Customer Reviews

OpenGL Game Development (Wordware Applications Library)

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

I came to this book not as an amateur, but as an intermediate game and OpenGL programmer. I think this gives me a perspective that some newcomers might not have.

This book is mediocre at best. It is filled with shallow explanations, and the development methodology espoused by the book is actually harmful. Specifically, Seddon takes the archaic approach of manually coding Win32 controls in his map editor (the construction of which comprises about 75% of the book), a practice that was outdated several years before the publication date.

One startling example of a bad explanation I can recall coming across was that of rotation matrices. Seddon claims that matrices are used to rotate axes, when the reality is that matrices are used to rotate points ABOUT axes. This misconception of the mathematics, along with the lack of elucidating figures (not just here, but throughout) illustrates a deep lack on the author's part of knowledge of the fundamentals, or at least the ability to convey these fundamentals.

As a replacement to this book, I heartily recommend OpenGL Game Programming by Astle and Hawkins, or anything by Andre Lamothe if you'd rather get your start with DirectX.

I gave this book more than one star because it does a fair job of explaining very basic Win32 programming, and because I was able to obtain it very cheaply.

This book is pretty good as a starter for anyone wanting to get into 3D game development. It not only covers OpenGL, but OpenAL and Multiplayer issues as well (not in the same depth of course).

My only complaint is that while it promotes OpenGL as the choice for multi-platform graphics, all the code examples and information on OpenGL are Windows specific, to the point of using the opengl32.lib and glu32.lib libraries in all the code.

Still, the book is well worth the price, just don't expect to make Doom 4 after reading it!

Although I've yet to finish this book I can say it does not deliver. The book gives the goal of making a high quality first person shooter but lands way under the bar. As I read through the model editor chapters, I'm thinking wow this is gonna be great, but in one chapter it all falls to pieces.

It amazes me how cheap it works and how much renown he put towards the editor. So I decided to look forward and surprise it was pretty much the meat of it. Cheap inacurately placed walls represent lines,and unrotatable squares work as floors and ceilings. The level editor is worth nothing. On the plus side, I did think how I could actually make a application, but his methods were just awful. After that awful display I go to the end of the book to find a monsterous FPS game.

Words can not describe how outdated it looked. It's a little better than wolfenstein and alot worse than the first quake. It just turned me off it completely. I can't say that there was no valuable information in the following chapters but I just saw that it wasn't worth finishing. It loads ASE models instead of MD2 so no animations unless you're some sort of genius that knows things like that already in which you probably wouldn't use ASE in the first place.

I got some ideas from this book but not much I didn't already know and I don't know that much. I used to think Beginning OpenGL game programming was a bad book because I thought it didn't give me what I really wanted to know, but books like this really make you appreciate books such a that and with a little internet research I think I'll do just fine. I got nothing more from this book than a tutorial on the microsoft visual c++ resource editor but I guess it could help later on. In all, this book is nothing what it's claimed to be.

You can learn many new things about the game programming with this book. More important, you can write a map editor, draw your scene into this map, save it as a map file and then open it in your map engine. It means that you write your own software to draw the scene and you write your own engine to load the scene and add textures to it. But if you want to learn OpenGL, it is better that you don't read this book. It's a good book for programmers that have enough knowledge about the OpenGL programming and want to write a game with it. Also this book doesn't cover the physics modeling and so you should learn another book to add the physics modeling to your game.
I like this book!
-Ehsan-

Chris Seddon does an okay job at explaining how to use some of the very rudementary functions of OpenGL. However, this book is by no means as diverse or teaches you as much as, say, OpenGL Game Programming from Primatech does.

He does do a good job at showing and disecting the Win32 hWnd stuff that allows OpenGL to run in a Win32 window - of which is somewhat complicated code to follow for newer programmers (but once you do it once, you never really have to do it ever again since its pretty static from application to application that uses OpenGL, short of a few ins and outs you can do). That earns the book the 3rd star.

