Game Coding Complete

Rating:
Summary: One of the best (and I buy 'em all)
Review: I just wanted to weigh in with my thoughts on this book. I really enjoyed it, no I loved it.

I have an addiction that involves buying every darn programming book released on Amazon. Many (most?) of those books sit on my over-stuffed shelf barely dog eared. I tend to browse the books I own or just mark useful chapters.

Not so with this book! I read it cover to cover. I loved the real world advice, the conversational style, the war stories and the pragmatic advice on non coding aspects of game development like estimates, scheduling, QA etc...

I got the same feeling of enlightenment when reading this one that I did a all those years ago when I read the classic book "Code Complete".

Great job Mike. I hope it is selling well so we can hear from you again especially on topics like AI and Sound.

Rating:
Summary: Game Coding InComplete, but one helluva lesson in the facts
Review: I say Incomplete because there is still a lot that could have been covered in a book called Game Coding Complete. At the same time I would not have picked it up off of the shelf if it didn't have such a catchy title, and learn as much about Game Coding as I did reading this book. Even though I think the title is incomplete, I still learned a great deal and I frequently reread chapters to catch things I missed the first time round.

IMHO this book is geared toward those who want to make a professional career in making games, but have no idea how, while at the same time teaching concrete principles of game programming to those like me who are currently hobby coders. Many times had I tried and failed to start developing a game, but I am now building my game intelligently and efficiently, knowing exactly what I need to do to get things done. I have to say it is all because of this book.
This is also one of the few books that has managed to grip my attention for as long as it did because of the clever way that Mike writes. His writing style is such that it is easy to read because of its almost informal nature. The text thankfully lacks rigid structure, and welcomed breaks in the lessons of "how and why" are made up of "I remember the day" stories that are both amusing and filled with helpful hints on what NOT to do OR how the approached a problem and fixed it :) (Which is the point BTW)
The code in the book is sparse, and it initially bugged me, but I came to realize that it really is not about giving the reader chunks of code. This is not a step by step guide on how to make a game, but a collection of ideas on how to cleverly write and manage your game. Mike frequently comments on the potential problems one might have compiling his code, and he rightfully tells the reader to fix it as an exercise. After all that is the kind of industry Game Development is if I am not mistaken: Fixing broken code and solving problems???

Anyways, this book is not for know it alls already in the industry. This is a book for people like me who are passionate about games but don't have a clue on where and how to start. To me working in the industry is an impossible endeavor, but this book is not only filled with concepts on game programming, but it is filled with motivational stories and tips on how to GET IN. This is a booster in the right direction, and to actually get the opinions of someone already in the business, and not just straight HOW TO LOAD A BITMAP crap, (which is also in the book I might add...) has left me pleasantly surprised and content. If McShaffry wrote another book, hopefully something that covers topics he didn't cover in the original, I would be all over it like a Fat Kid on a Smarty.

I highly recommend it!!

Rating:
Summary: Serious technical info and process for game coders
Review: I'm old enough to remember awful books with titles like "Graphics Tips from Game Gurus". From the cover I was worried that this was that type of book. But there is wisdom in the saying "don't judge a book by it's cover". This is a very serious book about both the technical aspects of the job, and the serious non-technical process aspects of the job. As the author says in the first chapter "game programming is freaking hard."

There are well written sections on 2D and 3D programming, including an excellent section on basic trigonometry. There is also some good timely material on working within the Windows framework. I would have liked some more material on 3D engines, but that's a minor flaw.

There are two very solid chapters on process and testing. And a very good chapter on techniques that you can use to survive the death march.

Game programming sounds fun and sexy but it's a very tough gig where the odds are stacked against you. Schedules are necessarily tight. Performance concerns are paramount. And the requirements are prone to change as the game play is refined. This means that all three points of the software project (quality, schedule, requirements) are in play. To survive you need knowledge, tools, wisdom, and a little luck. This book provides you with at least three of those four.

Rating:
Summary: Worth buying
Review: I've read many books on game development. Frankly, most are poorly written collections of obsolete information. Game Coding Complete offers a wealth of current day to day useful information for coders and development managers alike. The title suggests it is just for coders, but all members of a development team could benefit from it. The sections on realistic scheduling and forecasting are some of the most honest I've ever seen. I've shown it to our director at our company and he has purchased several copies for general dissemination.

Rating:
Summary: Opinions are like ...
Review: Ideally, I would like to give this book a better rating because it is written by a professional. So many of the currently available books on game programming are written by high-school kids who have goofed with the DirectX samples and think they can write a game. Their "hey, dude!" language gets really annoying (yeah, I'm talking to you LaMothe) and the sheer ignorance of their programming style usually makes their books useless.

