dread Dragon Doom, at which she quickly excelled at the age of 5. She's been hooked on games ever since.

Ellen is not only interested in computers. She skis frequently, among other sports, and enjoys general student life in the bustling Scottish capital, Edinburgh. As her choice of degree suggests, Ellen still finds computers very interesting and is constantly looking for new challenges.

Product Details

• Paperback: 654 pages
• Publisher: Apress (March 27, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1590590511
• ISBN-13: 978-1590590515
• Product Dimensions: 9.4 x 7.1 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 2.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (19 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,198,836 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #55 in Books > Computers & Technology > Programming > Graphics & Multimedia > DirectX

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Nothing of 3D, April 24, 2003

By 

~toki (Buenos Aires, Buenos Aires Argentina) - See all my reviews

This review is from: .NET Game Programming with DirectX 9.0 (Paperback)

If you want to read something of 3D forget this book.
This book cover 2D programming.
There are a chapter talking about 3D (basic concepts).

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Great Concept, Poor Editing, May 31, 2003

By 

S.O. (Brooklyn, NY, USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: .NET Game Programming with DirectX 9.0 (Paperback)

I've gotten about halfway through this book in the past two weeks and I feel like I'm learning enough where I can start writing my own simple games once I'm done with it. I started from knowing VB.net pretty well (for business apps), but not knowing the first thing about DirectX or Game Programming. That said, the editing of the code samples in this book is atrocious. The code samples in the book almost never match those on the CD and you have to figure out "what they mean" most of the time, debugging stuff yourself. Another dumb thing is that whoever wrote the code doesn't know how to use arrays, and always Dims a 4 element array as MyArray(4) instead of (3). Lastly, they don't tell you to enable "key preview" on your forms, so if you didn't know to do that from reading it in another .Net book, the keyboard handler functions would never work for you. Bottom line is that this book can help you learn elementary game programming in VB.net, as long as you know the language reasonably well (decent VB6 would be enough), and you won't get too frustrated trying to reconcile the code in the book and on the CD. It's too bad: If they had gotten their act together, this could have been a 5 star book.

10 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Stay FAR FAR away, January 24, 2004

By 

Brian J Newtz - See all my reviews

This review is from: .NET Game Programming with DirectX 9.0 (Paperback)

I've been buying books from Amazon for years now, and not once have I actually written a review about one. However, this book is so terrible that I felt compelled to send out a warning to all those considering this book.

The whole time I was reading it, the only thing I could think of was all of the naive programmers out there who might just be learning and not realize all of the bad practices this book is advising. Not to mention a complete misunderstanding of how Object Oriented Programming is to be used. According to Mr. Lobao, EVERYTHING derives from a game engine - a sprite, a tile, a font, etc...

I can't believe a book like this ever made it to press. I also find it laughable that the foreward is written by a Microsoft MVP whose focus is in ADO.NET, and the technical reviewer specializes in data warehousing and internet solutions. Um, since this is a book about GAME programming, shouldn't someone who actually knows a bit about GAME programming actually review the thing?