The Zen of Direct3D Game Programming (Prima Tech's Game Development) | Peter Walsh

The Zen of Direct3D Game Programming (Prima Tech's Game Development) | Peter Walsh | How to run the code examples.

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The Zen of Direct3...

	The Zen of Direct3D Game Programming (Prima Tech's Game Development) Peter Walsh Muska & Lipman/Premier-Trade, 2002 - 896 pages average customer review:based on 41 reviews view larger image
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Whether you're a professional programmer looking to get up to speed on DirectX® 8.0 or a hobbyist new to game programming, this book will be your ultimate guide to programming amazing 3D computer graphics with Microsoft® Direct3D® 8.0! It provides a solid introduction to interactive entertainment engineering, Windows® programming, and advanced graphical techniques. Inside you'll find deep coverage of 2D graphics, including using double buffering, page flipping, programming a bitmap font engine, and creating a Quake-style programmable console. Read on to learn sophisticated 3D graphics programming techniques such as bilinear filtering, texturing, materials, lights, and how to develop an object-orientated frame based object hierarchy in order to simulate amazingly realistic animation effects. Begin your journey into the world of Direct3D - and great games - here, now!

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What's with all the crying?

I see that many readers seem to have had problems getting the samples to compile. Having trouble using your compiler and debugging tools? I ran into compile errors, fixed them. Had a few runtime errors, fixed them too. Got every sample up and running with no tears.

Many of the readers who expressed dismay at simple compile errors go on to state that the have "solid" or "sound" or "extensive" C++ experience....

My only real complaint is that EVERY SINGLE VOLUME in the original Premier Press series had that danged C++ primer section that takes up almost a third of the book, rewritten over and over by each successive author. Thankfully, the newer books in the series seem to have dropped this bad habit. The end samples had that "cool" console and background that resized the background image for every frame - thus bad framerates. If you resize the image on load and then render the new image to the buffer instead it eliminates tons of overhead - bringing framerates up to the cap of 60fps on most systems (I have a computer graveyard here and some of them were only able to reach 28fps - p2/400 w/256MB RAM and an old Voodoo 2). Eliminating the background starfield brought the framerate up to 60fps on all of my systems.

Zen Lesson 1: Optimization is all in YOUR head.

And as far as "figuring out what order to call" various functions - a little time with a piece of paper and a little know-how with flowcharts might help you out there.

Some day you should try sitting down with a technical whitepaper on a system and try sorting things out from that. Too many people are apron-string programmers who can't figure out anything for themselves - hand-holding babies without a clue. Stop whining, learn something about the trade you're trying to embrace, and realize that mommy isn't going to code your game for you.

Have a nice day and happy coding.

Richard

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How to run the code examples.

I am not sure how to get the 3d examples to run in full screen, but if you make a few changes, they will run windowed pretty well.

First off you need to change the function InitDirect3DDevice that initializes direct x.
change to: d3dpp.BackBufferFormat = d3ddm.Format;
change to: d3dpp.Windowed = TRUE;
and comment out anything that starts out with d3dpp.FullScreen

then there is something wrong with the printing of the frame rate
comment out FrameCount(); from GameLoop()
comment out PrintFrameRate(); from Render()

it also makes it nice to change the window style to an overlapped window, hope that helped.

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Not Useless Not Great

I got this book dirt cheap at HalfPricedBooks so I can't complain too much, if you can get it cheap why not!

I think it will be a good reference book for beginning directX programmers. What you end up with is a simple working 3d game engine. Most of what you get is functions to simplify the iterface with dx8.

However I found the writing style highly annoying. My english teachers repeated over and over "take out the fluff". And when all you are looking for is information (its a programming book not a novel) this book has way to much fluff. The author actually says his English teachers would never have guessed he would write a book (or if he did it would look like this book).

The examples he shows in the book are not all on the CD and he doesnt always give explicit enough instructions to setup the examples yourself (for me). Which code base am I suppose to use for this example, the final code base? chapter 5 code base?

But hopefully this will serve as a basic (and cheap) introduction which I will supplement with some internet research. My next step will be to code a simple game using the engine from this book, but that will definitely require some additional resources

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Adequate but Careless

I am now half way through this book and find it ok in some ways and not ok in other ways.