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Reddit mentions of 3D Game Engine Architecture: Engineering Real-Time Applications with Wild Magic (The Morgan Kaufmann Series in Interactive 3D Technology)

Sentiment score: 5
Reddit mentions: 7

We found 7 Reddit mentions of 3D Game Engine Architecture: Engineering Real-Time Applications with Wild Magic (The Morgan Kaufmann Series in Interactive 3D Technology). Here are the top ones.

3D Game Engine Architecture: Engineering Real-Time Applications with Wild Magic (The Morgan Kaufmann Series in Interactive 3D Technology)
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Found 7 comments on 3D Game Engine Architecture: Engineering Real-Time Applications with Wild Magic (The Morgan Kaufmann Series in Interactive 3D Technology):

u/drakonite · 16 pointsr/gamedev

You may want to narrow that down a bit, but okay, here are some highlights, with amazon links to help disambiguate.

u/joeldevahl · 3 pointsr/gamedev

I read Realtime Rendering a lot when I started programming 3D. It's good book , and the site links to a lot of other good books and sites.

I wouldn't recommend 3D Engine Architecture or 3D Game Engine Design though, since they give a very bloated approach and are quite C++ specific.

Remember to Keep It Simple. =)

u/CodyDuncan1260 · 2 pointsr/gamedev

Game Engine:

Game Engine Architecture by Jason Gregory, best you can get.

Game Coding Complete by Mike McShaffry. The book goes over the whole of making a game from start to finish, so it's a great way to learn the interaction the engine has with the gameplay code. Though, I admit I also am not a particular fan of his coding style, but have found ways around it. The boost library adds some complexity that makes the code more terse. The 4th edition made a point of not using it after many met with some difficulty with it in the 3rd edition. The book also uses DXUT to abstract the DirectX functionality necessary to render things on screen. Although that is one approach, I found that getting DXUT set up properly can be somewhat of a pain, and the abstraction hides really interesting details about the whole task of 3D rendering. You have a strong background in graphics, so you will probably be better served by more direct access to the DirectX API calls. This leads into my suggestion for Introduction to 3D Game Programming with DirectX10 (or DirectX11).



C++:

C++ Pocket Reference by Kyle Loudon
I remember reading that it takes years if not decades to become a master at C++. You have a lot of C++ experience, so you might be better served by a small reference book than a large textbook. I like having this around to reference the features that I use less often. Example:

namespace
{
//code here
}

is an unnamed namespace, which is a preferred method for declaring functions or variables with file scope. You don't see this too often in sample textbook code, but it will crop up from time to time in samples from other programmers on the web. It's $10 or so, and I find it faster and handier than standard online documentation.



Math:

You have a solid graphics background, but just in case you need good references for math:
3D Math Primer
Mathematics for 3D Game Programming

Also, really advanced lighting techniques stretch into the field of Multivariate Calculus. Calculus: Early Transcendentals Chapters >= 11 fall in that field.



Rendering:

Introduction to 3D Game Programming with DirectX10 by Frank. D. Luna.
You should probably get the DirectX11 version when it is available, not because it's newer, not because DirectX10 is obsolete (it's not yet), but because the new DirectX11 book has a chapter on animation. The directX 10 book sorely lacks it. But your solid graphics background may make this obsolete for you.

3D Game Engine Architecture (with Wild Magic) by David H. Eberly is a good book with a lot of parallels to Game Engine Architecture, but focuses much more on the 3D rendering portion of the engine, so you get a better depth of knowledge for rendering in the context of a game engine. I haven't had a chance to read much of this one, so I can't be sure of how useful it is just yet. I also haven't had the pleasure of obtaining its sister book 3D Game Engine Design.

Given your strong graphics background, you will probably want to go past the basics and get to the really nifty stuff. Real-Time Rendering, Third Edition by Tomas Akenine-Moller, Eric Haines, Naty Hoffman is a good book of the more advanced techniques, so you might look there for material to push your graphics knowledge boundaries.



