Real Time Rendering Tricks and Techniques in DirectX
by Kelly Dempski

Special Effects Game Programming with DirectX 8.0
by Mason McCuskey

There's a "Books" here at gamedev, I'll go ahead and link it here for you:
Click here.

Quote:Original post by BrentBarrett
Real Time Rendering Tricks and Techniques in DirectX
by Kelly Dempski

Special Effects Game Programming with DirectX 8.0
by Mason McCuskey

There's a "Books" here at gamedev, I'll go ahead and link it here for you:
Click here.

The McCuskey one isn't brilliant. He does a very good advanced, scriptable particle system but that is about all I took from it. He also has a horrible, compact coding style and I found it very hard to read. Ever heard of white space, Mason? That's what I say.

Quote:Original post by __Daedalus__
The McCuskey one isn't brilliant. He does a very good advanced, scriptable particle system but that is about all I took from it. He also has a horrible, compact coding style and I found it very hard to read. Ever heard of white space, Mason? That's what I say.

Personally, I liked that book very much. I guess everyone has different tastes. He explains a good number of advanced concepts very well. He also explains many tricks that game programmers use that aren't really covered in other books.

I never really used the code very much. I mainly used the book for the concepts but he has a very simple and flexible quaternion-based camera system that I still use for demos even professionally. He also covers a lot of the game logic necessary to do many of the special effects out there today; something a pure rendering book won't always go over.

I also have Real-Time Rendering Tricks and Techniques. This is another excellent book. I think these two books go very well together. You can look at Real-Time Rendering Tricks and Techniques as a book that covers all of the things that Special Effects didn't have time to go over. The two of these together will give you a wide area of knowledge in both 3D game programming as well as DirectX.

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