Book Recommendations

In this section you find books related to the field of video game programming recommended by the viCampus staff. For each title you get a detailed review as well as a link to purchase the title from Amazon.com or Amazon.de. If you want to submit your own review contact sales@vicampus.com.

Click on a book's title to read the corresponding review.

Christer Ericson	"Real-Time Collision Detection"
David Astle at al.	"More OpenGL Game Programming"
David Franson	"The Dark Side of Game Texturing"
Kelly Dempski, Emmanuel Viale	"Advanced Lighting and Materials with Shaders"
Matt Pharr (editor)	"GPU Gems 2"
Jim Adams	"Programming Role Playing Games 2nd Ed"
Randima Fernando (editor)	"GPU Gems"
Eric Lengyel	"Mathematics for 3D Game Programming and Computer Graphics, 2nd Ed"

Book Reviews and Details

Title: "Real-Time Collision Detection"
ISBN: 1558607323	Reviewer: Stefan Zerbst
Author: Christer Ericson	Date: 2006-03-30 14:56:01
Buy from: Amazon.com or Amazon.de	Language:
Its not too long ago that most books in the field of 3D game programming concetrated on rendering and graphics. But as soon as you start implementing your own small 3D games, as opposed to 3D renderers, you will find that one big piece is missing in your brain: The mathematical background to deal with collision detection. Collision detection describes that fact that even if you have rendered the most brilliant looking 3D level ever the players as well as all other in-game objects and characters can easily walk through the walls or fall through the floor due to missing or wrong collision detection and response. This book is an amazing source that explains how to detect intersections and collisions between virtually all kinds of geometrical shapes. And not only that, the book concetrates on implementing the fastest possible algortihm for each scenario. Just think of a big 3D level with lots of bullets flying around and lots of bots wandering around. The faster you can calculate the collisions the better due to the huge amount of collidable objects in current video games. The book starts with all the basics such as colliding lines with each others and moves on covering all kinds of bounding volumes such as boxes to end up dicsussing management of collisions in big scenes using BSP trees for example. And its not only the math background provided but (pseudo code) implementation of each and every technique. Thus making this book an inevitable resource for each game programmer that does not own a degree in linear algebra. Last but not least the book does not read as if a guy with a math degree wrote it. You can follow the book even if you don't own such a degree.

Title: "More OpenGL Game Programming"
ISBN: 1592008305	Reviewer: Stefan Zerbst
Author: David Astle at al.	Date: 2006-03-30 14:45:45
Buy from: Amazon.com or Amazon.de	Language:
Weblink: http://glbook.gamedev.net/
When I bought this book I wa snot aware of the fact, that David Astle did not write the whole book but edited it. So the book is a collection of work done by several authors. Normally, I do not like such books because they mostly tend to provide you with a number of stand-alone articles that do neither integrate into a combined example of everything you learned throughout the book nor do they normally fit together well in a single book due to different writing styles, formatting, and things like that. While this book also does not combine everything into one major example application it does a great job of integrating all text from different authors into a seamless book that is quite a good and interesting read. It goes well beyond OpenGL topics and include discussions of effects and programming techniques and algorithms that are API independent and very interesting as well. To give you an example of what you can learn from this book beyong the OpenGL topics such as (but not limited to) vertex buffer objects, OpenGL shading language, and Pixel Buffers: Deferred shading High dynamic range rendering Shadows Billboards and particle systems Rendering water Procedural creation of 3D tree models Terrain with LOD, sky, and vegetation character animation (skin and bones) Scene management (culling, BSP, portals, octrees, ...) As you can see from this list its only a portion of this book that directly discusses OpenGL topics. Most pages of the book discuss all sort of things you need to know when programming a game, no matter if you are using OpenGL or Direct3D. To conclude we can say that this book is a good read even if you do not use OpenGL so its title is a bit misleading. I would have rather called it "More Game Programming" while emphasizing that OpenGL is the major tool used for rendering. However, note that the source code of the sample programs is available online for review before buying.