Software Engineering:

I don't have a good book to suggest for this topic, so hopefully another redditor will follow up on this.

If you haven't already, be sure to read about software engineering. It teaches you how to design a process for development, the stages involved, effective methodologies for making and tracking progress, and all sorts of information on things that make programming and software development easier. Not all of it will be useful if you are a one man team, because software engineering is a discipline created around teams, but much of it still applies and will help you stay on track, know when you've been derailed, and help you make decisions that get you back on. Also, patterns. Patterns are great.

Note: I would not suggest Software Engineering for Game Developers. It's an ok book, but I've seen better, the structure doesn't seem to flow well (for me at least), and it seems to be missing some important topics, like user stories, Rational Unified Process, or Feature-Driven Development (I think Mojang does this, but I don't know for sure). Maybe those topics aren't very important for game development directly, but I've always found user stories to be useful.

Software Engineering in general will prove to be a useful field when you are developing your engine, and even more so if you have a team. Take a look at This article to get small taste of what Software Engineering is about.


Why so many books?
Game Engines are a collection of different systems and subsystems used in making games. Each system has its own background, perspective, concepts, and can be referred to from multiple angles. I like Game Engine Architecture's structure for showing an engine as a whole. Luna's DirectX10 book has a better Timer class. The DirectX book also has better explanations of the low-level rendering processes than Coding Complete or Engine Architecture. Engine Architecture and Game Coding Complete touch on Software Engineering, but not in great depth, which is important for team development. So I find that Game Coding Complete and Game Engine Architecture are your go to books, but in some cases only provide a surface layer understanding of some system, which isn't enough to implement your own engine on. The other books are listed here because I feel they provide a valuable supplement and more in depth explanations that will be useful when developing your engine.

tldr: What Valken and SpooderW said.

On the topic of XNA, anyone know a good XNA book? I have XNA Unleashed 3.0, but it's somewhat out of date to the new XNA 4.0. The best looking up-to-date one seems to be Learning XNA 4.0: Game Development for the PC, Xbox 360, and Windows Phone 7 . I have the 3.0 version of this book, and it's well done.

*****
Source: Doing an Independent Study in Game Engine Development. I asked this same question months ago, did my research, got most of the books listed here, and omitted ones that didn't have much usefulness. Thought I would share my research, hope you find it useful.

u/johsko · 2 pointsr/gamedev

Note that Game Engine Architecture != 3D Game Engine Architecture. They are different books with similar names. While both are worth looking at, the former is my favorite (and the one OP mentioned).

u/thatbooisaspy · 2 pointsr/gamedev

This is where refining google searches and just finding information would shine, and this is a necessary skill when entering game engine development because trust me, some information is near impossible to find, especially with OpenGL.

There is a book everyone recommends reading, personally I haven't but it's called "3D Game Engine Design" and "3D Game Engine Architecture". I can't vouch for these though, but i've made it without them, it's your choice.

There's also tons of information online that you can use to build a engine (specific parts like timing) but not necessarily a monolithic tutorial. For example, there is a book online called "Game Programming Patterns" that I found useful for someone else's insight on how things like input is handled. Again, i'm not going to post all the resources you want here because this same question has been answered before.

If you don't find that the tutorials or resources linked here or found yourself enough, there are hundreds of game engines, or games that are open source (or at least have source available) that is a treasure trove of design patterns, bad or not. An example would be id Software's Doom 3.

I know you're looking for something specifically OpenGL, but really despite how old OpenGL's design is at the end of the day it's just a graphics API. You take data, and you process it and display it at the window, every graphics API does this. I'm guessing you are searching for things like "OpenGL game engine design" but it's not necessary and may help your search effort a bit.

At the end of the day, and at least try. If I don't know how to tackle a problem, I attempt to solve the problem with usually the worst way possible then improve and improve until it's at least presentable. No one thought of a perfect engine design, and ideas are constantly improved.

u/cedartreebreeze · 1 pointr/gamedev