Core Techniques and Algorithms in Game Programming
From GDWiki
Core Techniques and Algorithms in Game Programming by Daniel Sanchez-Crespo
Rating: 5 / 5
Comments: This book covers a very broad spectrum of game development related subjects and covers it really good!
Starting off with the history of the earliest games from Pong on a oscilloscope to Pac-man, Doom and more recent games the book starts off slow and gentle. However, it remains in focus and explains some of the very low-level functions and memory operations that is underlaying games from that time.
From here the book really begins speeding up, briefly covering game architecture, data structures and design patterns in the next few chapters. These chapters are too brief to be of much use to experinced game developers, and are kept at an introductory level.
The next hundred pages are devoted to A.I. techniques followed by a chapter on scripting and one on networking.
The last 450 pages covers game- and graphics engines, and explains an extremely broad variety of techniques and algorithms.
It's an enormous task trying to cover the entire game development field in one book - even one with almost 900 pages, but it manages it really well. It should be required reading for anyone interested in game programming.
The 5-rating is given for the great introduction to the subjects, and for the meticulous university-level explanation to even the most complex algorithms.
Requires knowledge of C/C++ or being able to read and understand C/C++ (source code is in C++).
Other reviews:
5 / 5 Gamasutra
4.0 / 5.0 GameDev
Sion 22:35, 11 Sep 2004 (EDT)
