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(38 reviews)
Author: Visit Amazon's Mike McShaffry Page
ISBN : 1133776574
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Format: PDF, EPUB
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Review
PART I: GAME PROGRAMMING FUNDAMENTALS. 1. What is Game Programming Really Like?. 2. What's in a Game?. 3. Coding Tidbits and Style That Will Save You. 4. Building Your Game. PART II: GET YOUR GAME RUNNING. 5. Game Initialization and Shutdown. 6. Controlling the Main Loop. 7. Loading and Caching Game Data. 8. Programming Input Devices. 9. User Interface Programming. PART III: CORE GAME TECHNIQUES. 10. Game Event Management. 11. Scripting with Lua. 12. Game Audio. 13. 3D Basics. 14. 3D Scenes. 15. Collision and Simple Physics. 16. Network Programming Primer. PART IV: ADVANCED TOPICS AND BRINGING IT ALL TOGETHER. 17. An Introduction to Game AI. 18. Introduction to Multiprogramming. 19. A Game of Teapot Wars!. 20. A Simple Game Editor in C#. 21. Debugging Your Game. 22. Driving to the Finish.
About the Author
Mike McShaffry, aka "Mr. Mike," began programming games as soon as he could tap a keyboard. After graduating from the University of Houston, he worked for Warren Spector and Richard Garriott, aka "Lord British," at Origin Systems on Martian Dreams, Ultima VII: The Black Gate, Ultima VIII: Pagan, Ultima IX: Ascension, and Ultima Online. Seven years later he formed his first company, Tornado Alley. Mike later accepted a position at Glass Eye Entertainment, working for his friend Monty Kerr, where he produced Microsoft Casino. Ten months later, Monty asked Mike and his newly assembled team to start their own company, called Compulsive Development, which would work exclusively with Microsoft on casual casino and card games. Mike served as the Head of Studio, and together with the rest of the Compulsive folks, produced three more casual titles for Microsoft until August 2002. Compulsive was acquired by Glass Eye Entertainment to continue work on Glass Eye's growing online casual games business. Mike was later recruited to start an Austin studio for Maryland-based Breakaway Games. Mike is currently self-employed, helping teams build a positive, creative and energetic environment so they can do what they do best--make great games.
David "Rez" Graham is a self-taught programmer who has been writing games in his basement since 1996. In 2005, he landed a programming job at Super-Ego Games where he worked on mini-games and AI for Barbie Diaries: High School Mystery for the PC. He also worked on a comedy adventure game called RatRace for the PlayStation 3. In 2008, Rez went to work for Planet Moon and worked on Brain Quest for the Game Boy DS and Drawn to Life: The Next Chapter for the Wii. Rez went to PlayFirst in 2010 where he worked on Diner Dash: Grillin' Green for the iPad and was the lead engineer for Wedding Dash for the iPhone 4. Rez currently works at Electronic Arts as an AI programmer for the Sims division. He has shipped two titles there, which include The Sims Medieval and the Pirates & Nobles Adventure Pack. He is currently the lead AI programmer for an upcoming Sims title.
Direct download links available for Free Game Coding Complete, Fourth Edition
- Paperback: 960 pages
- Publisher: Cengage Learning PTR; 4 edition (March 5, 2012)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 1133776574
- ISBN-13: 978-1133776574
- Product Dimensions: 2.1 x 7.4 x 9 inches
- Shipping Weight: 2.1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
Free Game Coding Complete, Fourth Edition
I have owned three versions of Game Coding Complete (2,3 and now 4) and have always been impressed by the material found in the book that is neglected in nearly every other text of its nature. While many books focus strictly on a specific topic related to game development, such as a rendering API, physics engines or AI, GCC delves into topics that are not as easily researched either in books or online.
While there are a few requisite chapters about rendering, which uses the newest version of DirectX, they are less about teaching you how to use the API and more about how to structure a renderer for a game engine. This is a topic that is all to often overlooked except in game engine books, many of which are of questionable quality. Fortunately, GCC is written in a far more structured manner and these chapters, as well as all of the others, don't feel as though the authors wrote the first solution that came into their minds and the result is a much higher quality book.
While the first few chapters are basic introductions and a bit of design theory, the heart of the book begins in chapter 5. What follows is nearly twenty chapters of topics discussed with a fair amount of detail on subjects that are often missed entirely. This part of the books begins with a lengthly discussion on how to properly start up and shut down your game or game engine. While many books choose to miss any kind of discussion on how to do this in an elegant way, GCC gives it the attention it deserves and it may just be the best chapter in the entire book. Chapters on game actors, input devices (including game pads as well as keyboards/mice) and scripting have seen extensive rewrites from the third edition in order to modernize the code.
Being a self taught game programmer myself I have quite a tall pile of books about the subject, including the previous edition by this author. Out of all the books out there trying to teach how to write a game and a game engine right, this one I feel deliver the knowledge the best out of all I tried so far, with its predecessor being right behind it.
While other books usually fall short, focusing mostly on a single element such as the game engine or the game only, this book takes you step by step through the process of creating the game engine using practical approaches from modern (2012) game industry applications, then follows up with creating a whole simple yet fun game and finishes with an editor for the game you just built. The whole process leaves you with enough knowledge to tackle your own game development with a set of tools to start with.
The chapters are set in order to teach you how to set up each piece of the engine from starting your windows application to reading user input, managing memory, rendering graphics, playing audio and even networking. Personally I enjoyed chapter 6 a lot where the authors explain Component based Actor architecture which feels to be a very simple and instinctive way to describe your in-game entities/actors. By the end of the chapter you should know how to create easy to use XMLs for defining your game objects. (Personally I added a binary read/write conversion for those classes for performance once game editing is done)
Another chapter I enjoyed a lot was chapter 18 "An Introduction to Game AI" where Rez explains many different AI systems all which the reader can choose from to use for specific game implementations, using a lot of examples from previous games he worked on such as The Sims Medieval .