Reviews (1)

This book is nicely laid out!
I have been publishing 2-d and flash games for a bit, and now need to hit DirectX for 3d again (stopped at v8) and need to catch up.There were several things I needed for the new game project starting and it was easy to find all of them right off the bat.I checked first in the index.e.g. I need landscape/terrain generation, .x file loading, and concepts described in pure mathematics (not pseudo code) before showing the actual code. Don't be afraid of matrix math/calculus and get this book.It is a total re-write from the ground up of a previous book.I like this guy. ... Read more

Subjects:  1. Computer Books: General    2. Computer Graphics    3. Computer Graphics - Game Programming    4. Computer Programming    5. Computer games    6. Computers    7. DirectX    8. Games / Gamebooks / Crosswords    9. General    10. Programming    11. Video & Electronic - General    12. Computers / General   

Reviews (2)

Up To Date View of the State of the Art
This book is a collection of forty-seven articles around the common theme of shading images in real time. Many of these effects have been common in the movie world for many years, but in that application the shading can be done on very expensive machines and the time it takes to produce an image is not important because the resulting image is to be shown on screen rather than immediately on a display. Now, with the increasing power in the PC's in widespread use, these techniques are being brought down to the standard desktop.
A comprehensive collection of ready-to-use techniques
Shader X3: Advanced Rendering With DirectX And Open GL compiled, organized, and deftly edited by Wolfgang Engle (Senior Special FX Engineer at Wings Simulations) is packed from cover to cover with 630-pages of insightful new techniques, innovative approaches to common problems, as well as practical tools and tricks that will help in all areas of shader programming. All of the articles comprising Shader X3 evolved from the the working experiences of industry professionals, and all of the sections were expertly edited by shader programming experts. This comprehensive collection of ready-to-use techniques will enable even the most novice programmer to get up to speed quickly, and the more experienced programmers will find a wealth of insights and techniques to improve efficiency and avoid redundancies. Shader X3 is an essential, "user friendly", and highly recommended instructional reference for shader programmers.
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Subjects:  1. Computer Books: General    2. Computer Graphics - Design    3. Computer Graphics - Game Programming    4. Computers    5. Computers - Games    6. Video & Electronic - General    7. Art / Graphic Arts    8. Computer graphics software   

Reviews (12)

Man does this book suck!
This book is terrible! You read through the whole thing, and you don't even learn anything!
Good but not perfect
This book gives the reader a good general understanding of how networked gameprogramming works, and also a good bit of information about the internals of a complete game engine. The downside about this book is that it uses mixed hardware/software vertex processing which results in noncompatable programs with my laptop, however, if you change that to only software and recompile every demo then it works greate (A setting in CreateDevice()...), but slow (on my laptop...),, the occlusion checks ain't the best, and the partitioning on load is slow,, slow as in - you cant augment the code for profiling or it will be runnig for more then 15 minutes on a 1.03GHz laptop... ("more then" due to the fact that i aborted it....) and the use of 3DsMAX files as levelmodels... and the occlusions based not on the real environement but on objects placed in the scene.. (invisible...)...
A perfect book for beginners/intermediate level programmers
This is a PERFECT book for intermediate level programmers that have a decent
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Subjects:  1. C++ (Computer program language    2. C++ (Computer program language)    3. Computer Books: General    4. Computer Graphics - Game Programming    5. Computer games    6. Computers    7. Computers - Languages / Programming    8. DirectX    9. Programming    10. Programming Languages - C++    11. Video & Electronic - First-Person Combat Games    12. Video & Electronic - General    13. Art / Graphic Arts    14. Computer Programming   

Reviews (42)

Great book to get started. Clear and Concise
I started DirectX programming recently. This book brings you upto speed very fast. It is well organized, written well, and is kept very simple. It's objective is to teach concepts and how to program specific concepts is C++. The examples and straightforward and illustrate whats in the text very well.
Very easy to follow
This book is written very well, and it is written in a way that allows the reader to follow without getting lost in the terminology.Everything is explained very well.I use the book constantly as a reference when programming.Pick this book up if your serious about learning DirectX.