Title: "The Dark Side of Game Texturing"
ISBN: 1592003508	Reviewer: Stefan Zerbst
Author: David Franson	Date: 2006-03-30 14:21:07
Buy from: Amazon.com or Amazon.de	Language:
Let me start the recommendation of this book with a small summary: Buy this book. Okay, now you want to know why you should, I guess. As most of you reading this I am only a game programmer. That means I have neither a talent nor any clue about how to create good looking textures for my 3D-applications. That is a real pity because even if I can program a Doom 3 clone it would look like shi... ah shame because of the textures I can do on my own. At least that was the case until I read this book. Starting with almost no knowledge about professional 2D artist tools such as Adobe Photoshop I am now able to create at least okay-looking textures for my 3D apps. And that is thanks to this book. The whole book does not try to teach you how to use all Photoshop features. And rightly so. There is a tutorial on the CD companion that introduces you to working with Photoshop. After reading this you can jump right into the book which contains the following chapters: Texturing Basics Nasty Decals Sprites Military Textures Slums Medival / Fantasy Textures Planetary Textures SciFi Textures Each of the chapters works basically like this: Franson tells you what kind of texture he wants to create. Then you get a bulleted list of steps you have to perform in Photoshop to end up with the final texture. The cool thing is that even as Photoshop beginner you can easily follow each step. Also, there is a screenshot of what the current Photoshop image looks like for all major steps. Then, after going through the whole list of steps you will have a professional looking textures. What is even cooler is that there is basically no freehand action required. That means you do not need to have a talent to draw art. All textures are created using Photoshop filters. Some textures even include using images of rendered 3D models to make even better looking textures. The way to use this book is to start your Photoshop and create the texture you want to while having the book lying next to your keyboard to check the steps you need to take to create a certain effect. It really supports your own workflow in a good way as opposed to require you to read whole chapters before you can get started with anything at all. Besides the wide range of different genres covered there are also a lot of useful hints and descriptions you will always need when creating textures. For example, this book also teaches you how to make a nice photograph of your favorite real world item (such as a medival castle wall or a piece of wood) and then create a texture from this photograph. This includes adjusting the color values as well as creating a seamlessly tilable texture from the photo. To conclude I have to say that I can really reccomend this book to you if you are interested in creating your own textures. When I bought this book I was afraid buying one of those books that either don't go beyond a Photoshop tutorial or expect you to be a Photshop expert already. But I was very surprised that this book proofed to be a very good teacher even for non-artists like me. You don't even need to buy the latest Photoshop. Check out Ebay for example and buy an older version such as Photoshop 5 or 6. Its works equally well as the latest versions 8 and 9 while only costing you a 100 bucks.

Title: "Advanced Lighting and Materials with Shaders"
ISBN: 1556222920	Reviewer: Enrico
Author: Kelly Dempski, Emmanuel Viale	Date: 2006-03-02 10:46:53
Buy from: Amazon.com or Amazon.de	Language:
Summary: Simulation of lighting and shadows is one of the most difficult tasks in computer graphics. Whether a picture now can be valued as "realistic" or only as "well", mostly depends on small, subtle differences only. To simulate these differences as realistic as possible, exact knowledge of "light" and its interaction with the environment is needed. That is where this book starts: It explains in a simple and understandable manner what "light" is in the physical sense and how to simulate it in computer graphics. The three fundamental sources of light are just treated like different local and global lighting and reflection models. To make the lot not too theoretical, the whole theory is made clear with a lot of example programs. Among the examples there are a Raytracer and implementations of all lighting models via Shader. A major part of the book deals with "Spherical Harmonics ". These are explained entirely and implemented by many examples. In the last part of the book the authors go into details of another global illumination method: Radiosity. First the fundamental idea is explained again and later many more advanced technologies. Finally a possible way in direction of "Real Time Radiosity" is shown. On the added CD ROM all example programs are available as source code and as binary file. Review: Altogether this book is really worth reading. The combination of very good explanations of physics and partial complex (but not complicated!) mathematics with many example programs is unique in this form. Also the "advanced" in the title should not be taken too seriously, one does not have to be a very good programmer to get many useful information from the work. As the latter plus the platform- and API-independent code still has to be mentioned. Like every book this also has a few negative points: 1) the examples use an outdated DirectX SDK (if anything) and the examples are not actualized, unfortunately, by the authors. This is not far tragically, because only a few places have changed in the newer versions (mainly the function arguments). 2) the pictures are only in black / white and at some places of no good quality. Especially in a book about lighting, good pictures in color are a must.

Title: "GPU Gems 2"
ISBN: 0321335597	Reviewer: Enrico
Author: Matt Pharr (editor)	Date: 2006-03-02 10:46:35
Buy from: Amazon.com or Amazon.de	Language:
Summary: The book is, as well as the previous one, a collection of articles of a wide range of topics. The authors are again from known firms and facilities like Crytek, Piranha Bytes and Nvidia itself. Alike in the previous book among the subjects are lighting and shadows and also GPGPU. Just the latter is strongly extended and now takes almost half of the book. Review: The book is an excellent work like the previous one. The articles are of high quality; the same applies on the color printings in the whole book. It is again to be criticized that only few of the demos are capable to run on ATI hardware. Generally the number of the demo programs has decreased, so that in this work of the row many ideas are presented without providing, however, an example implementing. This by no means makes the book worse, but it would mostly be an advantage to be able to examine a certain technology "live", before one does the work of implementing for oneself. In contrast to the previous book the area of the GPGPU Computing is strongly expanded, which naturally leaves less room for other topics. If one is interested in GPGPU, this book is worth a recommendation anyways. In addition one still receives some other, beautiful technologies. If however own interest in GPGPU hardly exists, this part of the series is almost completely uninteresting. Here it would be better to revert to the previous one.

