Programming Role Playing Games with DirectX, Second Edition (Game Development Series)

Rating:
Summary: The best book I've found on this topic by far
Review: I found the 1st edition of this book to be the best book on this topic I have found. I use much of the code and many of the concepts from this book in a hobby level multi-user RPG I have written. My review of that book is attached below.

Because I greatly appreciated the content of the 1st edition, I also bought the second edition.

Basically, the second edition is the first edition updated for DirectX 9.0. The text and the code are practically verbatim with small changes here and there to account for changes in technology and probably minor improvements the author wanted to make from the first edition.

The most obvious difference (aside from using DirectX 9.0), is that the first few chapters from the first edition have been removed. The discussion on how to design rpgs from a story line perspective, intro to C++ and a few other things were removed as well as the last chapter on marketing your game.

Editorially I can see why they did that. It makes the book much more focused on the "meat" of programming an RPG using DirectX. Also, I personally barely paid any attention to those chapters in the first book anyway as I focused on the programming myself. However, I thought they added an element of style to the book that was quite nice, so I miss them a little.

In summary, this book is pretty much the same as the first edition in all of the important ways. Since I thought extremely highly of that book, I think extremely highly of this one too.

------------------------------------------------------------

Review of Programming Role Playing Games with DirectX 8.0

I had a specific objective in mind when I bought this book. I'm in the process of writing a hobby level multi-user RPG for me and maybe up to a hundred or so other players (not many hundreds or thousands). I have a solid background in C++, less so in DirectX.

I've bought many books on game programming to help me with this process and to my surprise I've found this one simply amazing while most of the others I've found to be little more than expensive doorstops. :)

Like all the books of this nature, I read it in very much a "pick and choose" manner, focusing on chapters I liked and extracted code from the CD for places where it helped me. I found the material covered and, more importantly, the code representation of that material to be extremely helpful in my coding process.

I believe the tips and code the book provides (which all compile and provide very reasonable and practical applications for the ideas demonstrated) saved me (literally) hundreds of hours of research (not to mention trial and error) finding methods that work and work well and covered all of the core components I would want in a role-playing game. It covered multi-player over the internet, 2d and 3d rendering in directX, how to construct combat, spells, chat, and inventory systems and a variety of other items.

Naturally, I had to do a lot of customization to make the game do what I wanted it to do and I had to merge several of the ideas discussed into my own framework (for example the multi player network section is covered more or less stand alone where clearly other parts of the book need to be integrated with it to form a real game), but the result is I have a basic game up and running in a fraction of the time it would have otherwise taken, which no other book has ever really brought me.


Rating:
Summary: Beginning to Intermediate, With Software
Review: Need I point out that computer game playing has become big business. With the commercial market flat, or perhaps even slowing down (businesses find that for word processing you don't get any more performance out of the latest Pentium 4 than you get out of earlier machines and are upgrading much more slowly).

Game playing, on the other hand, needs all the computer power that can be had. With each increase in processing and especially in video processing power the realism of the game gets better. Now with the advent of Direct X Version 9.0 the programming of games has progressed far beyond where it was when I first got involved.

In this book, a master of the profession covers game programming from beginning to intermediate level. He also includes a lot of software that you will need to design state of the art games. This includes: DirectX 9/0, Paint Shop Pro, gameSpace, GoldWave.

With the growth of the business, the need for programmers has likewise increased. Reading this book won't guarantee you a job in the business, but without the knowledge it contains, you won't get one.

Rating:
Summary: My head hurts
Review: Some authors really need to debug their code better. I got the book thinking it would really help me and to some extent it has. It does explain the dirext X and Direct3d functions well, but trying to get his code working is difficult. He created a "game core" which has alot of his own personal code that, I would imagine, works on his machine, but when put to the test, fails to work on mine. Here's the errors I got from his classes and functions.

Compiling...
Core_Graphics.cpp
d:\temp game work\gamecore\core_graphics.cpp(368) : error C2660: 'Begin' : function does not take 0 parameters
d:\temp game work\gamecore\core_graphics.cpp(989) : error C2664: 'D3DXCreateFontIndirectA' : cannot convert parameter 2 from 'struct tagLOGFONTA *' to 'const struct _D3DXFONT_DESCA *'
Types pointed to are unrelated; conversion requires reinterpret_cast, C-style cast or function-style cast
d:\temp game work\gamecore\core_graphics.cpp(1004) : error C2039: 'Begin' : is not a member of 'ID3DXFont'
c:\dx90sdk\include\d3dx9core.h(296) : see declaration of 'ID3DXFont'
d:\temp game work\gamecore\core_graphics.cpp(1013) : error C2039: 'End' : is not a member of 'ID3DXFont'
c:\dx90sdk\include\d3dx9core.h(296) : see declaration of 'ID3DXFont'
d:\temp game work\gamecore\core_graphics.cpp(1034) : error C2660: 'DrawTextA' : function does not take 5 parameters
d:\temp game work\gamecore\core_graphics.cpp(2391) : error C2660: 'Draw' : function does not take 7 parameters
Error executing cl.exe.

Tile.exe - 6 error(s), 0 warning(s)

Plus his steps to building your direct x environment, specifically chapter 2, is disjointed and broken. I followed through the book and the simple program failed to work. I suppose I put something out of order, but since the auther doesn't specify any order I'm out of luck.

So, the requirements for this book are....
1. 2 yrs+ of C++ programming
2. Patience, and lots of it.
3. Alternate reference.