Great Book -- Misleading title. :(
While I agree with all the other reviews on how this book is EXCELLENT for learning the introduction (and some advanced) concepts and applications of Direct 3D it is severely lacking one thing: game programming mechanics.
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Subjects:  1. Computer Books: General    2. Computer Graphics - Game Programming    3. Computer Graphics - General    4. Computer games    5. Computers    6. Computers - Games    7. DirectX    8. Programming    9. Programming - Software Development    10. Video & Electronic - General    11. Computers / General   

Reviews (8)

Out of date
Too much of the book is dedicated to showing assembly language shaders.The examples are built with the DirectX SDK and framework that was available when it was written, and won't compile with the later SDKs (I have June 2005).Other than that, it is a good reference to supplement the difficult to read SDK documentation.
Shaders and shader programming
As of this writing, there doesn't seem to be a real reference manual for HLSL and the shader assembly language. This book makes a good effort at filling that role, however.
Read DirectX9 SDK documents first.
I suggest to read DirectX9 SDK document fist that comes with DirectX9 SDK. Think about this book later. This book ends explanation as stream of comments of the simple sample shaders that come with SDK. I'd say this book is "out of focus". There are bunch of important things that should be explained - are not in this book. Such explanations are in SDK document.Read more

Subjects:  1. Computer Books And Software    2. Computer Graphics - Game Programming    3. Computer Graphics - General    4. Computer graphics    5. Computers    6. Computers - Languages / Programming    7. DirectX    8. Graphic Arts - General    9. Interactive & Multimedia    10. Multi-Media Hardware & Software    11. Programming - Software Development    12. Computers / Programming / Software Development    13. Multimedia    14. Programming languages   

Reviews (41)

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!
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.
Absolutely Atrocious and Useless
This book hardly qualifies to use the word Zen in its title if refering to Direct3D.Of the 16 chapters in the book, a mere 5 of them actually deal with things related to Direct3D.The first seven chapters deal only with Windows programming, which anyone who is reading a "Zen" book should already know. There is a lot of time spent talking about using the GDI with DirectGraphics surfaces which, by the author's own admission, is not adequately fast enough to write a game.Read more

Subjects:  1. Computer Books: General    2. Computer Graphics - Game Programming    3. Computer Graphics - General    4. Computer games    5. Computer graphics    6. Computers    7. Computers - Languages / Programming    8. Direct3D    9. Programming    10. Programming - Software Development    11. Three-dimensional display syst    12. Three-dimensional display systems    13. Video & Electronic - General    14. Computer Programming    15. Computer graphics software    16. Computers / Entertainment & Games / General    17. Multimedia   

Reviews (38)

So much info my brain hurts, in a good way.
Background: No professional programming experience, but i wrote MUDs in the late 90s. I learned C++ at a junior college. 4 classes of C++, analysis and design, discrete math, calculus, and a class of java. (and some other unrelated stuff)
Very good book on managed DirectX
This is a very good book on managed DirectX - i.e. using C# rather than using C++, using the managed rather than unmanaged API, using .Net, etc.Adequate chapters on how to get started but not in as much literal detail as some books - you will need to already understand how to use Visual Studio, how to include libraries into your Visual Studio projects, etc.Starts off with the basics and fundamentals but quickly moves into more advanced topics.

Decent approach, bad information
The way that this book approaches teaching Managed DirectX is a pretty good one compared to some other books I have looked at, provided that you are willing to do most of the work of trying to understand what you're doing yourself.
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Subjects:  1. Computer Animation    2. Computer Books And Software    3. Computer Graphics - General    4. Computer games    5. Computer programs    6. Computers    7. Computers - Other Applications    8. DirectX    9. Miscellaneous Software    10. Multimedia systems    11. Programming - General    12. Computer Programming    13. Computers / Computer Graphics / General    14. Image processing: graphics (static images)    15. Multimedia   

Reviews (21)

