Programming an RTS Game with Direct3D (Paperback)

by Carl Granberg (Author)

Editorial Reviews

Product Description
Making a commercial-quality RTS game takes thousands of dollars and a large team of talented people. So is it possible for a book to teach one person how to make their own RTS game? The answer is yes. Programming an RTS Game with Direct3D is such a reference. The book provides intermediate programmers with a step-by-step implementation guide for programming a complete RTS game. In this book you'll learn how to make a very simple RTS game with all of the core elements. Don't be fooled though-- even this simple game will take a lot of knowledge and hard work. But during the process of making the game, you'll learn many general game programming skills, including terrain generation, skinned meshes, path fi nding, visual effects, sounds, networking, how to create a user interface, and much more. Each chapter deals with one or more specifi c component in the building process to mimic a logical project workfl ow from concept to completed game. The book begins by laying the theoretical framework and discussing RTS game design and various implementation issues. From there, you'll move on to implement component after component, until you are finally ready to put them all together to form an RTS game. Throughout the book, there is a heavy emphasis on coding and a lot of this code will be found in the example applications on the companion CD-ROM.

About the Author
Carl Granberg has been creating games on a hobby basis since the old DOS-based Mode 13h graphics, after which he moved on to DirectDraw and finally Direct3D graphics. He received his master of science in computing at Curtin University, Perth, Australia, and has since been working in the Finnish game industry for 3 years. He is currently working as a Tools programmer at Remedy Entertainment in Finland. He’s also involved with a group of hobby game developers that goes by the name of BugFactory (www.bugfactory.fi), which has just released its first title, The Tales of Bingwood. For matters relating to this book, he can be contacted at [e-mail].

Product Details

• Paperback: 512 pages
• Publisher: Charles River Media; 1 edition (October 11, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1584504986
• ISBN-13: 978-1584504986
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 7.3 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #182,398 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent book, November 3, 2006

By	Adam Larson (Sturgeon Bay, WI United States) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

I had been working on a 2D RTS game for about 4 months, once I saw this book I was immediately interested. I've been reading the book for about a week now and all I can say is that it was well worth the money. The examples on the CD are excellent. The terrain rendering is done really well, most of my previous experience with books teaches you how to render a terrain and spread on texture over it. Carl Granberg takes this a lot farther by showing how to break the terrain up into subsets so they can be culled. He also shows several techniques using shaders and textures to create really cool looking terrains. The bad thing is that it is going to take me a long time to fully understand everything that is happening. I am so excited about this book that I just can put it down.

I've been making a goal of typing in the code he has and then modifying it in some way so I really understand what is happening. The main thing this book does is it builds a really good foundation for creating a full RTS game. Not to mention the book comes with prebuilt projects for Visual Studio which is something a lot of books leave out. The code is really well organized, and I've found very few errors in it. I have been working on my own framework for my games for a while, and have created several 2D games, but now it is time to incorporate what this book teaches so I can use it to create 3D games of any type. I am really looking forward to the chapter on creating the minimap.

12 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Code needs work, November 20, 2006

By	Jaime Moreno (Farmersville,CA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

I agree with the previous post.
Since most of the code is not included in the printed book which is actually pretty small it would be nice if the code actually compiled on a modern compiler like VS2005.
I didn't see anything in the book that actually mentioned what compiler or DX SDK the authors used to compile the code but it must've been VC 6 or earlier since the first problem with the code is using for loops with a variable that goes out of scope because of newer scope rules in VS2003 or higher.
Second problem is that most of the code is linked with directshow which is no longer included with DirectX SDK.
If the authors at least included some sort of contact information or webpage at least we could have a chance of getting this code to work but I wasn't able to find anything.
Maybe they could reply to this post.
The only reason I'm not giving the book less stars is that is actually concludes with a game demo is that is pretty damn good almost like age of empires 1 quality. And I've never seen a game programming book with a better quality demo and I own almost 100 or more!

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Not a bad book at all!, December 19, 2006

By	Cody "damda" (San Francisco, CA United States) - See all my reviews

This book covers most of the essentials topics in the RTS development.

Pro:
- the code is clear and easy to understand
- it covers topics such as fog of war, building units, simple AI, networking, and special effects
- the author is helpful and updates his code to reflect the Visual Studio 2005 version.
- a working demo at the end for you to see!

Con:
- the chapter that teaches you how to create a model 3Ds Max could have taken out and uses it for something else like more advanced AI topics.
- With the 470 pages of materials total, some of the explanation were briefly explained.

Overall, I think it's a good read book to show the really simple and basic features of most RTS games have.