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Programming an RTS Game with Direct3D | 
 enlarge | Author: Carl Granberg
Publisher: Charles River Media
Category: Book
List Price: $49.95
Buy New: $30.22
You Save: $19.73 (39%)
New (27) Used (8) from $30.00
Avg. Customer Rating:  5 reviews
Sales Rank: 304829
Media: Paperback
Edition: 1
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 512
Shipping Weight (lbs): 2
Dimensions (in): 9.2 x 7.4 x 1
ISBN: 1584504986
Dewey Decimal Number: 794.81536
EAN: 9781584504986
ASIN: 1584504986
Publication Date: October 11, 2006
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Shipping: Expedited shipping available
Condition: Brand New Book 100% guaranteed. Never Read before. No underlining or highlighting. Ships within 24 hours of when you order. Free Tracking with every order. Quality Plus from QP Books.Brand New Book 100% guaranteed. No underlining or highlighting. Ships the same day you order. Free Tracking with every order. Quality Plus from QP Books.
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| Editorial Reviews:
Product Description
Making a commercial-quality RTS game takes thousands of dollars and a large team of talented people. So is it possible for a book to teach one person how to make their own RTS game? The answer is yes. Programming an RTS Game with Direct3D is such a reference. The book provides intermediate programmers with a step-by-step implementation guide for programming a complete RTS game. In this book you'll learn how to make a very simple RTS game with all of the core elements. Don't be fooled though-- even this simple game will take a lot of knowledge and hard work. But during the process of making the game, you'll learn many general game programming skills, including terrain generation, skinned meshes, path fi nding, visual effects, sounds, networking, how to create a user interface, and much more. Each chapter deals with one or more specifi c component in the building process to mimic a logical project workfl ow from concept to completed game. The book begins by laying the theoretical framework and discussing RTS game design and various implementation issues. From there, you'll move on to implement component after component, until you are finally ready to put them all together to form an RTS game. Throughout the book, there is a heavy emphasis on coding and a lot of this code will be found in the example applications on the companion CD-ROM.
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| Customer Reviews:
Straight Forward Writing September 5, 2008
This is a good book that really walks you through the start, middle and end of programming a simple RTS game with Direct 3D. The code base does seem a little dated and some items seemed to be glossed over, but with good purpose.
Overall a good book to begin from.
 Excellent- working examples in every chapter March 22, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
This book was much better than most game programming books out there, because although you do end up with a working, advanced game, each chapter tackles a topic, and visually shows you what is happening. So instead of simply building one game throughout the book, ending finally with something that works, you can see how the concepts progress throughout the book.
Overall the best game programming book I have found so far, the only problem being coding problems between programming environments. Get this if you're having trouble programming a game with other books, or even if you're trying to get the hang of some direct3d concepts- either way it is clear, concise, and definitely recommended.
Not a bad book at all! December 19, 2006
5 out of 5 found this review helpful
This book covers most of the essentials topics in the RTS development.
Pro:
- the code is clear and easy to understand
- it covers topics such as fog of war, building units, simple AI, networking, and special effects
- the author is helpful and updates his code to reflect the Visual Studio 2005 version.
- a working demo at the end for you to see!
Con:
- the chapter that teaches you how to create a model 3Ds Max could have taken out and uses it for something else like more advanced AI topics.
- With the 470 pages of materials total, some of the explanation were briefly explained.
Overall, I think it's a good read book to show the really simple and basic features of most RTS games have.
 Code needs work November 20, 2006
11 out of 12 found this review helpful
I agree with the previous post.
Since most of the code is not included in the printed book which is actually pretty small it would be nice if the code actually compiled on a modern compiler like VS2005.
I didn't see anything in the book that actually mentioned what compiler or DX SDK the authors used to compile the code but it must've been VC 6 or earlier since the first problem with the code is using for loops with a variable that goes out of scope because of newer scope rules in VS2003 or higher.
Second problem is that most of the code is linked with directshow which is no longer included with DirectX SDK.
If the authors at least included some sort of contact information or webpage at least we could have a chance of getting this code to work but I wasn't able to find anything.
Maybe they could reply to this post.
The only reason I'm not giving the book less stars is that is actually concludes with a game demo is that is pretty damn good almost like age of empires 1 quality. And I've never seen a game programming book with a better quality demo and I own almost 100 or more!
Excellent book November 4, 2006
10 out of 11 found this review helpful
I had been working on a 2D RTS game for about 4 months, once I saw this book I was immediately interested. I've been reading the book for about a week now and all I can say is that it was well worth the money. The examples on the CD are excellent. The terrain rendering is done really well, most of my previous experience with books teaches you how to render a terrain and spread on texture over it. Carl Granberg takes this a lot farther by showing how to break the terrain up into subsets so they can be culled. He also shows several techniques using shaders and textures to create really cool looking terrains. The bad thing is that it is going to take me a long time to fully understand everything that is happening. I am so excited about this book that I just can put it down.
I've been making a goal of typing in the code he has and then modifying it in some way so I really understand what is happening. The main thing this book does is it builds a really good foundation for creating a full RTS game. Not to mention the book comes with prebuilt projects for Visual Studio which is something a lot of books leave out. The code is really well organized, and I've found very few errors in it. I have been working on my own framework for my games for a while, and have created several 2D games, but now it is time to incorporate what this book teaches so I can use it to create 3D games of any type. I am really looking forward to the chapter on creating the minimap.
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