Game Coding Complete

Quite frankly, this book kept me going in game programming when I was about to give up in frustration. I've bought many game programming books over the years, and two authors stand out... Mike McShaffry and Andre LaMothe. This book is incredibly valuable as a reference and as a guide. Quite honestly, I wonder who paid the guy who wrote the "Spotlight Review" to dis it so badly, or who he paid to get his opinion in the spotlight. But here's a test you can take for yourself... go to http://www.mcshaffry.com/GameCode and see how Mike McShaffry is *still* helping folks who've read his book, (or anyone who post on the site for that matter). He's still giving *free* advice on his book's forum, when most other authors won't even respond to an email. In response to those who objected to the author's "coding opinions":Yes, the guy has an opinon - he's entitled to. What do you expect from a book? "well, this is probably wrong, and I don't really know what I'm talking about, but the publisher paid me a lot of money so I have to say something." Give me a freaking break! OF COURSE the book is full of opinions - that's what books are! Just one caveat - it doesn't teach you C++. It assumes some experience, meaning you can take the coding advice and apply it to suit your own style. It does assume a basic level of professional ability in other words.

As someone who just has about 3 years of programming experience and is finishing up high school this year, I found this book to very helpful. I got Tricks of the Win Game Programming Gurus one year for Christmas, and although the later chapters such as AI, multithreading, and physics modelling were pretty good primers, all the DirectX material were essentially rehashes of the SDK docs. Just about every other game programming book that focused on DirectX had the same kind of characteristic...most of the DX material could just as easily be found in the SDK docs. But when I came across Game Coding Complete, I saw it had a lot of good, practical information; I couldn't put it down.I really liked the 2D chapter because it provided some good pointers on surface management (such as when and when not to restore surface data), explained how alpha blending works (and provided a surface-surface copy function that utilizes alpha blending), and lays out some of the basic functionality of a sprite class. For a newcomer to game programming, I really found these practical examples very helpful in at least getting ideas churning in my head as to how I want design my game.Chapter 7 on the whole initialization, main loop, and shutdown procedures were real insightful in my opinion. Mr. Mike begins by discussing what he thinks is a good initialization process. One of the earlier reviewers might dismiss this as just another opinion of the author, backed up by no fact, but, at least to me, the author has some pretty sound reasoning for suggesting what he suggests. An example would the case he makes for doing initializations of certain objects: instead of relying on a user calling some Init method and using the return value from it to test for success or failure, he suggests doing all initializations from within the constructor and throw an exception if an error occurs. I agree with the author that the resulting code looks cleaner and a bit more elegant than testing the return value for multiple Init method calls (of course, this is also partly a matter of personal preference, but what have you). As with many other chapters, this chapter provides some pretty useful code for you to use, such as a function that will calculate the CPU speed, another example showing how to ensure that only one instance of your game is loaded, and a fairly solid cooperative process manager.Chapter 8, which covers resource management, was pretty informative and made a convincing argument as to why you ought to use resource files rather than relying on all your images/sounds/what have you as individual files. Even though resource packing may seem a little daunting at first for a beginning game programmer, but in the long haul it's rather rewarding to be able to store all your resources in a few packed resource files. Mr. Mike uses the iPac program as an example for a resource packer, and although it is not freely available (I'm unaware of any free resource packing tool), through ima

I've read many books on game development. Frankly, most are poorly written collections of obsolete information. Game Coding Complete offers a wealth of current day to day useful information for coders and development managers alike. The title suggests it is just for coders, but all members of a development team could benefit from it. The sections on realistic scheduling and forecasting are some of the most honest I've ever seen. I've shown it to our director at our company and he has purchased several copies for general dissemination.

His book is targeted towards people who know C++ who want to know where they go from where they currently are to be able to make games (college students, for example). Essentially, this book supplements your C++ abilities as well as adding to the 'game' part of your 'game programmer' education. It covers specific concepts ranging from the various game components that programmers will need to understand such as 2D/3D graphics, Interface/Input Code, the main loop, resource management, and DirectX/Win32 programming. There is a lot of specific technical information in the book, but it also covers some broad concepts such as scheduling, testing, and an introduction to some advanced programming concepts such as smart pointers and scripting languages. The basis of the book is from an angle of professional experience as opposed to the mere hobby game developer. I would recommend this book to any programmer who wants to supplement their education towards game development as a serious career.