Unfortunately Mr. McShaffry fell into the same pitfall most other "here's THE right way to write code" authors fall into: he just has too many opinions and not enough facts. He touches on a lot of subjects which are programming religions, and there is no objective right or wrong for much of what he discusses. I feel some of the problem lies in the fact that McShaffry has worked on two types of games: the Ultima series and a playing card game. If you work on one codebase for years, you're going to think your solutions are perfect. As a person who has worked on numerous different types of games and engines I can tell you that there is no magic solution for writing the perfect engine. The engine is always very heavily tailored to the game desired. This is why you hear about the Quake engine, or some other third-party technology, being licensed and then gutted with major portions rewritten. So most of McShaffry's game-specific ideas need to be taken with a grain of salt. An example: smart pointers sure are safe, but if you're working on the PS2 you probably can't spare the memory or execution time for all that tracking.

I also disagree with his opening statements about variable and function naming. This is a constant headache for development teams, particularly game dev teams whose programmers are mostly self-taught. But just saying "Hungarian is useless!" is ridiculous. Sure Visual Studio tells you the type of variable, but this works maybe half the time (it is incredibly easy to confuse Microsoft's Intellitype), and not everyone uses VS. If a person is more comfortable in Emacs, should they be forced to change editors just to get context information on a variable? Is one to three letters of information in front of a variable name really that hard to type?

Those are just a couple of examples for the sake of brevity. My main objection about this book is that I don't feel I learned anything by reading it. I just read Mr. McShaffry's opinions about a few things, some of which had merit, but most of which weren't supported by any factual or reasonable data. They are just opinions. I did agree with his statement that all objects should have a stream-constructor defined; having tried to graft in "save anywhere" to two engines I can attest to the usefulness of this type of planning ahead. But other than that the book is mostly useless to me.

People new to the industry or curious about it might find it exciting to read tales from the trenches. And if you're a pro, I would expect your enthusiasm for the book to be directly relative to how closely your opinions match Mr. McShaffry's. But frankly I wouldn't recommend most of his ideas over anyone else's. Maybe it's the title that grates on me - perhaps a better title would have been "Game Coding: One Man's Opinion"

Rating:
Summary: Wealth of Knowledge
Review: In a way this is sort of the 'Code Complete' of game programming books. The LaMothe books are pretty decent, but he doesn't always distill the content very well. You end up with 25 pages describing what you could in about 5. On the other hand, McShaffry really shows his experience by PACKING this book with tons of useful info. Even if you just randomly picked one page a day to read and digest, your bag of tricks would grow exponentially. This is quite good - not necessarily a beginning programming book, but if you have a couple years of experience, you'll get a lot out of it. I highly recommend it.

Rating:
Summary: Not just another coding book... check the web site and see..
Review: Quite frankly, this book kept me going in game programming when I was about to give up in frustration.

I've bought many game programming books over the years, and two authors stand out... Mike McShaffry and Andre LaMothe. This book is incredibly valuable as a reference and as a guide. Quite honestly, I wonder who paid the guy who wrote the "Spotlight Review" to dis it so badly, or who he paid to get his opinion in the spotlight.

But here's a test you can take for yourself... go to http://www.mcshaffry.com/GameCode and see how Mike McShaffry is *still* helping folks who've read his book, (or anyone who post on the site for that matter). He's still giving *free* advice on his book's forum, when most other authors won't even respond to an email.

In response to those who objected to the author's "coding opinions":
Yes, the guy has an opinon - he's entitled to. What do you expect from a book? "well, this is probably wrong, and I don't really know what I'm talking about, but the publisher paid me a lot of money so I have to say something." Give me a freaking break! OF COURSE the book is full of opinions - that's what books are!

Just one caveat - it doesn't teach you C++. It assumes some experience, meaning you can take the coding advice and apply it to suit your own style. It does assume a basic level of professional ability in other words.

Rating:
Summary: Covers too many topics
Review: The author tries to hard to cover the basics of making games. It sort of reminds me a class study guide, i.e., everything lumped together in a highly condensed manner.

Rating:
Summary: More words from the author...
Review: The first thing I'll say about the book is that it is extremely genuine, everything from the stories to the source code has seen action in the computer game industry, on games that really shipped. Since this was the main motivation for writing the dang thing, I hope everyone enjoys what they read, and perhaps learns something at the same time.

