Customer Reviews

Windows 95 Game Developers Guide Using the Game Sdk

5 star:		(0)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

As is often a problem with books from SAMS publishing this book contains too much talk and to little serious information. In other words - if you are serious buy Addison-Wesley or Prentice-Hall books - do not buy SAMS!

The book attempt to do two things at once: 1. To introduce gaming to the amateur. 2. To introduce DirectX 1.0 (presently at version 7.0)

For the amateur the book is not appropriate, because it is assumed that the reader knows MFC and windows programming beforehand. It is not good for the professional either, because a lot of pages is used telling how to use painting and sound utilities that come for free. Everybody knows that.

It *does* introduce directX, but only fairly briefly and in conjunction with lengthly code examples and a code library supplied in the book. Much of the directX introduction is merely a alphabetical listing of API functions that is just as clearly written in the on-line help.

I *could* run the code examples (at least those that I tried), although this required some minor editing. I ran them under DirectX using Watcom 11.0. It is not fair to expect code to compile directly out of a book as C++ is not entirely portable. All non-portable code should have been left out of the book, though.

The code doesn't run well and the games only run full-screen, 8 bit. Don't buy this book.

This book does not explain the basics, like what files to include, and is vague on where to put your code. If you have ever gone through the code generated by AppWizard, you know this could be very daunting. For programmers who are very familiar with DirectX implementation, I would recommend it. If you are not, keep looking.

I found the book to be helpful for programming in sdk, but it is outdated. The code does not work unless you use direct 2.0 or less. With a little practice,which helps,you can get everything to work. I would not recommend for 1st timers.

This book was designed for use with DirectX 1.0 (GameSDK), not the later versions. Any attempt to get the sample code to work with DirectX 2.0 or higher leads to miserable results. Like many other people, I could not get the samples from the CD to work, and when they did compile they GPF'd. The book does, however, give a good foundation for game programming and has a decent section on sound and music. A more updated version, with better compatibility, would be nice.

I am a developer that has about 3 game programming books, 5 graphic books and about 10 other programming books. Out of all of them the only one I found that covered playing MIDI files was this book. This was a godsend. The class, covered in chapter 17, is called CMIDIStream. Playing a midi file seems to be horribly complex even with windows multimedia functions. This book provides you a class and enough documentation to get you started to put midi playing functionality into your game. The class itself isn't wonderfully implimented, but its a START and at least it works. Also, something that really threw me of when trying to use it was that midi files need to be converted into MSU format by the MID2STRM program provided at www.microsoft.com. (do a search). Otherwise the book is ok reading material, although I only use it as reference material

This book doesn't teach about directx. Rather, it presents a high-level class library that encapsulates it. The class library looked neat, until I tried recompiling it: i got a number of errors under Visual C++ 4.2. When I removed it and reloaded 4.0, and tried then, the library _did_ recompile. Then, I compiled a sample program, and found it GP-faulting! This was code right out of the book, no changes.

If this book taught about directx, it would still be useful, even if the code didn't work properly. But it isn't about directx. It's about a class library that sits atop directx, and which is too buggy for use. Very disappointing