Customer Reviews

Real-Time Strategy Game Programming Using MS DIRECTX 6.0 (Wordware Game Developer's Library)

5 star:		(23)
4 star:		(12)
3 star:		(8)
2 star:		(10)
1 star:		(15)

 

 

This book covers some advanced topics not necessarily suitable for beginning Visual C++ programmers or avid real-time strategy game players looking to assemble a RTS game of their own based on this book. The author's insights into the gaming industry are very interesting, as are his comments on the development of Age of Empires, which I found fascinating.

I wrote an e-mail to the editor of WordWare Publishing, and she forwarded my message to Mickey Kawick, who then contacted me about the problems with the source code. The original code does NOT compile under Visual C++ 6! You must get an updated copy of the code that was included on the CD, or else you will have a frustrating time getting it to compile correctly. Mickey sent me an updated copy of the library for Visual C++ 6 and the samples compiled successfully. Since a large portion of my previous review was based on my frustration with the source code, I must amend my comments and say that the author was very kind and eager to help. If you have a hard time with the source code that came with the book, simply send Mickey Kawick a message. He responds to e-mail quickly and will do everything he can to help his readers. I'm giving this book a 5-star review to counter my previous 1-star review, to end up with an average of 3 stars.

I think you will find this book a great addition to your DirectX programming library. Keep in mind that no single volume can encompass the complexities of DirectX and teach the basics as well as advanced topics of game programming at the same time. There is simply too much information to cover.

I will state again, however, that the author is very friendly. After you purchase the book, send him a message, as I'm sure he will be pleased to hear from another reader.

I found some good things in this book i've searched for, so it's not all bad , the iso drawing routines, the raised tile code, but i was hoping the book would work up to developing a game engine and mabey even a small game... Like andre lamoth book's do.. No luck, the book throws all the code on the cd clumped together, some topic's arent even covered!! Like fine cordinate tile based scrolling, these are simple thing's that should of been covered.. I think alot of the book has too much code in it as well, seemed to be trying to fill pages??.. Most of this info is available on the net, or if your looking to learn DX and make a simple game in the process, get Game Programming for Dummies by Andre Lamoth, much much better book, as far as developing a game engine and learning DX in the process... Mickey if ya write another book, stick strickly to the topic make it all about RTS programming take the user's step by step and make a small game with them as you go, this is the best method i've seen on a rather difficult subject...Leave the the teaching of DX for another book...

I agree with everyone who said this book could have been much better. It is an average book until chapter 13, then it becomes a great book. If he had compressed some of the earlier chapters, he could have put in so much more. I would have given this book a rating of 4.5, but I rounded up.

What this book is: This is an advanced book. It has tons of code snippets, and more ideas on how to expand and personalize the code. It has a few chapters that could be shorten or taken out completely, namely the first 8 chapters, except chapter 5. These chapters have a lot of ideas, but if you are familiar with games and/or programming, you already know a lot of it.

Chapter 9 briefly describes DirectDraw, for more see a differant book (I have found Windows Game Programming for Dummies good), but it doesn't claim to be a DirectX tutorial either.

Chapter 10 has some good stuff on drawing lines and rectangles, not used too much in RTS games though.

Chapter 11 teaches font and text building, could have been better, but has a lot of good information in it.

Chapter 12 puts 10 and 11 together in a single class for you. Could have been shortened but oh well.

Chapter 13 describes how to load graphics and keep track of them.

Chapter 14 has some very good stuff on blitting graphics to the screen. He teaches LLE compression which is one of the best ways to blit to the screen(compiled sprites are still a bit faster).

Chapter 15 has a lot of good information on keeping track of animations.

In chapter 16 He does a very good job of teaching landscape. He has a lot of good code examples, and suggestions on how we could add more to it.

Chapter 17 is on the interface. Lots of good stuff in there.

Chapters 18 and 19 talk about creatures and pathing. Good stuff.

Chapter 20 is kind of an addon chapter. It describes DirectSound Overall, this is a very well written book by an author with a lot of experiance programming. I suggest buying it.

Things i would have liked to see: More on DirectX,especially DDraw and DInput. Networking.

Can you find some of this on the internet? Yes you can find some of it. I have found nothign on the internet that can compare to some of these chapters though. Buy it, its worth it.

i am working my way through this book, and find that although it has enough useful information for me not to regret buying it, there is a whole lot more that makes me wonder. mostly, i am quite happy with the code that is presented (other than it not compiling with dx6; there should be a website for the book with updated code). on the other hand, there are many opinions offered as fact which rub me the wrong way. statements like "i hate writing technical docs; if you have half a brain, you will too." just don't sit right. some people may well enjoy this; more power to them. another example in the description of pascal: "so why not? I'll tell you why: BEGIN and END." choosing a language based on typing out the basic block has got to be the worst way to choose a language, period. write a preprocessor if you don't want to write BEGIN/END, for god's sake.

anyway, too much ego, too much strange advice. i get a strong feeling that i have significantly more software engineering experience than the author, yet i am being lectured. but he does have way more game experience than i do. if the book would stick to discussing games, and talk more in terms of pros and cons and less in terms of what the author does and prefers, and less in terms of made-up statistics, i would be happier. i will still keep the book and finish it. of value, but i anxiously await a book by andre lamothe on this topic, or maybe an updated version with less ego, less lecturing, less dubious statistics, and more solidly useful advice and recommendations on how to implement specific game features.

