Start Your Engines: Developing Driving and Racing Games is a unique book that will teach readers everything they need to set up different types of road conditions, create opponents, set up road hazards, generate weather conditions, manage collisions, and much more. Not only will readers end up with the knowledge and tools they need to create driving and racing games, they get a full-featured, playable racing game that they can expand and customize with the skills learned in the book. The book shows readers how to develop live-action, interactive racing games with a unique three-tiered approach. Readers will start off by learning how to build a model for a racing game and then apply the physics to create a simple 2D (flat) game while learning how to create a variety of vehicles, race opponents, and terrain. In tier two, readers learn how to go from 2D to 3D with the same game concepts illustrating how to take the same basic idea for a game (and gameplay) and use modeling tips and tricks to begin customizing features. In the final tier, the author takes the concepts of 3D driving games to Mars with data modeled from real Mars terrain. Readers will create a dune buggy race on the planet of Mars and learn to create cool racing action at a bizarre and treacherous location.
Book Description
Editorial Reviews
From the Publisher
Driving and racing games are the most popular styles of games, and this book is the first hands-on programming guide that shows how to build and customize them. In Start Your Engines: Developing Driving and Racing Games, readers will learn all of the secrets and programming techniques for developing the most popular style of computer games. The book features the graphics, physics, AI, user interface, and 3D techniques used to create driving and racing games--from road conditions to collisions. Everything is presented in a unique step-by-step, hands-on, and construction-kit approach. Readers will actually be able to create games that they can play for hours of enjoyment.
From the Author
• Features tips and techniques from leading 3D game developers to create challenging driving and racing models. • Includes complete driving and racing game engine that is customizable. • Features a website that includes all the code and tools needed to create custom racing games. • Shows how to develop games that utilize varying driving conditions and challenging terrains. • Presents a full-featured dune buggy racing game that takes place on the unique terrain of Mars, with all the physics and AI background presented in an interactive, step-by-step learning format. • Provides a game engine and coding examples that are written in C++. • Shows the reader how to modify the game engine and tools presented.
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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Perhaps for an absolute beginner,
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This review is from: Start Your Engines: Developing Driving and Racing Games (Paperback)
As an avid hobby game programmer I bought this book in the hope of finding detailed descriptions of some concepts and ideas that go into development of racing games.
Reading through the description and even index of the book, I was excited about the topics that were covered in the book. I actually went as far as having the book overnighted as I was in the middle of development of a game and was at the point where I needed to refine thing such as AI, (pathfinding, collision avoidance, overtaking, etc.) and implement more realism in areas of map-model or model-model collision response, for example. I was hoping this book would shed some light on some techniques used in the field to implement items such as these efficiently. The book also has a section on generating terrains, which I hoped would teach me some new ideas for creating game maps / tracks. Unfortunately, I was disappointed at each turn. Reading through the chapter title and then the contents, left me disappointed at first, but eventually almost astonished, that the author could claim that the chapter teaches what the chapter title seems to imply. I was left with a feeling that the author introduces each concept to an absolute beginner, but never graduates into more advanced discussions that the advanced or even intermediate developer will be interested in. I was vaguely interested in the short section on waypoints (pathfinding) but I had already implemented a more visually appealing method in my game based on the same principles, without this prior knowledge. If you have any experience whatsoever in developing racing games, you will probably not find much content in this book that you couldn't figure out for yourself, or that is readily available elsewhere (for free). I am bitterly disappointed and I don't recommend it.
1.0 out of 5 stars
Lacking any good information,
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This review is from: Start Your Engines: Developing Driving and Racing Games (Paperback)
I'm sure the author is a great programmer and knows game development mechanics well, but this book is a superficial survey of too many topics. The car or racing specific sections such as AI or physics were way too much fluff. I bought this book for help with car physics, and I assumed this book would go into great detail about them, since...uh...that's one of the most important aspects of racing simulators. A third of the physics section is about how to fake car physics and the technique is retarded and obvious (i.e. move the car forward when the user presses a forward key, lol). I was super disappointed in the material. Physics for Game Programmers from Apress has a way better treatment of car physics.
Like I said, the author is probably great, but the editor should have allowed the author to focus on a few key areas that may be difficult for programmers new to the genre and its special problems, go into advanced detail, and forget the rest (which is 100% of the book as it is). tl:dr; stay away from this book, I wasted 0.65 + shipping on it
0 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Not worth the money.,
By
This review is from: Start Your Engines: Developing Driving and Racing Games (Paperback)
I have to agree with the first poster. This is not a good book.
It might have some useful information for complete beginners, but the quality of the code is quite simply bad and extremely amateurish. Peter
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