Programming Mutliplayer Fps Direct X

by Vaughan Young

Book Overview

If you have experience with C++ and DirectX and have always wanted to program your own game, this is the book for you. Programming a Multiplayer FPS in DirectX takes you from the basic game design to... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1584503637
• ISBN13: 9781584503637
• Release Date: December 2004
• Publisher: Charles River Media
• Length: 520 Pages
• Weight: 2.40 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.0" x 7.5" x 9.2"

Customer Reviews

A perfect book for beginners/intermediate level programmers

This is a PERFECT book for intermediate level programmers that have a decent knowledge of C++ and basic knowledge of DirectX and have always wanted to build their own 3d game. This is the only book (as far as i know) that guides you from the beginning, and explains every important part of the engine code. in every chapter new features are added to the engine and in the end you have a full working FPS engine! Great! Author explains not only usual stuff that can be seen in every other book (how to setup a DirectX or use DirectInput), but also goes into detail on how to design your engine writing a reusable code and build that can later be easily improved. Topics covered are Engine Design, Engine Control, Scripting, Rendering, Sound, Networking, Materials and Meshes, Objects, Scene management etc. I wish that all programming book were written this way. Absolutely recommended.

Excellent book, with only minor failings

The book is true to its title. It takes you through the complete development of a First Person Shooter game. The final game is simple, and the entire project is approximately 10 000 lines of C++ code, but it does illustrate almost all the required functionality. I have two, and only two, minor criticisms of the book. The first is that the actual English writing of the book is sometimes poor. Sentences are grammatically correct, but sometimes fail to be natural. Analogies are very basic, and sometimes incorrectly applied. In fairness, the author sticks to simple English most of the time, so the discussions are fairly clear. The book would be more readable if the author were a better writer. I consider this a fair criticism, since some technical books do have good writing. My second criticism is that the book fails to cover a few fundamental topics in greater detail. Specifically, these topics include collision detection, animation, and physics. The author includes an article about collision detection on the CD, but this does not make up for the lack of discussion in the book. Animation is so fundamental to almost any 3D game that it should have had more pages dedicated to it. Quite frankly, the author should have used the pages that were used for explanations of C++ topics (such as templates) to cover advanced animation material. I can forgive the missing physics material because it is such a vast topic, and any detailed discussion would have added hundreds of pages. In fairness to the book, it is a testament to the quality of the book that it is only 500 pages long. If you are a competent programmer, and you have some experience with DirectX, this book delivers on its promises.

First Person Shooter Using DirectX 9

At last, a book on 3D gaming that isn't an excuse for re-iterating the DirectX SDK/Help docs. Yes, it's the real deal. I'm sure that anyone with an interest in this subject will know that it isn't for the faint hearted. If you want to "understand the code" and not simply use the complete project for your own levels, you certainly have your work cut out. That said, the author takes you on a well guided and informative tour of all the aspects required to create an "outdoor" multiplayer (LAN) shooter. A great introduction to what really goes into it all. Recommended.

Excellent Introduction

When I first found out about this book I thought it had a snowball's change in hell of being even a half decent book (being a pretty ambitious topic). I've changed my mind after actually reading the book, and found it to be an excellent introduction to writing a FPS game engine. Granted, it's not DOOM3 but the end result is a simple, complete working engine; which is quite an achievement in my opinion. One caveat though, even though the book is fairly simple and not exactly taxing (a tribute to the author) it is certainly not a beginners book. You should already be fairly comfortable with C++ and DirectX 9 to get the most out of it and be prepared to study the source and MSDN documentation (a good habit to get into anyway). The book covers most of the major parts of a FPS engine at a reasonable level, resulting in a well designed, modular engine that can be expanded on quite easily. The main value of the book, however, is the design of the engine which should help a lot in developing your own engine (since most books cover the therory in exhausting detail but ignore the overall engine design - if you're looking for detail, this may not be the book for you). After reading this book, the following books may be useful: 1. Introduction to 3D Game Programming with DirectX 9.0 (excellent intro to DX9). 2. 3D Game Engine Architecture : Engineering Real-Time Applications with Wild Magic (nice and detailed - I recommend all David Eberly's books). 3. Real-Time Rendering (doesn't get better than this). 4. Game Programming Gems (buy all of them, now).

Top Notch Code

I'm about half way through the book now and the code that comes with the book is top notch. I even heard the author saying he went through all of the code removing the error checking before releasing as to make it easier to read. Its well maintained, simple and clever. The code is also definitly encapsulated well so you can bring it to other projects easily if you'd like with little dependencies. Warning to those who are intermediate directx users - the first 2-7 are mostly directx basics and you will most likely skip this to get to the meat. Although there's nothing incredibly complicated in this book, I think it gave me a healthy dose of not over estimating myself. The author only spends time on the what is required to complete the project and reuses his code a lot (i think the initial linked list was reused about 100 times in total) So if you ever find yourself making projects that always fail half way through - this is a good book for you.