game development pro
In the past week I’ve made some major breakthroughs with the performance on Degine, my custom OpenGL / WebGL 3D engine. Did a lot of reading on performance and optimization guides, like on the ARM and Nvidia websites, specifically for OpenGL ES3 performance on mobile. Also integrated a new lighting system, that supports up to 8 dynamic lights at once (with 1 including
I spent the last two days adding GPU compressed texture support to Degine, my custom OpenGL / WebGL 3D engine. I tried a few formats, but ended up going with ASTC, since it was the only one that appears to be supported on both desktop and web. While it’s not a massive difference, it was enough to get the Amazon Kindle Fire HD
Build your own 2D Game Engine is a pretty straight-forward book for what can usually be a fairly complex topic. Out of the game engine books I’ve read (mostly for 3D) this is one of the more approachable of the bunch, while still showing the details necessary. Thankfully, the authors here stick mostly to the standard API, and show real HTML5, Javascript, and
Don’t judge a book by its cover. This is a blockbuster tour through WebGL, with many performance optimizations and considerations not commonly found in other texts. Like typical gems collections, each chapter is written by a different author and focuses on one aspect of WebGL coding. There is a lot of coverage here, and I found the authors’ expertise to be second to
Of the top WebGL books I’ve read so far, I think I can say this one is the best. Not only is it well written, but it includes lots of detail about how rendering APIs work, 3d math, lighting concepts, and even some performance considerations at the end. It’s not a very long book, but it covers the fundamentals well. I also enjoyed
WebGL Programming Guide is the first WebGL book that I can fully recommend. The authors stick to straight WebGL code (no libraries like Three.js) and explain everything in full detail. Since they focus more on the API than anything else, most of the samples are simple things like colored triangles or spinning cubes, but that is fine to learn the basics. I liked
WebGL: Up and Running by Tony Parisi is a competent first introduction to 3d on the web, and the author does seem to know what he’s talking about. The book is not long, but manages to cover a variety of topics, even the source code for a complete game (simple as it may be). The chapters include: introduction to the WebGL API, setting
I’m a bit conflicted about this book. While there is a lot of good material here, I feel like there were many inconsistencies with the coding style and some errors or confusing explanations that deter from the gems inside. It’s also heavily geared toward complete beginners, making it somewhat of a numbing read for intermediate to advanced programmers. But I still found some