This is an excellent introduction to the difficulties and concepts involved in the creation of RTS/RTT games. It is not a book on how to write games in DirectX. It is not a book about DirectX. The book's stated goal is to describe the process by which RTS/RTT games are created. The author accomplishes the goal with success. While several topics are covered in detail (the path finding section for example), most topics are left alone for further research by the reader as there are well known, well respected books covering these topics (tile sets, resources vs. expenditures, threat levels vs. defensive capabilities, etc.). If you want a book describing how to create a RTS/RTT game, this is a good book. If you need a book on how to code, go elsewhere.

The book is fairly out of date at the time I'm writing this, but I had hoped when I picked it up that it would have some valuable tips for writing games that are relatively timeless. The DirectX API has certainly changed a great deal from 6.0 to 9.0, but good game architecture doesn't change much.

The book was disappointing. At times it reads like a collection of disjointed articles written by an amateur programmer, and at other times it demonstrates a clear "been there, done that" presence.

Many aspects of the book are, simply, annoying. After briefly mentioning the Age of Empires scenario editor, the author writes in a separate note offset from the main text: "I worked on the scenario editor and it is largely the same as I programmed it to be, at least functionally." This self-important commentary does nothing to promote anyone's understanding of game development.

The author's programming skills are poor. Other reviewers have said this; no need to beat it into the ground. I get the sense the author was working on tools for the games he worked on, not the games themselves. This comes out in the text: good explanations of the game development process and tools used by animators and developers, but shaky descriptions of game architecture.

The choice of topics is a mix of good and bad. The early chapters on planning are very good, but then we get into a very long chapter on painfully optimizing line drawing, complete with a bad clipping algorithm ("Actually I wrote it myself without any help.") The chapter ends with, "but also realize that there isn't much line drawing in games these days", calling into question the purpose of spending so much time on it.

It does have a long chapter on pathfinding, which was nice to see.

most of you are reviewing the book and haven't even finished reading it much less half way!!

Please don't review a book until you finished the *entire* book.

I initially thought the book was great but after chapter 12 (almost half way), the book went downhill! He gives you no examples of how to use the code.... I spent many hours trying to figure out how to get the animation and tiling working..and was unsuccessful. Perhaps if he would have showed us a sample code or even a game at the end of the book showing us how to use the code then that would be a lot better.

my main criticism is not the directx coverage but his showing how the code works. He gives you bunch and bunch of codes and doesn't even explain it too well. He even doesn't show how you will use it.

to give you an example, imagine this. you are given 100 pages of code and only one-line explanation every 5 pages or so. the code is not *fully* implemented and you're expected to decipher the code and implement the complex code even if you don't know what the hell is going on.

like i said, if he would of given a sample game with source code that incorporates most of the concepts you learned in the entire book then i wouldn't be complaining.

I've had the book for a while now, and have completely gone through the material and CD. The book shares a lot of ideas of what makes a commercial RTS game tick, but most of the chapters seem to abruptly end with no explanation. Even index at the back of book the is poorly put together. For example, he plugs several html addresses throughout the book, but unless you keep track of them, you have to go through the entire book again looking for them!

It says the level of difficulty on the back of the book is for intermediate to advanced, and this seems true, since he uses pure C++, such as classes, overloaded operators, and structures called templates (which can seem very complex if you do not know how they work).

I had my first disappointment when I noticed how scarce and empty the CD was. There are absolutely no executables on this CD! No RTS demos, no RTS games, no test programs, nothing, except a simple alphabet editor program. You would think he would at least put the Age of Empires demo on the CD which he brags about throughout the entire book, but that doesn't happen. And the source code is like the book says, a library, bits of pieces of code, that the author does not even try to put together to create a simple sample executable for you.

If you are looking for demos, this is not the book to get. If you are looking for ideas only, this book might be worthy.

I read this book cover to cover in a couple of days and found some really useful information. I am currently working on a Real-Time Strategy game and already have an engine but this book has introduced me to some new ideas. It covers all the basics that anyone would need in order to understand how a RTS could be programmed.

There are a few problems though. Due to the fact that there is a large amount source code included, much of it is left unexplained. That's not so bad except for the fact that there are bugs that make decoding the purpose of the source code difficult.

I believe a test application that used all of the classes would have been helpful and probably helped the author to eleminate the bugs.

Other than that there is a lot of good stuff here.

I believe this is yet another of those 'game programming'books that builds an entire damn system from scratch, basically reworking tons of tired ideas and methods that have been covered to death in other even worse books, eg. how to plot a pixel, how to blit a bitmap, yadda, yadda.

Intermediate to advanced?

Not by a long shot. Absolute beginner.

Real-time strategy?

Some beginner stuff about tiles and pathing, easy to find on the web. I expected to see a fellow game developer share some gems, but found another hard-coded, simplistic, limited, and entirely unrealistic approach to producing a real game. This is retro...very...

No goodies on the CD either.

No Multiplayer or even single player for that matter discussion, except to fill a page about what you can do. I know what I can do, and want to do, and what I think is cool.

Stay away unless you're a beginner and don't want to type text into a search engine. But even that's stretching it.