A friend of mine took the BSP and Terrain Rendering classes. He liked the Terrain Class and Loved the BSP class. Said it was worth every penny.

I took the terrain and BSP courses.

The terrain course material is very good in my opinion, but the instructor was not around as much as I would have liked him to be. It was still worth the money though IMO.

The BSP course was fantastic! The material is great and the two instructors are incredibly dedicated, friendly, and most of all helpful. I''ve heard time and time again that this is the best course that GI offers and I agree.

As said above, I''ve heard bad things about the OpenGL course. Stay away from it...

As for the other courses, I''m not really sure. Ask for opinions on specific ones that you''re interested in and see what kind of reply you get.

I almost done with the Direct3D course. I''ve got a few DirectX books on the shelf, but you can''t talk to the author of a book you bought at amazon. Communicating directly with the instructor makes all the difference to me. For the price i think its well worth it as the cost of my directX books add up to more than the course.

I am on the 5th week of the Pathfinding class, and must say that I really enjoyed Brians writing style. Very well done!

Has anyone taken the ''Network Game Programming with DirectX 8'' course at the Game Institute? I can''t decide whether to take this course or buy the ''Multiplayer Game Programming'' book.

I have been leaning towards buying the book for it''s additional information about socket programming and other DirectX API''s like DirectAudio and DirectInput. But, I''ve also read some reviews complaining that more time needs to be spent with the directplay chapters. So if anyone has taken this course or read the book, I''d like your opinion.

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Now I would like to say that I have taken two Game Institute courses so I know how the format works. The first course I took was the Advanced BSP course which I highly recommend to anyone who''s interested in BSP trees or even getting started with 3d game programming (a little Direct3d knowledge is required). Over all, it was Excellent and I give 5 out of 5 stars . Great job Gary and Adam!

The other course I just took was the Direct3d course which I was kind of disappointed in. Here I would give it 3 out of 5 stars.

It''s not that it was bad, it''s just not as complete as the BSP course. There are way to many assumptions and not enough explanation in the textbook about how the eiSDK code works. Sure the code is there to look at but it''s not exactly the easiest thing to trace thru, especially for someone with only C++ programming experience. A lot of this stuff is still new to me, such as loading ZCB files. With so many c++ classes interacting with other classes it becomes confusing to sift thru just to find out how something works. I think if they explain more on how eiSDK works in the textbook and put some more comments in the code this will turn out to be a 5 out of 5 star course. On a side note, I will say I have learned a lot from studied the eiSDK, which is what it''s all about. And from what I''ve gathering about the code, I think the framework is well thought out once you begin to see how everything works.