Title: "Programming Role Playing Games 2nd Ed"
ISBN: 159200315X	Reviewer: Enrico
Author: Jim Adams	Date: 2006-03-02 10:45:47
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Summary: The first part of the book deals with the development of a framework for the game development, adding the loading of a level as well as models for player and enemies. Furthermore the author addresses important areas like input, sound and network as a part of this Framework. The second part of the book, the real "content" of the book, is dedicated to the development of the fundamental structures of all role playing games. Level construction as well as different script systems of subjects, magic spells and opponents and also a fundamental AI belong to it. The script systems revert on an existing script language, but are entirely developed in the book. The tools, which are very important for the work with the script systems, are also included. The last chapter shows in its center section how one integrates a Multiplayer mode into the game. In the last part a complete game named "The Tower" is developed from the developed components (the Framework as well as the script systems). On the CD you find the source code for all chapters as well as the programs in binary form. In addition there are several demo versions of different programs and the required DirectX SDK. Review: The center section with its extensive explanations about the internal structures of a role-play certainly belongs to the strong points of the book. Also the developed tools are very good, as they only just make possible an efficient development of a RPG. Unfortunately, the not compilable source code is a very big deficiency of the book. It also not adaptable to current DirectX version without very big changes. Subsequent machining on the part of the author is urgently necessary here. For every programmer, who would like to take a look at the development of a role-play (and not only this genre), this book is to be recommended very much. For beginner level programmers the book is less suitable, because the source text is not compilable and this represents, nevertheless, a pretty big hurdle.

Title: "GPU Gems"
ISBN: 0321228324	Reviewer: Enrico
Author: Randima Fernando (editor)	Date: 2006-03-02 10:44:32
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Summary: The book consists of 42 articles about many topics in modern computer graphics. Besides, main attention lies on the use of Shaders, because game development nowadays can hardly be imagined without them. The authors are all industrial experts of different areas, so that no doubts can arise in the quality and up-to-dateness of the articles. Furthermore the articles all are around 20 pages long and therefore longer and more detailed than most articles in the very well-known \"Game Programming Gems\" series. The treated subjects reach from lighting and shade methods about Performance optimization towards the area of the "General Purpose GPU\", which is becoming more and more popular. Because several authors work with Nvidia and the book was also initiated by Nvidia (unfortunately, without collaboration of ATI), it is not surprising that most example programs function only on Nvidia hardware. But the explanations are so good in themselves that a porting of Cg on GLSL (and with it also on graphic cards of other manufacturers) should be possible without any problems. Review: This book matches the original, the \"Game Programming Gems\" series. It offers a big selection of topics and the quality of the articles really is very good. A big plus is the high-distraught color printings in the whole book. This expenses-intense feature is very rare. The treated technologies are also still useable without any problems to this day, so that the book cannot be considered as outdated for a long time yet. Single deficiency are the demos, which almost only run on Nvidia hardware.

Title: "Mathematics for 3D Game Programming and Computer Graphics, 2nd Ed"
ISBN: 1584502770	Reviewer: Enrico
Author: Eric Lengyel	Date: 2006-03-02 10:43:15
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Summary: The author begins with quite harmless topics like vectors and linear algebra, then passes over, however, surely quickly to more advanced topics like lighting or visibility determination. Now a chapter about Shadow Volumes and a graphics card's pipeline also belong to the extent of the book. In its last part the book deals with an introduction to physics. The book assumes fundamental knowledge of mathematics of trigonometry and calculus. However, with short repetitions and explanations the author guarantees that the required knowledge from these areas exists. In some chapters (like lighting or Shadow Volumes) example code is to be found, which is laid out mostly for OpenGL. However, with the pertinent explanations the code can be transferred to every API. Review: This book provides a solid basis for mathematics behind computer graphics. The writing style of the author is clear and understandable; many drafts are underpinned with proofs. The author never loses the practice relation, in this case computer games and graphic applications. Just the latter is enormously important for own learning motivation. To apply the learned, there are also some exercises at the end of every chapter. However, these could have fallen out little bit more extensively. The pallet of the treated topics is very big and passes from vectors and stencils about Raytracing, collision tests and lighting to Shadow Volumes and visibility determination. But that is not yet enough: several chapters about physics (e.g., liquid simulation) and an informative beginning round up this excellent work.