It's a bad book
Firstly, that book is not for beginners, so you should know DirectX previously. The engine explanation are tedious and short, and the author copies a lot of code in every page. You must know some engine programming knowledge prior to understand what he does.
Excellent Book
There are a great many terrain rendering white papers and other resources available online. Greg Snook's book helps you to take a lot of that information and put it together into a workable terrain engine. If you just picked up a compiler yesterday, or don't know the difference between an x-axis and a z-axis, this book isn't going to help you. While he does offer someprimer material, the focus of the book is on the terrain engine.
Talented Programmer, Poor Book Approach
While I do not doubt that Gregory Snook is a very talented programmer, the code shown in this book and on the accompanying CD are proof enough, I believe that this book is of no use to anyone except for the most experienced professionals who have weeks of time to burn learning about Terrain Engines. I am not the most experienced programmer, having only worked with C++ and DX for 4 years now, but the problem with this book is not in complex concepts, but in content. All of the fundamentals of creating and rendering terrain are covered, but the example code and the engine (Gaia) on the CD are overly complex for any sort of educational book. Possibly every single library that Snook referenced has special wrapper functions and classes around them, making an examination of any code snippet next to useless unless the reader has spent days going through dozens of wrapper classes learning all of Snook's syntax. While I do enjoy owning this book as a conceptual reference, I am afraid that it is next to useless as an aid in practical programming scenarios. ... Read more

Subjects:  1. C++ (Computer program language    2. C++ (Computer program language)    3. Computer Books: Languages    4. Computer Graphics - Game Programming    5. Computer Graphics - General    6. Computer games    7. Computers    8. Computers - Other Applications    9. Direct3D    10. Programming    11. Programming - Object Oriented Programming    12. Programming - Software Development    13. Programming Languages - C++    14. Three-dimensional display syst    15. Three-dimensional display systems    16. Art / Graphic Arts    17. Computer Programming    18. Computer graphics software   

Reviews (205)

So-So book, but you better have your comp with ya
This book does have some good parts to it and would be a great starting point to people wanting to get into games.It covers enough to get you going, but sometimes doesn't cover enough to let you expand on what you have learned.Much of the time, i would have to look through the sdk help to figure something out/get a better explaination of some of the stuff in the book.
To all who don't have a clue about Mr. LaMothe
As S. Randall pointed out, some reviewers claim that "Andre is not a real programmer" and made other comments like:
For the Naysayers:
There are many reviewers here who claim Andre Lamothe is not a real programmer, just a guy with a book deal.This cannot be farther from the truth.Here's a snip from an online interview:
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Subjects:  1. Computer Bks - Languages / Programming    2. Computer Books And Software    3. Computer Games    4. Computers    5. Computers - Languages / Programming    6. DirectX    7. Microcomputer Operating Environments    8. Microsoft Windows (Computer file)    9. Operating Systems - Windows    10. Programming    11. Programming - General    12. Video & Electronic - General    13. Computer Programming    14. Games / General   

Reviews (4)

Well written and easy to follow
This book is excellent. It is technically well written and easy to follow. The Author is obviously very knowledgeable in game programming and DirectX.

Be CAREFUL If You Plan on Buying This Book
The Good :
The worst book I ever bought
I totally regret buying this book. It explains nothing.
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Subjects:  1. Computer Books: General    2. Computer Games    3. Computer Graphics - Game Programming    4. Computers    5. Computers - Games    6. DirectX    7. Games / Gamebooks / Crosswords    8. Programming    9. Video & Electronic - General    10. Computers / Entertainment & Games / General    11. Software engineering   

Reviews (4)

Nice book with some flaws
ShaderX2 is broken in to two volumes, with this volume intended as an introduction to shader related topics to prepare the reader for the other volume, or for other shader books. It fills that role fairly well, though it does have a few shortcomings that keep it from being a great book.
Lots of good here
So let's focus on the good. Good source of information, but a so-so book overall
If you know nothing about the High-Level Shader Language (HLSL), then the information you need is in this book.Unfortunately, it's not a particularly well-written book.It's not horrible either, but it could have used better organization and clearer writing.For example, the "Introduction to the DirectX HLSL" chapter never gives an overall picture of how vertex and pixel shaders interact, and how data flows between them and the hardware.The author jumps right into to discussing shader syntax.Then, when he's barely explained enough to see what's going on, he jumps into a section on optimization, then a section on compatibility details between various shader levels, then he abruptly starts talking about code sequences that generate "_bx2" modifiers, without any set-up or real explanation of why.I realize that each chapter is written by a different person, but all of this random gear-shifting is in the same chapter.Read more

