Game Programming Gems by Mark Deloura
Published August 2000
List Price: $69.95, Your Amazon.com Price: $44.07
Charles River Media Price: $55.96
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Amazon Sales Rank: 201,065
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Summary A collection of game programming algorithms written by experts from the game industry. Covers all of the major techniques needed to develop a competitive game, from animation and artificial intelligence to Z-buffering, light maps, dark maps, bump maps, environment maps, and music and sound effects.
There are many game programming books out there written for beginning to intermediate programmers, but unfortunately, advanced information is harder to come by, being scattered across web sites, magazines, technical journals, and in small sections of non-game-specific books. Game Programming Gems finally provides a single place where you can find explanations of advanced techniques that are actually being used in modern games.
This book covers a broad range of topics and is written by many authors, so naturally, there will be some sections that are more useful to you than others. Overall, though, I think you'd be hard pressed to find a game programmer who wouldn't benefit in some way from this book.
My only minor complaint is that although the vast majority of the chapters include sample code, not many include a complete demo. Although you can easily create your own project to dump the sample code into, it would have been nice to be able to immediate launch a demo as I read each section.
That one shortcoming isn't enough to stop me from giving this a 5 star rating. I highly recommend it to any intermediate to advanced game programmer who wants to take it to the next level.
This book is one of the best books in my library of GameDev books. The book covers a wide range of subjects; some of them for the novice, and some of them for the more advanced programmers. I quite often still look back to this book for reference with some topics.
I was very pleased with this book. As others have mentioned, much of the material covered in the book can be found on the Internet, and this may disappoint many. However, after spending some quality time with this book, I must say it's definetly a good buy. First of all, the quality of the articles exceeds the free tutorials you find. They are just about the right length, they tell you all you need to know to understand the issue, the solutions and the methods involved, and this is explained in words and clear pseudocode. There is not much of the dreaded "dump-source-on-paper"-method that is abused all too much, yet the authors usually gives you good tips on implementation of the techniques. However, if you like source, there is a cd snuck into the book as well, with all the source on. Very nice indeed. If you are familiar with game programming, and seek to expand your knowledge into those more advanced topics, this is a VERY good choice. Note however, that it isn't a "course book"; it doesn't teach game programming, it's more of a cookbook of solutions and ideas for common problems involved in game programming. And it's a very good one. And I have never read a book that gave me more of a "coding itch" than this one...
This book is a great addition to any aspiring game developers library. It contains a great deal of useful information presented clearly and logically.
Don't think you can just find all this stuff on developer sites! You might be able to find a good deal of it but this is a profesionally edited book which far exceeds most of the tutorials on the net.
I think the fact that I havn't been able to read it yet is testament enough to how good this book is.. I was too busy to read it when I first got it, so a coworker borrowed it, and it's been circulating my coworkers ever since, several of whom are waiting on their copies too.
I think there's only 2 or 3 of the other programmers left now who havn't read it yet, so I should get a chance to read it myself soon, if I'm lucky.. :)
I really enjoyed this book. Finally something which covers some more advanced topics. I found some pretty useful pieces of code in there, but don't expect too much code ... just a few snippets here and there. The only reason this book got a 9 instead of a 10 are, that the diagrams are pretty crappy (the wavelet article for example) and (more importantly) that some of the more interesting things are just 'mentioned'. Like (again in the wavelet article) "you can use this to compress images" ... it would have been interesting to say "HOW".
Anyways, the wavelet article is just a bad example of an otherwise great book. I guess it just kinda struck me as odd, because I was searching for sources on wavelet compression at that time.
I translated it into Korean(translated version is published 15/12/2000 in South Korea), so I read it from cover to cover, never skipped a word(or a letter).
My conclusion is... "every single bit" in this book is great. Great book!
...and...
Hi ZegTern, I'm Korean too. Visit my site at http://gpgtudy.com. As name says, its for studying Game Programming Gems.
The closest thing to a printed game developer encyclopedia you will ever find.
For amateur game developers (and sometimes professionals) game developing is about designing a game in paper, figuring out how to put that in common algorithms and methods so you can program it, and then realising you have no idea where to start, how to solve a specific problem and much less how to put it all together. Many amateurs (sometimes professionals) find themselves so stuck they drop the project altogether, or waste months and months resourcing, theres is where this book springs into action.
The introduction of this book says it all, "Everyday we deal with problems that seem unsolvable and a deadline (thats the fun of game progrmming!) and then have to scan the web in search of a possible solution, but wouldnt it be great if we have a book we could search for the answers first?" that is the pure function of this book and it does it great.
