Customer Reviews

Windows Game Programming with Visual Basic and DirectX

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

I have mixed feelings about this book. I am an intermediate level game programmer but I have relatively little experience with Direct3D. I think it is great to finally see a book that deals with the use of Direct3D for VB. My largest complaint about this book is that it makes extensive use of a $600 3D graphics tool called TrueSpace. It comes with a "Trial" version so I figured I would be able to use it for 30 days or something to see if it was worth buying, but the trial version doesn't even let you save files. Without the ability to save the files to load into my game applications, I can not properly evaluate the software. So the author needs to be more clear that the purchase of some very expensive software is required to fully utilize the book. The book is also a little limited in scope in that it focuses on the development of only one game (an underwater 3D sim mall). I also found the capabilities of the code presented rather week. I have achieved much higher frame rates using my own graphics engine with VB and WIN API calls. I understand that non-optimized code is often used for clarity, but it is simply too inefficient for real game programming. With all that said, I still learned a lot in reading this book, and I would recommend buying it if you are an intermediate level VB game programmer. Just don't expect to write the next Quake any time soon.

What a disappointment.

I was expecting a lot more from this book. The chapters have no logical flow based on game development. The author seems to have little or no experience writing or designing a game (before you complain, I have 7 retail titles published), and merely wrote this book to add to his collection of previous works. The whole thing comes across as a business application, masquerading as a game.

Very few of the samples included on the CD-ROM actually work well, and can be crashed easily. Performance of the code is lackluster, with frame rates 1/10th of what is capable with VB and DirectX.

Readers would be better off gaining knowledge from several excellent web sites devoted to DirectX development with Visual Basic.

Usually I wait for others to review a book before making my purchase. Well, this time I didn't and wish that I did. I expected a lot more from this book than what was offered. Since there are few VB game programming books available I try to check each one out. I choose this book purely on the authors name. Instead of exploring different aspects of game programming with VB and Direct X, the entire book is about one game, a sim game based on Sim City. If I would have known this from the start I wouldn't have bought it. So if you are looking to learn how to incorporate Direct X into your VB games look elsewhere. If you want to learn how to program a Sim game then check this book out.

I just bought this book, and it is actually quite helpful. I have never written a game, but am fairly experienced in VB6. I wanted to explore DirectX programming, and this is a good start. As far as other reviews complaining about having to use Truespace, you can also use 3dStudio Max, get the file exporter from Microsoft and you can can create .x files with that. Should also work with Maya, and you can get that for free. I thought the code was well organized, and on my 1.2 ghz machine, I get excellant frame rates. I only wish there was more detail about Direct3d, but still, enough here to get started. I recommend this book if you are an intermediate level VB programmer, and need some ideas on how to program games, if you are new to VB, probably not the best book to get.

Very dissapointed. The help file of the SDK (8.0) makes a better job at explaining the principles. I found the book evasive as far as DirectX is concerned. Third part tools discussion make the essence of the book. May be of some interest about writing a game, but *almost* irrelevant about DirectX. You don't want consider this book if you already know some very basic DirectX stuff.

I expected a thorough explanation of DirectX when I bought this book. I want to know what CLIPPER is, why we have to use it...etc. There's so much cryptic terms to learn in DirectX - DDSCAPS_OFFSCREENPLAIN, DDSCAPS_PRIMARYSURFACE, DDSCL_ALLOWMODEX, BltFast, Blt just to name a few. The book does explain how to set up DirectX so that we can use Direct3D etc, but it does a poor job on explaining them succinctly, instead it spends too much time on third-party graphics tools. The explanation on the 3D coordinate space, vertex, points etc is very short.
The explanation on the logic of the game is very boring, to be objective, it doesn't help me much. Overall, I'm disappointed.

I bought the book hoping to gain some knowledge of 3D graphics programming. Since I am only starting out programming I fealt it better to learn in a language that's easy to follow.
The book does seem to describe some aspects of 3D programming quite well. However, as I read more of the book I couldn't help thinking I'd have been better off wading through a book on C++ game programing. I realise that the authur is trying to simplify the process, but there doesn't actually seem to be much REAL information.
The books usefullness wasn't helped by the fact that I couldn't get the examples to run. I understand that it is not the authurs responsibility to ensure that your hardware and software are set up correctly. But when the entire process of learning depends on seeing the code in action, you'd have thought there'd be a section on troubleshooting at the very least. I can't help feeling that the code is contrived to produce (on most machines) a fancy game, without any of the real programming necesary for a half-decent game.
I'd possibly recommend this book to people with compatible systems (whatever that is neither of mine will run the game). who want to play with a (from what I can tell) nifty little game.
To anyone else I'd say - for games, learn C/C++.

Wayne S. Freeze, Windows Game Programming with Visual Basic and DirectX (Que, 2002)

First and foremost, a warning. Freeze's book, despite its publication date, deals exclusively in Visual Basic 6. If you're using VB.NET, a lot of this stuff is going to cause you to wonder what on earth Freeze is on about. I strongly suggest reading Keith Sink's DirectX 8 and Visual Basic Development in conjunction with this, and asking a lot of questions on a lot of VB.NET tech support mailing lists. (Microsoft's documentation on how to go from VB6-VB.NET with DirectX is not nonexistent, but it is such that nonexistent would have been better.) Given that .NET had already been in prerelease for over a year by this book's publication, one would think that, at the very least, the publisher would have made it very plain somewhere on the cover that the book dealt in a technology that's not compatible with the next generation of the language. An unforgivable oversight, especially if you happen to spend the full retail price for a copy of this book.

That aside, Freeze's book is quite good in the way it introduces the reader to the new, and largely esoteric, combination of Visual Basic and DirectX (the latter technology was exclusively the realm of C++ programmers until 2001, when DX8 began to include VB wrappers). He's not afraid to use repetition to get his point across, and he does so in a laid-back atmosphere that's quite different from what one sees in most how-to programming manuals.

Freeze teaches the VB/DX intersection through the programming of a SimCity-style games called SwimMall, which is in and of itself at least worth a discounted copy of the book. Needless to say it's not a commercial-quality game, as one would expect from a single person programming such a thing while under the pressure of a book deadline. But the routines and ideas therein are just the thing to spark the imaginations of novice game programmers; no matter what genre a person is working in, there are certainly routines here that will help a programmer out in various ways. Much of this code is easily ported to any other type of game framework.

Very good stuff. Just remember the admonition in the first paragraph if you're working with .NET and haven't used VB before. (Actually, I recommend Sink in conjunction with this book anyway; the atmospheres of the two are a pleasant mesh, and when you can't find a niggling piece of information you need in one, the other is sure to have it.) *** ½

"Windows Game Programming with Visual Basic and DirectX" is one of the best sources for game programming with Visual Basic. It is rare to find a nice VB book these days, and this one covers everything to make a sim kinda game. you make a mall and try to run it, teaching you how to Program games on the way. This is a must have for any Game programmer that wants to use VB for thair game.

In the context of showing you how to make a simulation game, this book shows you how to load meshes from outside sources like 3dsmax. What's more it's done simply and clearly explained. It also shows how to make your game scriptable and is a very good example of how to make your code object orientated. Every thing talked about in the book while shown in the use of a simulation game would apply to any other type of game with a little creative thinking. This book is a must, the price seals the deal.

However, it's not without its faults. One thing to remember though is that you will need to refer to the cd, because the author cut the size of the book by only showing the relevant portions of the code to the topic in the book not the whole picture. However since the code makes use of a debug log you can't run the code from off a cd. You need to copy it to a space on your hard drive first and then open it in vb and run it. Lastly the modeling package featured in the book seems to be another me too product.