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Webmaster Book Store > Webmaster books beginning with P
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Programming a Multiplayer FPS in DirectX (Game Development Series) |
Author: Vaughan Young
Published: 2004-12-20 |
List price: $49.95
Our price: $36.46
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As of: January 08th, 2009 07:45:36 AM
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Customer comments on this selection.
 Programming a multiplayer FPS in directX - Oh really?
To start with, I would say the reader needs to have some basic knowledge of DirectX before reading this book.
This is not a book that "teaches DirectX with the goal of creating a First Person Shooter". It's a book where the author explains how his game engine/framework he built on DirectX works. It's not the type of book that explains to you step by step what is going on and tells you to add this piece of code here, which in my opinion, is the best way of teaching something. Rather, it's a book that lets the reader open up the source code in the CD/DVD and expect him to figure out where the code the author is talking about is located.
Furthermore, the source code won't even compile cleanly in modern versions of visual studio.
Now, if you want to learn how an FPS game engine/framework was created, perhaps you might consider reading this book. I would recommend you look forth to modern game engines and forget about the book, as the end game is not all that good anyways...
So basically what I'm saying here is: 1. This is not a DirectX tutorial for newbies 2. The code/game is rather outdated.
The author knows what he's talking about, though. The actual code is pretty good looking. He's got a great concern for proper memory allocations and memory cleanups. The game loop he designed is pretty consistent too, and very well thought of. My only regret is that, in my opinion, the whole "tutorial" part of the book was disastrously focused, which is a shame.
 Godd introduction, complete coverage
In general I'm very pleased with the book "Programming a multiplayer FPS in directX". It provides a very nice introduction on how to approach the task of building a complex 3d application for user with basic knowledge of C(++) and DirectX. Structured programming is important! It is nice that one has such a concrete result at the end of the book. The only drawback is that it could have a little more in depth treatment of certain areas, but hey, it is already almost 500 pages :)
Interesting book; good analysis
At my school we used this book for our networking class. (I had been begging our teacher to show us some directPlay stuff... yes, I'm aware that directPlay is ugh in terms of networking, but, it was a lot better than learning some java networking stuff. At least to me).
This book was an invaluable tool for designing my networking system. I basically gutted this networking system and stacked on some variable size packets that I studied from one of the Lamothe (actual author:Todd Baron ) books. (weird book, guy talks about his exploits in ultimate online for like, almost a chapter before he goes on to explain about how you can hack the networking system for exploits.
This book shows you how to implement a peer to peer network and then treat it like a server/client system. It's an interesting (I chose to just go strictly peer-to-peer in my system) approach. And I read in one of the Game Programming Gems a way to bypass some of the connectivity issues with peer to peer networks.
Regardless, this book is an EXCELLENT study of networking for games. I read the networking chapter probably 20x during our project and it took me quite a while to figure out exactly what he was doing with it. In the end, it's a logical system that works fairly decently.
We didn't use the rest of the code in the book too much. Some of the other people in my class modified the FPS game to do other things (made a shooting gallery, other's made some text based games on the networking code, etc).
The source code is useful and there is an update available for it (his precious linked list had a memory leak in it... he really harps on about it).
If you have never designed a game system before. This book is going to be a tremendous help. It teaches a bit about design patterns without all the unnecessary mumbo-jumbo, and how they directly relate to game programming and how they're useful (helloooo singleton).
The code is in visual studio 6 I believe, and you have to set the default project to the actual project and not the engine to get it to run. Also, if your hardware doesn't support hardware vertex buffers (you have integrated graphics, we had a couple people on the team with this issue) you have to change one of the directX intializers to something else to account for this (can't remember the call now, look at some other directX init calls from somewhere else and you can find it).
He goes into quite a bit of detail about each topic and the basics, and then delves down into the design of each system. It's very methodical and well thought out. AND YOU GET SOMETHING WORKING AT THE END!
Do not get this book if:
You are new to C++(you better have a CRYSTAL clear understanding of pointers and OOP, classes etc).
You are not interested in engine design.
You hate directX, or directPlay.
You hate max; he uses 3dsMax to make the scene files etc.
You are an industry professional that has a basic understanding of how a game engine works. This is definitely a n00b book.
You expect to get your hand completely held at each step. He does skip over some details that are easily discovered if you delve a little into the MSDN or any other online resource.
Get this book if:
You are incredibly interesting in engine design and want to get your feet wet; as well as learn some engine design in the process.
You're interested in any of the systems this book covers ( I can really only attest to the networking system, and that he uses directPlay, which is in sunset mode).
Interested in basic modular programming and looking to expand the code in the book to meet your needs or to experiment with. It is an incredibly useful base to start with.
Are extremely comfortable in c++/directX and are interested in expanding your knowledge and it's applications into games.
Overall, the book was a good purchase and is an excellent stepping stone into engine design. It has been very useful in my future projects since I've used this book in my course work.
Useful book, really bad FPS game
I've enjoyed reading this book. It effectively shows you how to write a very basic first person shooter in directx. Well done. It briefly introduces rendering, a simple scripting system, peer-to-peer networking, handling user input, scene management, collision detection, sound effects, and more. Not bad. The code is fine, I had no problems compiling it in VS2005 (check the authors website for the latest code though) and I learned a lot from reading the book and going through the code. In short, I am glad to have bought and read this book and I do recommend it to others.
The book does have some drawbacks though. I feel that the actual game that is built in this book is embarrasingly bad. The networking system, rendering system, user interface, and everything else about it are bare-bones functional, but certainly not good enough that you'd want to encorporate them into your own game. I suppose that the thought is that you should first learn to build a Yugo before you learn to build a Ferrari, but personally I'd rather just learn to build the ferrari right off the bat :) Oh, and why must the graphics suck so badly? I realize that it doesn't necessarily impact the goal of learning the various topics, but seriously, how hard would it have been to at least provide a decent character model, or some decent textures and lighting and so forth?
One last thing. The book assumes a familiarity with C++ and to a lesser extent with Directx, so if you are brand new to either of those, the book will be pretty challenging to follow.
 Man does this book suck!
This book is terrible! You read through the whole thing, and you don't even learn anything!
I would strongly recommend people not to buy this book.
Otherwise, you just wasted 30 dollars on worthless bs.
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