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85 of 94 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Book's OK,but 3D Game Prog. All in 1 is a misleading Title.., June 4, 2004
I've just got and read most of this book and I'll try to give my personal opinions, but from what I hope it could be a somewhat objective point of view. For starters, I can say book is actually well written, but still, I'm just giving it 2 stars, because I was actually expecting something (much) more from it, and the book title was misleading to me... Here there's a summary of my opinions on it:
PROS:
Well Written
Comprehensive
Easy to read, even for Beginners
CONS:
Too Specific to the Torque Game Engine (the word Torque is actually repeated infinitely through the book; really, you'll get bored of reading it, after page 2)
Game programming fundamentals (transformations, math), theory (graphic pipeline) and libraries (DirectX and OpenGL) aren't covered at all
For REAL Beginners (it even teaches you how to use Paint Shop Pro and other tools which can be, in my opinion, easily self-thaught)
Repetitive sometimes
OVERALL:
As the heading says, calling this book 3D Game Programming All in One is misleading, whereas "Creating Games From Scratch w/ the Torque Engine" could have been a much more suitable title.
At any case, the book is well written and easy to follow (although repetitive at times), so go ahead and get it if you're a real beginner and you're interested in learning how to make a game from scratch, just from the designer (not programmer) point of view. You'll be taught some TORQUE, Paint Shop Pro, Ultraedit 32, Milkshape and other tools/game design issues, to make a complete game, at the end; even if not in depth, a bit of everything is covered, really.
It's probably not the book for you though, if you already know something about programming and especially if you expect to learn (like I did) some real-time rendering and game engine theory. For that matter, I can suggest you to get both "Real Time Rendering" by Akenine-Moller & Haines (more theoretical) and OpenGL Game Programming by Hawkins & Astle (more practical - here also you end up with a game, but you really get a grasp on how things work under the hood... definitely something you don't with the reviewed book).
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25 of 26 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Great Book... but...., October 7, 2005
This is an awesome, and essential, book if you plan on doing development with the Torque Game Engine (TGE). I had purchased my Indie Developer license (...) before discovering this book. The codebase for TGE is so huge (hundreds of files, thousands of classes, 100's of thousand lines of code). The online tutorials and Garage Game DOCs weren't really enough, I felt, to get started. So, I bought this book to get me started.
I will admit, the title of this book is a bit misleading. It does cover most aspects of 3d Game Programming (coding, textures, 3d modeling, sound, level design), but it is mostly dependent (except the artsy topics) on the TGE. Someone not expecting to work with TGE will be disappointed as all the code in the book is written in TorqueScript, not C++.
Another thing I will say about this book: The beginner-intermediate rating is a bit untrue. I would gear this book more towards the intermediate level. The 'introduction to programming' chapter is a good start, but really doesn't prepare an unexperienced programmer to the concepts of inheritance, scoping, program flow, among others, covered in the book.
Final Conclusion: Buy this book if you are working with TGE. Even if you're an experience TGE user, the references (function/class listings, etc) are extremely valuable. If you are not a TGE user, you should give a good look at it, as it is a great tool for an indie developer (...). If you're working on making your own engine from scratch, this book probably won't help you too much (there are probably better books on texture creation, 3d model creation, and sound that you could pick up instead... along with an actual 'engine development' book in C++).
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17 of 18 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Nice book on Torque... but, June 24, 2004
By A Customer
Torque badly needs a book like this, but I hope some of the faults in this work are addressed in a second edition.First, the good stuff. There is no book to offer a holistic overview of the mighty Torque Game Engine. This book has broken that sad deficiency. The author also writes at a level that will not alienate the experts overly as it offers the neophtes a leg up. The text is playful and fun, but not caked in silliness as I've found similar volumes seeking the same touch. As such, it is a true invitation to explore and learn how to use a complex and capable game engine that has suffered from a "by coders, for coders" darkness in the documentation department for years. However, as I work through the book, I find a considerable number of errors in the text/code and comments of the sample scripts in the book. There is a threaded post or two on the www.garagegames.com forums where Ken is patiently noting corrections offered by the enthusiastic readers, but one cannot help but feel that the barriers these mistakes will present true newbies are more considerable. The CD ROM is a misfire, in my opinion. One of Torque's greatest advantages over other game engines is that it support Linux and Mac in addition to Windows machines. But the CD ROM has setup.exe's and such whose function is nothing more involved that to extract compressed data from the CD and place it on your hard disk. This is just a sad mistake which alienates the subset of his audience who would most keenly benefit from having good documentation for such a gem as Torque in that they have so many fewer choices available to them. I strongly urge the publisher to replace such executable archives with plain ZIP files... at least for those containing only chapter "RESOURCES" materials. This would allow Torque to reach its greatest possible audience and put all platforms on a more even footing. I look forward to finishing the book and walking through its lessons, but the CD ROM has failed to expedite my quest.
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