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

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Editorial Reviews

Product Description

Ultimate 3D Game Engine Design and Architecture teaches how to design and create a video game engine that can be used to create gaming applications on the PC. Written for beginning programmers, beginning game developers, and those aspiring to get into the fi eld, the book covers the various systems and processes that go into a complete game engine, with an emphasis on architecture issues. The book focuses on building a complete game engine, including graphics, physics, programming, audio, AI, data structures, memory management, and more. The sample engine is called the Building Blocks 3D Engine and it's designed to give you the basics of each system that you can build from to create your own engines and games. The technologies used include OpenGL, C++, and the Windows XP, MacOS X, and Linux operating systems. This cross-platform approach makes the information and techniques easy to apply to any type of project. The book is broken into five main parts, beginning with introductory material, the engine core, input, sound, and networking systems. Next comes graphics and environments, including the rendering system, the drawing of static models, and more advanced rendering topics such as level of detail, scene graphs, graphical effects, resource management, and scene management for environments in general. In the third part, Physics, AI, and Scripting are covered. The custom physics system is detailed, along with point masses and soft bodies. A variety of AI techniques are covered next, followed by scripting-- command, property, and compiled scripting. In the fourth part the engine is ready to use for the two demo applications you'll create-- a black jack game and a 3D walkthrough using a portal rendering system. In the final part, you'll review what you've done, what you could do, and what resources you might need in the future to enhance your game engine.

About the Author

Allen Sherrod, a DeVry University graduate in the Computer Information Systems program, has authored games and graphics related books including Ultimate Game Programming with DirectX (first and second editions), Ultimate 3D Game Engine Design & Architecture and Data Structures and Algorithms for Game Developers. Allen is also the host of www.UltimateGameProgramming.com. He has written for Game Developer magazine and Gamasutra.com, and is the founder of Re-Inventing Games & Graphics, Inc.

Product Details

• Paperback: 560 pages
• Publisher: Charles River Media; 1 edition (December 8, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1584504730
• ISBN-13: 978-1584504733
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 7.2 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.4 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #610,733 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

10 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars An OK first book on the subject of game engine design, February 6, 2007

By	calvinnme "Texan refugee" (Fredericksburg, Va) - See all my reviews (TOP 10 REVIEWER)

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.

4.0 out of 5 stars How game engine components come together, January 11, 2008

By	Michael Gonzalez - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

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.

2 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Sub-par and Somewhat Disappointing, September 8, 2007

By	Michael Warcholik (Myersville, MD USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

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.