Chapter 1, Game Programming is Wacky starts the book off really well, distinguishing game programming from any other kind of programming. The rest of Part I is a gentle introduction into the high level decisions a programmer has to make before they write their first line of code.

Part II is my favorite part of the book because no other game programming book I've ever read, and I've read a few, exposes important topics like multiprocessing, resource caching, or why the stock ANSI random number generator isn't your best choice.

Part III continues this trend, digging into architectural topics such as 3D worlds and logistical topics like debugging games. Most game programming books show you how to write code, this is the first one (that I know of) that shows programmers how to fix it when it is broken. The section on special considerations for Windows games is especially useful for any Windows programmer who writes games or real time simulations.

Part IV takes a break from programming and discusses some production topics like scheduling and testing. Programmers who know this stuff will always finish their work on time and enjoy their weekends away from the keyboard.

Enough niceties - here's some harsh commentary from the author about the author.

First and foremost, the source code in the book is completely broken and disorganized. If someone spent the hours of typing necessary to write each line of code into a single compiling project they'd be rewarded with hundreds of compiler and linker errors.

Thank heavens for the web site, and the ability to download code that actually works.

Next, there are some serious omissions in this book.

Game audio is an important subject, and tends to be ignored until the last minute in most games. There should be a chapter that discusses DirectSound, Miles Audio, and how to synchronize sounds and animations. Character speech would be a good topic to add as well. The fact that the debugging chapter makes such a big deal of audio bugs makes this missing chapter even more apparent.

Game physics and collision is also totally missing, except for a brief mention of Havok in the 3D engines chapter. Physics and collision are critical to every game project, even something as simple as breakout. The author should be drawn and quartered for this omission.

Finally, there's absolutely no mention of networking and multiplayer game technolgy. The fact that the author has worked on some of the most famous (or notorious) multiplayer and massively multiplayer games makes this omission even more bizarre. Any book from Mr.Mike should have addressed playing games over the internet.

Enough complaints - here are some excuses:

First, the book was supposed to be no more than 550 pages. You'll notice that the book weighs in at more than 580. What you don't know is how many chapters were cut completely, or cut for length. The user interface chapter could have been twice as long, continuing the discussion with implementing various kinds of controls for games. There were plans for a physics chapter, and a networking chapter - they were cut because the book was running long and the deadline was nigh.

My only solace is that some game programming books are 800+ pages long, and say a lot less than you could have found in the DirectX help. If this book does well, I promise to include more info on audio, collision, physics, and networking in the next revision.

All said, I'm very happy with this book - even some of my beta readers told me they learned things when they read the first drafts. If you learn something too, then I can feel satisfied.

One last comment - the cover rocks. Thanks, Paul!

Rating:
Summary: Good intro to undercovered topics
Review: The title of this book suggests two things to me. The first is that it provides a complete guide to game coding. The second is that it fills the same role for game programming that the book Code Complete fills for programming in general, i.e. a journeyman's book that fills in the gaps left in introductory texts and broadens your knowledge to prepare you to move on to more advanced topics. Unfortunately by trying to do the former (which I don't think is possible in a single book), it falls a bit short on the latter, resulting in a (very) good book rather than the great book it could have been given the author's impressive background.

First, the bad.

It seems that the author never really decided what his audience is. Parts of the book (e.g. the introduction to 3D graphics) are written for total beginners, while others (such as the overview of game engines - all of which cost tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars to license) are really only relevant to experienced professionals. The author/publisher really should have picked an audience and stuck with it.

Some readers will be annoyed by how platform-specific this book is, which really isn't apparent from the cover copy or even the other reviews. All of the code samples use DirectX, and there is a lot of space dedicated to Windows-specific information. Granted, Windows and DirectX are by far the most popular choices for PC-based game development, so this won't be an issue for most readers.

And now for the good.

The best parts of this book were those covering topics that typically get overlooked in other game programming books, namely things like pointers and memory management, scripting, creating automated build enviroments and code/resource management, debugging, and notably the entire section on production, scheduling and testing. Although some of these topics are covered in other books that are not specific to game development, putting them in a single volume and exposing game developers to them early on is a Good Thing.

Although the sample code was fairly sparse, what he did provide was extremely useful, in particular the resource file implementation, random number generator, and scene graph.

Finally, props to the author for maintaining a website and actively supporting this book. As an author myself, I know how much work is involved in doing so, and I recognize that it reflects the author's desire to really help people and not just sell books.

In conclusion, my overall impression of this book was very positive. It's marred by a few shortcomings, but overall, I think that most new game programmers will benefit from it.