Focus On 3D Terrain Programming by Trent Polack
Published December 2002
List Price: $29.99, Your Amazon.com Price: $22.79
Course Technology PTR Price: $23.99
Average rating:
Amazon Sales Rank: 285,265
Summary Introduces readers to programming 3D terrain engines. Begins with the simplest terrain engine possible and works its way up to one of the most complex and useful terrain engines around.
Terrain rendering has become an increasingly hot topic as more and more games have included outdoor environments. There are many different ways to approach terrain rendering, and the articles covering these methods are scattered over various websites, journals, conference proceedings, etc. This book takes a number of the most popular of these methods and presents them in a clear, easy to understand way that is be easily accessible to programmers who are new to the topic of terrain programming.
The methods covered include geomipmapping, quadtree-based terrain rendering, and ROAM - and it should be pointed out that the book also includes coverage of the ROAM 2 algorithm, which has not been officially published yet by its creator. Additional topics covered include simple collision detection, sky boxes and sky domes, and special effects such as water, particle systems, and fog. All of the topics covered are explained well, with a good mix of implementation and explanation.
The author's writing style may be a bit too conversational at times, and the material covered is mostly available from other sources, but overall, this book makes for a great introduction to terrain rendering that I'd recommend to anyone interested in the topic.
Great book with a useful cd.
With it you can go a long way into writing a good terrain engine.
It was written by a teenager (ouch ! They know more than us pro's ?!) and so is full of teenager type phrases:
"Awesome", "funky", "cool !" but as adults and pro's we're supposed to encourage young people not bully them for knowing more than us !
You can go through it in a full day or so but you'll have to refer to the code itself to make proper sense of it all as the author admits he's not too hot at maths. A minor gripe really as it keeps the book size down and means you can plough through the book and get a full understanding of all the topics really quickly.
Good size book, easy to read and be please be nicer to teenagers !
All of the above is true; so why only half a star? Because if, like me, you buy the PDF version of the book then you can't get the source code - without which it's all theory as the text simply refers you to the game files.
Note, you can get a copy of the CD from the publishers website, but that simply isn't good enough.
Very good book, covered everything I needed from it (and a little bit more in the form of Particle Systems and Vertex Based Fog). It only gets 4 stars because certain parts were not explained all to well if at all, and I had to re-write most of the code just because I didn't like how it was written, this might not bother some people though.
In my previous reviews of Premier (formerly Prima) Press’ titles in their Game Development Series, I had one chief complaint – the size of the books. The books often covered rather narrow subjects, but they were padded to enormous size with a lot of “extras” that have already been better covered in other books. Hence the series consisted largely of 700-page books that retailed for as much as $60. This can certainly be forgiven for a title that covers a broad subject like OpenGL Game Programming, but you just know that a 700-page book on writing isometric-perspective games is doing a lot of padding.
Thankfully, Premier has addressed my concerns with their new “Focus On” series. This is a sub-series of books that better fit the narrow subjects to which they’re written, both in page-count and price. They average 200 pages and cost around $30, which makes the purchasing decision much less stressful, at least for me.
Focus on 3D Terrain Programming is a good example of the series. It’s a fairly narrow topic and is sized and priced accordingly. It doesn’t pretend to be a DirectX tutorial or a tutorial of any kind, for that matter. It’s a book on how to draw, light, and walk realistic-looking 3D terrain, and that’s it. It predictably starts off with the simple stuff, drawing a 3D mesh from a heightmap. Chapters 3-4 cover texturing and lighting terrains realistically. Chapters 5-7 cover more advanced algorithms like ROAM, which was used for the game Treadmarks, a game for which the author has a significant soft spot. The algorithms are well-illustrated and easy to follow, even for an old die-hard 2D curmudgeon like myself.
Further kudos to the author for actually explaining the algorithms rather than just pasting in ten pages of example source code. When explaining how something abstract like a code algorithm works, a picture truly is worth a thousand words. Too many books (including many Premier titles) take the easy way out by just posting a bunch of code and hoping that the reader can figure out the technique. Focus on 3D Terrain Programming is thankfully light on pasted-in code and heavy on explanation.
The pack-in CD is also quite good, containing all of the code examples along with executable versions of all of the examples so that you can see an example work without having to drag out your compiler. I’ve got too many books where the CD includes all of the example source code, but for some reason fails to include the executables or, in some cases, the project files.
In the way of complaints, I have to cite the author’s age. While I was hoping not to need to point out that the book was written by a high-school kid, the repeated use of "cool" and "awesome" in describing virtually everything makes it hard not to. Also, while the book covers several terrain algorithms, some are just mentioned by name. A couple are covered in third-party articles on the CD, but some weren’t. Finally, somebody didn’t take a very close look at how the some of the pictures would look in black & white, because many of the photos of example textures just look like burnt mud.
And a final note. All of the examples are done using OpenGL. While I find this an understandable choice, given that it at least gives the appearance of being cross-platform, some may have preferred Direct3D examples. Far as I can tell, the author’s not using any OpenGL features that are so advanced that they couldn’t be done as well with Direct3D.
In conclusion, Premier finally stopped trying to make all of the books in their Game Development Series be all things to all people. Books like Focus on 3D Terrain Programming that cover a single subject are given the small and inexpensive treatment they deserve. It’s not a perfect book, but if you have a need to draw 3D terrain in your game, it’s a good place to go.
Southwest Gaming Expo
Course Technology PTR
Amazon.com
Amazon.co.uk
Amazon.ca
Amazon.de
Amazon.fr