However, when it comes down to the OpenGL portion, I felt that Chris missed several key issues or did not explain their importance well enough. First off, the book is organized so that he presents the creation of a level editor and how to make one and then moves onto making a small OpenGL application, of which I wouldn't neccessarily have approached in that way, but if you follow along you can get the jist of the concepts you need to understand in order to build such an application. Second, about 1/10th of the book is nothing but source code extracts that span several pages (of which contains no comments), of which should have been left out entirely (why authors have to do this is beyond me - it adds no value to the book). Third, while doing a fairly basic job at a very rudementary level editor discussion (of which dives a bit too into design issues, i.e. why I wouldn't of gone about explaining things using such a complex example without having a concrete understanding of the basic concepts first), when it came down to the chapters dedicated to actually building a simple game application, he misses the point entirely and fades out far too quickly. A good example was the chaper entitled "Game Engine Design", where it spans maybe 3 pages. There are entire series of books on game engine design, 3 pages isn't going to amount to anything, I assure you. This turns out to be the biggest flaw of the book, is that he has a fairly okay introduction, which eventually leads into the end of chapter far too prematurely, almost as if he ran out of time and the publishing company forced him to finish in an horribly underestimated amount of time (which might be the case? who knows).

I would suggest that Chris should release an updated version that completes his train of thought by adding maybe in the range of 100 to 200 more pages to cover more of the OpenGL side of things, possibly explaining things from a ground up perspective and then dives into some of the technicalities of why things are done in certain ways (such as the glBitBlit code section he wrote - TMI for a newbie to handle), then it might score 3.5 to 4 stars, still short of other books which explain the concepts first before designing a system to use the concepts learned. As the book is now, its not much of an OpenGL book since there are much better written and fully complete books, again such as Primatech's OpenGL Game Development book (which is a good book to learn OpenGL from for beginners). 3 stars is a fair review, good effort, fairly decent explanations (I've seen better explanations of NeHe's site), but the cut off later on is very noticable and kills a lot of the ability for this book to be a good book at really learning OpenGL.

This is the absolute worst Open GL book ever authored. Ignoring the enire premise of the word Open in Open GL the author decides to focus entirely on - not Open GL - but Windows. Not any Windows system, but Win 95/NT. So right away the title is misleading no doubt to generate sales.

We see the first bit of real code at around page 90. Maybe 5% of it is Open GL related. The rest like the entire first chapter focusses on writing a basic Windows program. Recommended compiler Visual Studio C++ 6.0! There is a brief acknowledgment of MFC, .NET is not even on the horizon and the author goes with an SDK app. Yup! Plenty of hDC, hWnd, longwinded explanations as to what these do. The program - this is apparently a homework assignment the author handed in in the early nineties - pretends to be in C++, but is essentially C. There is atrocious use of globals, no dynamic allocation and forget about design patterns. The book was published in 2005!

To top it all of, the code requires DirectX! Some lame explanation as to how it makes things easier is included. All in all the code provided is on the level of assigment #4 out of 20 in any decent Open GL 101 course - and no, definitely not mid-term material. Get the Open GL Programming Guide. It costs about the same.

This book is a great reading for all those that want to begin or to penetrate into the programming game using OpenGL.
It relies on an easy and progressive reading, with númerosos functional examples explained to the detail.
The authors are real experts in the programaión of games beside having great experience in transmitting your conocimmientos knowledges.

First, I must admit a few things. I have not finished the book (I'm at the end of Chapter 7, roughly halfway through the book). Second, I bought this book to learn primarily about Win32 applications stuff and basic openGL topics (I know other books are better for each respective topic, but this is the only one I could find locally on either topic). I do not know much about (nor care) about game development.

Ok, with that disclaimer out of the way, I believe others have done a fair job describing what the book does and doesn't do. I'd like to point out why it makes me think others new to Applications/openGL programming should find a different book.

Throughout the chapter, the author discusses the module you'll be working on and shows the source code. Then at the end of each chapter, there is a "complete" source file with all the bits and pieces in it. Also, the author has downloadable code available from a website on the book.

I opted not to download the source code, because I had never done anything like this and I wanted to physically enter all the code, in hopes that it would help me understand everything. (I think this has worked very well, FYI).

So here is my issue: the code embedded in the chapters does not always match the code at the end of the chapter, which doesn't always match the source code availble online (which is the source code that actually compiles). What this equates to is the following: you have to debug code that you don't understand (because you're supposed to be learning it!) on a subject that you are unfamiliar with. However, I feel that doing all this extra work has helped me understand the concepts and "ins and outs" of applications programming and some basic openGL.

If you like puzzles, you'll like this book. If you don't like digging through broken instructional code for hours at a time, find a different book.

Oh, and worst of all, I bought this book at a local bookstore for $46 when its available here for like $13... maybe thats why I have such an unfavorable opinion of this book.