Subjects:  1. Computer Books: General    2. Computer Graphics - Game Programming    3. Computer Graphics - General    4. Computers    5. Computers - Languages / Programming    6. Programming - General    7. Video & Electronic - General    8. Computers / General   

Reviews (30)

Direct x and Direct Visual Basic
First of all I'd like to say that this book is really good because it is step by step in its foundation.It explains how to set up the programs it discusses.What I had problems with were that I understood the code from a template kind of perspective but did not understand exactly what each line of code was doing without a substantial background in Visual Basic 6.I jumped right into learning the game aspects instead of building a solid understanding of the concepts of the language of visual basic 6.Even though I was lacking certain pieces of the puzzle Mr. Harbour did a pretty decent job of explaining things even a novice like myself could grasp.I recommend this book to anyone who is interested but get the foundation in Visual Basic 6.0 first.This book is alot better than some of the books I've read before which stick code snippets throughout but have no semblance of order as to where they fit in. This is a must read!!!! It covers all aspects of creating a game and even gives multiplayer capability.All n all I give this a three thumbs up!!!

Needs to be updated to VB .Net
This book was written about the time VB .Net was coming out and the author even mentions that he considered writing some of the code in .Net.I bought the book, realizing it was dated, thinking that it would be a good learning experience to convert the examples to VB .Net.Of course, it's proving to be very frustrating.
Good Reference, However...
This book is in fact a good reference, but I hit snags trying to run the sample code.I have Visual Studio .NET and I love it, and thought that this book would be a good starting point for game programming.And it was until I hit the first program "ChunkyPixels"I put the code into the VB.NET IDE and it would not compile.The examples are all writen in VB 6.0 and has no compatibility with VB.NET.So, in conclusion, if you want a good reference and do not have VB.NET, buy this book, but if you have VB.NET you are, as am I, out of luck
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Subjects:  1. Computer Books And Software    2. Computer Graphics - Game Programming    3. Computer games    4. Computers    5. Computers - Languages / Programming    6. DirectX    7. Microsoft Visual BASIC    8. Programming    9. Programming - General    10. Programming Languages - Visual BASIC    11. Video & Electronic - General    12. Basic, Visual Basic & QBasic    13. Computers / Entertainment & Games / General   

Reviews (15)

>:(
What can I say people have said it in these other reviews this book gives you a bigger headach then ever. I first bought the C# version, which this book turn out to be liek that the code it self is full of holes and it's a big mess. This book is not for beginners as the title stated it will just bring you down into a bigger hole.

Beg your professor to change textbooks.
Miserable and frustrating. I wasted an entire weekend trying to learn from this book. I seriously think they outsourced the actual coding in the CD, because there are so many ridiculous inconsistencies.
Don't waste your time
The code examples in this book simply do not work. You have to rely on other books and looking up things yourself on the internet to get the examples working. If I wanted to do that, I wouldn't have bought THIS book!!Its thourogh in its coverage of DX9, but so are a lot of other books that have code that actually compiles. Don't waste your money. A programming book with programming examples that don't actually work is like a cookbook without any actual recipes. Useless. ... Read more

Subjects:  1. Computer Books: Operating Systems    2. Computer Graphics - Game Programming    3. Computers    4. Computers - General Information    5. Interactive & Multimedia    6. Computers / Entertainment & Games / General    7. Multimedia   

Reviews (5)

Best Direct3D Book I've Seen Thus Far
I picked this book up about a year ago as it seemed to start from the beginning and cover much ground.Little did I know at the time that this would be the best book I'd find on the topic a year later.The coverage on shadow volumes and shadow maps is impressive.The discussion of things such as the depth buffer and stencil buffers is good.Plus having access to the various vertex and pixel shaders code made it easy to learn from just reviewing the code. Good book
This book helped me understand vertex shaders and pixel shaders, which was the point of the book. The only thing I did not like about the book was that some of the code had bad logic. But its very readable code and I must give the guy props, he must have coded this super fast. Plus his chapter on video was werid and hard to understand and the code was akward and to me was out of place in the book. It had way to much source code and no explaination of why it works. His other book on curves was good too ... check it out.

