Customer Reviews

Ultimate 3D Game Engine Design & Architecture (Charles River Media Game Development)

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This book does an OK job of walking through the basic anatomy of a game engine. You won't have anything too complex at the end of the day, because at only 500 pages, this allows only roughly 50 pages per chapter. Imagine trying to get everything you need to say about game physics in 50 pages! What was David Eberly thinking when he wrote that 800 page book on the subject? The book walks through the basics, adding features to the game engine as it goes, while never going very deep at all into any one subject. It's a good first book on what the skeleton of a modern game engine looks like, but you'll almost need a separate book to match the subject matter in each chapter in this book if you intend to put meat on those bones. On the plus side, the author uses standard C++, making the code easy to read and understand. Also, this is one of the few books on game engine design that mentions network programming issues and audio along with all of the 3D graphics issues. Another plus is that several of the chapters include student exercises, making it a good textbook choice in a class on basic game engine design. One odd thing the author does is that he continually uses UML diagrams in the book. Beginning game programmers need to focus on engine architecture and not get befuddled with software engineering issues. In general I thought the author's figures subtracted more than they added to the understanding of the book and its subject matter. The following is the table of contents:

Part 1 INTRODUCTION TO GAME ENGINES
1. Introduction to Game Engines - a "flyover" of the entire book including coding conventions used.
2. Engine Core - A discussion of data structures used, memory allocation and file I/O, and timing utilities - the basic workhorse elements of the engine.
3. Input, Sound and Networking - A long chapter that includes a look at the XBox 360 and XInput. OpenAL, which is a free API for 3D audio, along with XACT, which is Microsoft's cross-platform audio creation tool,are discussed for adding audio. Finally, networking with sockets is discussed.
Part 2 GRAPHICS AND ENVIRONMENTS
4. Rendering Systems - Includes a basic math library as well as a discussion of geometry primitives, shaders, and texturing.
5. Rendering Scenes and Scene Graphs - Describes the scene graph and how to work with it. Talks more about special effects than the more important subject of Level of Detail. Geometry sorting and culling is also discussed.
Part 3 PHYSICS, AI, AND SCRIPTING
6. Physics - Newtonian physics and games are discussed some, but there is a relatively long discussion on cloth simulation, which seems odd.
7. Artificial Intelligence - Barely touches the surface of the subject. It mentions path finding, finite state machines, and scripting, but not in near enough detail to be helpful.
8. Scripting - A very general chapter on this subject, and all too short.
PART 4 DEMOS
9. Game Demos - Discusses two demos using the engine - "Black Jack" and "The 3D Walkthrough Demo". A pretty good chapter.
PART 5 GAME OVER
10. Conclusions - A short and very general discussion of how the engine might be improved.
Appendix A. Additional Resources
Appendix B. Additional Tools
Appendix C. About the CD ROM

This is an OK first choice on understanding the basics of game engine design, just don't expect to walk away an expert after reading it.

I purchased this book in hopes of learning how a game engine worked; and while I did not come away with nothing, I did not gain much from this book.

The tutorials and ideas presented in the book are helpful, I must admit, but they are geared entirely around building someone else's engine - not a very intuitive or personal learning experience.

I do not recommend this book.

This book is not an instruction manual for a programming language. Rather it designed with the avid game designer enthusiast in mind. This book will cover briefly the code necessary to create game engine components. Moreover it will focus primarily on the structure of a game engine.

In other words, from a architectural point of view it will describe how the various components: Game Physics; System; Network; Interface, etc come together. Unlike most books who give broken snippets of code it brings attention to how these components interact with each other. Thus it is an essential book to add to any game library as it describes the critical necessities of all game engines. Again this book is not focussed on learning the code, you should already be familiar with classes, and data structures in both C++ and OpenGL.

This book simply shows you how to organize what you know into something powerful. I highly recommend this book. I keep it in my library and refer to it often.

At the heart of any complex computer game there's an engine that handles the actual stuff you see on the screen. This book is on programming such an engine. It isn't a beginners book. You should have a pretty good knowledge of programming in C++, some concept of file formats, graphics design, and so on.

The layout of the book is to build a working engine. It is neither the most simple, nor the most complex but is a solid foundation for understanding what such an engine entails and can form the foundation upon which the engine can be customized and expanded to fit your needs.

There are several reasons for reading this book:
You may want to build your own engine
You may want to work for an engine company
You may be thinking of using a commercially available engine and want to know more about what's in them.
Or whatever?

Gaming engines are among the most complex probrams being written today. This book should be viewed as a basic introduction to how they are written. The CD supplied with the book has several ancillary packages as well as the full source code for the engine being developed in the book.

The product never showed up and I was not contacted by the seller, although I did get a timely refund.

I was looking book on 3D engine and bought Ultimate 3D Game Engine Design & Architecture book. The primarily reason to buy that book was reviews. I was disappointed because it used OpenGL as a base for rendering. Why on earth I have to know OpenGL, why not from scratch? That was my goal to buy for engine. I do not want to look or watch picture of cubs, rather I would like to see how that can be done if I am developing an engine. This makes this book absolutely meaningless.