Game Engine Design and Implementation

Alan Thorn’s Game Engine Design and Implementation was quite an interesting read. Overall I thought it was good, but the book struggles at times to find it’s audience. On one hand, it covers a lot of great topics and there are some good code snippets to be found. On the other hand, it seems to jump around between APIs and frameworks and never really culminates with a complete engine. Even so, engine development is no breeze and any help in this area is much appreciated.The text begins with the basics: downloading Visual Studio or Code::Blocks and configuring a development environment. It shows you how to create and call a DLL. Some brief coverage of the STL. All useful stuff. Then it moves on to some basic engine features, like logging errors and handling exceptions. Again a great place to start. It continues with a resource manager based on XML. Then a 2D scene manager and renderer using SDL. Supporting sound and music with the BASS library. Processing input with OIS. Then a renderer with DirectX 10. Great stuff. Then in the next chapter it throws out everything you just learned and jumps to working with OGRE. Don’t get me wrong, OGRE is a great API. But it seems strange for a book titled “Game Engine Design and Implementation” to use an off-the-shelf library and not code the, erm, implementation themselves. The book follows up with coverage of Bullet physics and ends with a brief overview of DX Studio, which is an all-in-one game engine solution.While each chapter alone is very interesting and informative, I feel like the book as a whole lost it’s focus somewhere and the engine that you think you are creating at the beginning of the book never materializes. I almost feel bad, it’s like the author started with one premise of creating an engine from scratch, and then gives up half-way. I even agree that using pre-built tools are a good idea in many cases, and most people don’t want to re-invent SDL or OGRE or whatever. But there are other books that focus on these engines and frameworks. People picking up a book like “Game Engine Design and Implementation” probably are more interested in rolling their own engine.That said, I still feel like the book was a worthwhile read and I did learn a little bit about some stuff and found it useful. Going in I had read the reviews on Amazon, and I knew the author was going to jump around with different libraries. Had I not known this I may have been more upset. As is, Alan Thorn is a competent writer and clearly knows a thing or two about game engines. I guess I just wish there was more of a focus on creating something cohesive and original and not just a jumble of introductions into different APIs. However, if you are on a journey (like me) of creating a 3D game engine you will need as much ammo has possible and this book certainly has a place in the arsenal. Just not the first place.

I don't have any game engine experience and I got this book to help me out.The first few chapters are great. They explain a lot about game engines; generally, how they work and why.The author even shows you how to create your own c++ game engine from scratch. I love this.He also makes a point that game engine design is a huge topic that cannot be covered in one book, however at times it seems like he is trying to, which hurts the content.In the chapter about a DirectX 10 Render Manager, he spends over 100 pages talking about it and how to write a basic one. At the end he explains that the manager he just showed you is actually a piece of crap: camera doesn't move at all, no lighting, etc. The very next chapter (3D Scene Manager) he completely throws out directX and uses OGRE 3D.I have no problem at all seeing a lot of different examples / ways of creating the different parts of the engine. But I'd also look to different books/resources for different examples. I was looking at this for consistency, which falls apart midway through.

Ok so the main part of this book the first 9 chapters is all about building a game engine and it is pretty damn good at doing it too. I was thinking it must be the very best book I ever read on programming in general, good code, good explanations and everything was going very well.In comes chapter 10 where the book moves away from using directx directly and into using Ogre3D, this is a really good thing because Ogre3D is very good SDK and makes using directx/opengl very easy. He explains the basics pretty good but thats all, he NEVER implements Ogre3D into the engine that the previous 9 chapters where all about building. Doesn't make any sense to just abandon the engine all together, And strangely he never even mentions the engine again from the beginning of this chapter on. And since the chapter you build a directx10 renderer doesn't include any way to load models from file, you are left with an engine that CAN'T draw 3d models from a file, and several other important missing features that Ogre3D provides.So that was a HUGE dissapointment.In comes chapter 11 where you are introduced to bullet physics SDK again this is not incorported into the engine. It is just a very light intro to it.So if he had put the ogre3d renderer in the engine this book would have been really good but because at the end you have just a pile of worthless code, its only worth 3/5 stars to me. Those 3 stars are because I did learn a lot from the early chapters.

Good book, helping me with building my flight simulator with DirectX (software) & Atmega ( hardware)...

This book provides a great overview of the field of game engine design from start to finish. It also contains a lot of code examples. Would recommend.

Das Buch listet die wesentlichen Bestandteile einer Game Engine auf und zeigt mittels einer sehr einfachen Implementation, wie die einzelnen Teile umgesetzt werden können und zusammenspielen. Detailliertere Informationen, wieso etwas genau so gemacht wird in diesem Buch und was allfällige Alternative wären, kommen meiner Meinung nach zu kurz. Da ist das Buch  Game Coding Complete, Fourth Edition  um einiges aufschlussreicher, aber auch anspruchsvoller. Die Code-Beispiele sind auch für einen Anfänger verständlich und nicht sehr kompliziert. Wieso einige Codeblöcke allerdings mehrmals vorkommen, ist mir ein Rätsel. Der Autor schreibt, "for convenience", ich sage, um die Seitenzahl zu erhöhen.Es ist mir nicht ganz klar, für welche Zielgruppe dieses Buch geschrieben ist. Für einen absoluten Programmier-Anfänger mag eine bebilderte Installationsanleitung einer IDE oder das Einrichten eines Projekts in der IDE noch sinnvoll erscheinen. Aber spätestens mit der nächsten Version der IDE sehen die Dialoge ja aber eh wieder ganz anders aus und das Buch ist bereits wieder hoffnungslos veraltet. Eine kurze Suche im Internet nach einem Tutorial wäre da aufschlussreicher und aktueller.Ein absoluter Anfänger ist aber meiner Meinung nach nicht daran interessiert, wie man eine Game Engine entwickelt. Er beginnt einfach mal darauf los zu schreiben und erzielt auch damit schon einige Erfolge. Wenn er dann seine ersten Erfahrungen gemacht hat, ein oder zwei Spiele geschrieben und nun wissen will, wie man es den richtig macht, der kauft sich solch ein Buch. Dann muss man ihm aber auch nicht mehr auf zwei Seiten rudimentär das Singleton-Pattern erklären, oder eine bruchstückhafte Einführung in die String- und Vector-Klassen der STL liefern. Für alle Programmieranfänger: Lernt zuerst die Programmiersprache, z.B. mit dem wirklich guten Buch  The C++ Programming Language  (auch als Nachschlagewerk zu gebrauchen) und nehmt nicht den Programmierstil des Autors als Vorbild. Für mich als erfahrenen C++-Entwickler (ohne Kenntnisse in Game-Entwicklung) ist der schlechte Programmierstil des Autors sehr störend (public Member-Variablen, "const" kennt er offenbar nicht, ...).Zusammengefasst: eine kurze Einführung in die Game Engine Entwicklung mit viel Blabla, das besser durch ein wenig mehr Tiefgang ersetzt würde. Game Coding Complete, Fourth EditionThe C++ Programming Language