Good book
This book helped me understand vertex shaders and pixel shaders, which was the point of the book. The only thing I did not like about the book was that some of the code had bad logic. But its very readable code and I must give the guy props, he must have coded this super fast. Plus his chapter on video was werid and hard to understand and the code was akward and to me was out of place in the book. It had way to much source code and no explaination of why it works. His other book on curves was good too ... check it out. ... Read more

Subjects:  1. Computer Books: General    2. Computer Graphics - Game Programming    3. Computer Graphics - General    4. Computers    5. Computers - Languages / Programming    6. Programming - Software Development    7. Computer Programming    8. Computer graphics software    9. Computers / Entertainment & Games / General    10. Multimedia   

Reviews (14)

Looking forward to seeing improved 3rd edition
I have read most of the book and I am critical of it.
A Great Book for Learning to Program Games
I bought the first edition of this book years ago when I was at a low point in my programming career.I hated my job and needed to change my life.I'd always wanted to program games and so I decided to learn how.I found this book after a bit of searching and getting some recommendations. I found the book to be easy to learn from, extremely informative, and packed with good ideas and useful code.At the same time, the writing style was easy to read and kept my interest.It's pretty rare for a programming book to be readable and not bone-dry boring in my experience.Reading this book and going through the examples helped me to create my own engine.It wasn't the best engine, but it taught me enough to know the right questions to ask and focus my future learning.
Want information?Look elsewhere.
While this book does give some useful information and tips, I found that most of the code in the game library is uncommented and the functions and connections between the classes is not clearly documented anywhere (an appendex section with the classes in the library and the relations to the other classes along with descriptions of the methods and members would have been nice).Although I did read the book over about three times, when it came to coding I found that I ended up looking more at the DirectX SDK documentation to figure out what was going on than I did at the book.Considering this is the second edition of the book (the first edition covering DX8), it also would have been nice if there would have been some kind of notification on what changed from DX8 to DX9, especially in the mesh/animation area.
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Subjects:  1. Computer Books: General    2. Computer Graphics - Game Programming    3. Computer games    4. Computers    5. Computers - Languages / Programming    6. DirectX    7. Fantasy games    8. Miscellaneous Software    9. Programming    10. Computers / Entertainment & Games / General   

Reviews (40)

It's just BAD!
Won't waste anymore of my time telling
The Book Professor Review
Generally this text is for beginners, so if you are someone who knows nothing about C# or Game Programming, you'll probably be very happy with the book or at least need to study it. Additionally, if you have already studied C# say in school or through other books, but want to learn Game Programming, then you'll probably be very happy with the book or at least need to study it.
Another example of "Type now understand later (if ever)"
I've gone through half of this book and will not be completing it.
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Subjects:  1. C# (Computer program language)    2. Computer Books And Software    3. Computer Books: Languages    4. Computer Graphics - Game Programming    5. Computer games    6. Computers    7. Computers - Languages / Programming    8. Programming    9. Programming Languages - C#    10. Programming Languages - General    11. C & Visual C    12. DirectX    13. Microsoft .NET    14. Programming - Object Oriented   

Reviews (10)

Originally very excited about the book
Many other reviews covered this but I will briefly restate what others have said.
Delivers what it promises
I see from prior reviews of this book that there are very mixed opinions regarding it. Its focus is quite narrow: it is only concerned with graphical user interfaces driven by DX9. As such it has no interest in the 3D capabilities of Direct3D, some interest in DirectInput and DirectShow but no real interest in the other DirectX APIs. A late beginner/early intermediate knowledge of C++ is assumed.
Dissapointing
Being very favourable it could be called a code listing. But the code is incomplete, the naming of the variables and methods seem almost purposefully misleading and the actually logic in some of the code is just off.
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Subjects:  1. Business / Economics / Finance    2. Computer Books: Languages    3. Computers    4. DirectX    5. General    6. Programming Languages - Ada    7. User interfaces (Computer syst    8. User interfaces (Computer systems)    9. Multimedia    10. Non-Classifiable   

Reviews (39)

Very frustrating book
I have to recommend against purchasing this book, even for absolute beginners.The book leaves out far too much important information, focusing instead of aspects of isometric game programming that most programmers could figure out themselves in a few hours (or via a search on google).