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OpenGL Game Programming w/CD

OpenGL Game Programming w/CD

List Price: $59.99
Your Price: $40.79
Product Info Reviews

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Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Great book
Review: I bought and read this book a while ago, and came back to purchase it for a friend, and was surprised at some of the recent negative reviews. It seems like these people had expectations for this book to be something it never claims to be. Either that or they didn't actually read it.

This book is targeted at people who are just getting started in games and graphics programming. It doesn't intend to be the end-all be-all for their game programming education; rather, it provides them with a solid foundation in the basics, and it does this quite well.

As an example of what I'm talking about, one reviewer mentions that the chapter on model loading is worthless because you'd never use md2s in a commercial game. This criticism is completely off-target. The purpose of the chapter in question is to teach the reader the basics involved with loading and animating a model in general, which knowledge they can then use to apply to any other forumat. md2 was presumably chosen because it's a straightforward and widely available format.

Several reviewers have mentioned errors in the source code. What they seemed to fail to notice is that the authors list their support website, glbook.gamedev.net, in the back of the book, where they've posted updated source code and corrections to other errors. When I was reading it, I emailed them about some problems I had, and they responded immediately.

The bottom line is that this is a great book for people who want to get a handle on developing 3D games or learning OpenGL. If you're already experienced in those areas, this book wasn't written for you.

Rating: 2 stars
Summary: Get the GL superbible!
Review: I bought this some years ago it rarely came out to be useful. Most of the things are a bunch of code which is freely avaiable on the net badly assembled togheter. By this point of view, the price is way too high, especially considering the CD does not contain source code at all.

At first glance, the DirectInput and DirectAudio chapters may look useful but in fact, most of them has been just cut n' pasted from MSDN. This is simply not tolerable. Consider also they use COM to init DirectAudio but it is possible to use it without.
It does not puts enough enphasis on how to solve problems such as pipeline optmizations, data structure management or such. It irons out and let you use a canned 'engine', but I guess they don't know what a 'engine' is since what they use severely lacks programmability.
Using MD2 models for your own programs is bad since there will be a day you'll want to sell them, and since you use MD2, id will ask for a bunch of money. With this chapter, half of the book is in the trashcan so price shall be halved accordingly.
The part about NURBS (curved surfaces) is simply useless since they are proved to be NOT hardware accelerated and quite difficult to manage while the chapter on modeling is simply useless since no one will made a game's content in that way.

As a last thing, remember that all the GL books around are written for fixed-function pipelines. Today's accelerators have increased programmability and functionalities which no book teaches you about.

Rating: 3 stars
Summary: Accessible, but Sloppy and Rather Windows Specific
Review: This book covers a broad range of game programming areas, with specific sample code provided both in print and on a CD.

What the book cover and abstracts fail to emphasize is that despite the "OpenGL" in the title, this is a rather Microsoft Windows specific book in many aspects. A considerable portion of it is spent talking about Windows specific APIs like DirectSound, and most of the examples use Windows event handling. It's probably hard to avoid the former issue, as there are no platform independent APIs for high quality sound, but many of the examples would not have suffered from being written using GLUT event handling.

Overall, the book is written in a sensible style that may be more accessible to some readers than the "official" OpenGL manuals. However, the areas that I had independent knowledge on (Math and Physics), I noticed numerous mistakes and sloppy reasoning, which may or may not extend to the areas that I can't verify independently.

Not overly valuable to me as a non-Windows programmer who has read the "official" tutorial volume, probably quite a bit more valuable to a Windows based programmer with little prior OpenGL experience.

Rating: 1 stars
Summary: Costs way too much for the content
Review: I am just starting to develop games. While I have learned about game programming through this book, it never gave me any solid info to wrap my brain around. The book writting does not flow. The prose is way too "touchy-feely." If you are looking for a book that gives a direct treatment of the material, do not buy this book. It tries to cover too much material with too little space. And it does so at the expense of content. The section on math should be removed as should the section on windows programming. Neither is written very well and that content can be found in abundance from other sources. Plus some the code does not work correctly (this in my opinion is a very poor reflection on the author/publisher.) On top of it all the book is fairly pricy. Overall this book has been a disappointment.

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: Must have for all fledging OpenGL programmers
Review: This is a great book if you know C/C++. I found the text easy to understand, there are a lot of examples and the book covers most of the important details to a new OpenGL programmer. It is a must for any Beginner/Intermediate level programmer's library.

Having said that I found some of the sample code uncompilable and I had to go through those programs to work out the bugs and if you are already a seasoned OpenGL programmer then flip through it a little to see if it's worth it. But overall it is an amazing book and well worth the money.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Excellent Book!!
Review: I've bought 4-5 game programming books, and this is the best one I own. Excellent examples! Even though some of the concepts can be difficult to understand (plane collision detection, OpenGL Lighting requirements)... the author presents it as thorough and concisely as possible. I'm about 90% complete with the book, and I've learned tons of information: OOP design for a game, input, model animation, and the windows environment----just to name a few. Definitely worth the money!

Rating: 3 stars
Summary: Good but error prone
Review: I had to rework the windows loop on every program to exit correctly. There is also a file missing from the code for chapter 20 (simpengine.h), and a few other mistakes I've found in the code. That said, the book does actually cover quite a bit of OpenGL and is a good beginner book as long as you don't mind debugging the author's code.

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: Not for learning concetps
Review: If you want to learn the concepts of OpenGL then this book is not a good book to start with. It is more like a learn and figure it out yourself from the demos. But the section on building a simple game engine is more than enough to enable me to download an even more complex game engine written in opengl and in a similiar fashion and learn from the source code. For the part on learning OpenGL, go read the bible or red book, because the explanations in this book are compact rephrased explanations from those books which makes it difficult to follow.

Rating: 3 stars
Summary: Oh well...
Review: This book would be better titled Windows and Opengl Game Programming. If you decide to buy it, glance through the first 2 chapters and if that looks good, buy it.

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: good foundation to start
Review: I am pleased with the book overall. This has got me started into Opengl.
Coding in the book is clear but lacks in the department of error dection(a trade off for readability i guess).
Some of his code may crash if your hardware does not fully support some open gl extentions.
This can be very frustration when trying to debug/learn when no error messages pop up telling you that a specific extention was not supported.

The book i felt could have had a bit more content however for a getting start book i think it worked out well for me and is a good reference.
If you are someone seriously looking into opengl game programming, this is a good place to start.


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