Advanced 3-D Game Programming [With CDROM]

I think the reviewers on this board are focusing on the authors age / "professional experiance" far too much. The content in the book is what matters. And in my opinion this book is perfect for those who are beginning 3d programming. If you don't know what a matrix is, or what a texel is then you NEED this book. In fact this book contains the entire subject matter of my college level Real Time 3d class.The only down side to the book is that it honestly doesn't cover Direct 3d as well as I believe it should. The author spent too much time covering the basic information that 3d game programmers need to know rather than explaining the Direct 3d API.However this is a good thing! Far too many new programmers think they can purchase a single book and program the next quake with out knowing important information on the basics of 3d, calc, and Linear Algebra. This book exceeds in showing off those basics. Once the reader has completed this book they should be able to pick up the direct x documentation and understand what's going on. Isn't that the whole point?So if you've just finished tutoring your self on 2d game programming, or wish to start 3d game programming with out any prior experiance this book is a must have!However if you have completed some 3d game projects, used OpenGL, or another 3d API and are looking to expand your knowledge check out "Real Time Rendering", or "3d Game Engine Design" for they are more suited for your needs.

If you want to lean programming games with DirectX 7.0 or 7.0a this is definitly the book for you! It covers mostly Direct3D and you'll need to know how to program C++. It gives a short overview of a Win32 API program so you might want to buy "Programming Windows, the definitive guide to the Win32 API" by Microsoft press (ISBN: 157231995x) which is also recomended by Adrian Perez.You'll learn how DirectDraw, DirectInput and DirectSound works and how thier structured, How artificial inteligence works using Neural networks. There is also some stuff about BSP trees work and can speed up rendering. How to use the UDP/IP protocol can be used for internet/network play, how multithreading works and of cource there is a lot about 3D, from the principles and math required to how to use Direct3D to put the theory in practice.Overall, for me, this has been the best

This Book is great. As a 14 yr old game developer, this helped alot.

I have been developing 3D Graphics for almost 2 years now and for all the knowledge I've allocated is explained as a whole in this book. I like this book mainly because it's not old in content but its fairly new and covers the latest and greatest techniques in 3D graphics today. The two famous techniques I've found are PVS and Portal Rendering. Adrian doesn't go into detail on these subjects yet he explains enough to get your coding running properly. My favorite subject in this book is about Radiosity Lighting. Thus another subject that many authors run away from mainly because of its complexity to implement the algorithm properly. The Direct X stuff is fine and D3D is up to date and is explained in detail. Adrian constantly reminds me of Andre Lamothe hehe... but maybe it's the name thing.... Andre was the pioneer I think in writing good books like these. Dan Royer is a good friend too. It doesn't cover everything in true detail but give a good overview of almost everything. This book is a must have so please go out and purchase it.

This book in my opinion is the best Direct3D programming book on the market. It starts off making a very nice win32 framework. Once thats out of the way it gives you class wrappers for DInput, Ddraw, and DSound. Next it hits 3D math, and provides nice object oriented data types representing the 3D primitives we use in 3D programming. Next is a good intro to AI programming and networking. Finally in chap. 6 we initialize D3D and make a custom model format. Chapter 7 and 8 provide a well detailed explanation of 3D algorithms and texture mapping. Chapter 9 explains portal systems very well. The main thing i liked about this book was the object oriented approach. It makes it very easy to modify the framework the author gives. Also the portal chapter was very helpful, and the BSP class and explanation was very informative. I highly recommend this book.