Game programming gems is the closest thing to a troubleshooter book encyclopedia in game developing you may find, it covers almost any topic you may encounter problematic in game programming: fast math, network coding, resources, fast saves, AI, 3d pipelines, resource management, optimizations, bones, model skinning, camera control, pixel special effects and even coding styles, organization, design patterns and fast programming techniques are covered.
Many have said that this book is a "bunch of articles together" they might be, but they are so well sawn together, sometimes you will even miss when you change fron an author to another, even the writing style of some "fit" together and the subjects are divided in large chapters along the book covering *Math, *Coding, *Pixel effects, *AI, polygons , so you wont get lost easily.
Besides , If this articles are found in "any" place in the web, I have yet to found them, true some of they are, but I really dont think ALL of them are. And believe me without reading this, you are missing some very valuable info.
Amateurs might have the idea this book will teach them opengl, C or C++ and all the math involved in game programming, sorry but it wont, is not supposed to, the math level it uses (although not as advanced as other books) pressume you have knowledge of some vector math, matrices and a bit of calculus. Programming as well starts using templates and classes as soon as you get to the second article (not very newbie friendly). I recommend you read NEHE great opengl tutorials and some 3d math primer (and just a tad of calculus) before yo get here and you will be just fine with this reading.
However the book is not without its faults. Some important subjects like network coding are barely touched, other substantial knowledge like vector algebra, bezier and splines curves are not fully covered or barely mentioned and techniques that are extremely important in todays game programming like Roaming, bsp trees, portals, Hardware T&L and such are just not here.(guess we will have to look them up in the net, or wait for the next book.)
Another fault I found is web support, there is.. well.. none, The webpage the book suggest is "a place with lots of game programming info where blah, blah, blah" is basically a (not very good) ad page.. disapointing to say the least.
http://www.gameprogramminggems.com
On the other hand, the bundled CD has examples and source code from most (I think theres only 1 article without source code) of the articles in the book. It doesnt have eye popping demos but it has what you need to get your eye popping games started. (now thats a good philosophy!)
The book still does what it promises to do, it gives you a place to search for answers before anything else and most of the time finding them, and in an easy to read, fun and very practical
way, Just what I've been looking for!
Overall a great book! (with some minor faults fixable by reading any dev site gamedev perhaps? =) )
This book is an absolute must. It has sections on everything. The AI section alone makes buying this book worthwhile. Each topic is explained in full, and then has concrete working C++ samples. If you're looking for a solution to a problem, this is the first place to look.
Wonderful book. Unlike many Game programming books, it actually focuses on the "game" part, and not just the graphics. There is just enough there, but it also has sections on AI, Programming techinques, and any of the things that are essential to making games.
I am incredibly impressed with this book. This book covers everything from memory/resource management to real-time realistic terrain generation( giving a variety of techniques to do this as well ). Lens flares, octrees and the AI section is out of this world. What can I say, other than every game developer should have a copy of this on his/her shelf. And guess what, no WIN32 primer, whoo hoo!!! And in actual fact the book does it's best to make the text as platform independent as possible.
However, the beginning game programmer is likely to get nothing out of this book as it is targeted at intermediate/advanced programmers. But this is a good thing at least the book has targeted it's audience and doesn't try to be everything and the kitchen sink :) . Can't wait for Game Programming Gems 2.
Alot of books state "game programming" in their title but many times unfortunately the titles of the books should have been "direct X programming". Fortunately, "Game Programming Gems" is true to it's word it is a book focused primarily on games, so all you folks wanting to learn c/c++, openGL or Direct X then choose another book because this book will teach you techniques and algorithms specific to games. An excellent reference book if nothing else covering many topics across the board.
Well, I love this book.. They´ve placed a whole gamedev library in one book! Even if it doesn´t explain every part of gameprogramming, it´ll show you the technique to do it! Really worth it! BuY it NOW!
This book is THE definive resource for those who are just beyond beginning game programming and want to move on to stuff that is at least close to the techniques used in real games. The first three articles nail some issues I have with projects I tried or completed in the past.
The book is nicely divided into sections so you can flip to a specific topic that you need knowledge in or care about. After the first section, the book gets much more advanced and some of the math needs math above intro-level Calculus. This book is a must buy for anyone who is serious or even semi-serious about game programming.
Yea this book is a must have and a good complement to Lamothe's book... it has a lot of useful tools ( like profiling your game ) and endless algorithms like path finding and physics... Also alot on class design... get this one it is worth it...
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