game development pro
I know it has been quite some time since the last update, and I thought I would be much further by now. Truth be told, I have been a little distracted the last few months with things totally tangential to graphics programming. In any case, I’ve had some motivation recently to continue on the 3D game engine and began doing further research and
OGRE 3D 1.7 Application Development Cookbook by Ilya Grinblat & Alex Peterson was, I guess, what it advertised itself as; a quick cookbook of recipes using OGRE. What is was not was a good inspection of the OGRE engine itself. Really what the book amounted to was a series of short chapters, each tackling a specific programming problem. While there is nothing wrong with
Blender Foundations: The Essential Guide to Learning Blender 2.6 by Roland Hess is one book I purchased nearly 2 years ago, started and never finished reading. Finally I decided to go back and finish it, as it’s been bugging me for a while. I have to say, this is a fine piece of text. It really takes you from knowing nothing about the software,
Right off the bat, I knew this was not going to be an in-depth resource. The book weighs in and a light 120 pages, though the title does say “getting started” so I least they were upfront about it. That said, I did find the book useful and feel it was a good intro text for people unfamiliar with UDK. Getting Started with
Mathematics for 3D Game Programming and Computer Graphics by Eric Lengyel is one of those books I have literally been eyeing for years and just never got around to reading. If you are not familiar, Eric Lengyel is the creator of the C4 Engine, and also the author of various game development books. He is well regarded in the community, so I assumed this
It’s been quite a while since my last 3D game engine post, but I haven’t forgot about it. In fact, I’ve been so heads-down in research I haven’t really done any development at all. I still feel like there are a few more books I will need to read to be better prepared, but I guess that will always be the case. So
The quest to become a master of 3D engines has brought me to another book, 3D Game Engine Programming by Stefan Zerbst (with a forward from the legendary Andre LaMothe). This is one of the first books I’ve read in a while that wasn’t available on the Kindle, and it’s out of print, but I managed to find a used copy of the
I was thoroughly impressed by Practical Rendering and Computation with Direct3D 11 by Jason Zink. Microsoft’s Direct3D API is certainly not for beginners, and neither is this book. But, at the same time, the author does a great job of explaining the material in a way that is approachable. The book assumes you are already comfortable with C++, and doesn’t hold your hand with
Frank Luna’s DirectX series has been the go to book for DirectX development for many years. Although there are other great resources, Luna’s writing is both informative and approachable. The book also covers a broad range of topics from the basic lighting, texturing, and blending, to terrain rendering, normal and displacement mapping, geometry and compute shaders and more. He even tackles some tough topics
In preparation for my 3D game engine, I have been trying to read all I can on 3D engine design and architecture. Although there are some good books out there, it’s very difficult to find a text that will walk you through everything you need to know. That said, 3D Game Engine Architecture: Engineering Real-Time Applications with Wild Magic by David H. Eberly gives it
