Hey RJAG. We don't always see eye to eye but you seem to be one of the more level headed guys around here! I almost always appreciate your posts -- they usually have an interesting perspective to them -- even if they aren't well received. I probably should pay more attention to them! But enough of how reddit tends to shoot the messenger and ignore the message.

You're right -- a lot of material is total crap. Out-of-date, not explained well, piss-poor naming, poor architecture, etc.

Warning:

I first started doing professional game dev back in 1995, so I am extremely biased. I've seen the fad of programming languages, toolkits, libraries, etc., come and go. I think Boost's 1,109 lines for a simple CRC is over-engineered C++ crap compared to the ~30 lines of C/C++ you actually need to solve the real problem.

With the #include <disclaimer.h> out of the way ... ;-)

The best authors I have found are (aside from Jason obviously):

• Christer Ericson's Real Time Collision Detection
  
• Everything by Eric Lengyel i.e. Mathematics for 3D Game Programming and Computer Graphics, Projection Matrix Tricks, and A Bigger Mathematical Picture for Computer Graphics
  
• Everything by Mike Acton
  
• Everything by Jonathon Blow
  
• Everything by Casey Muratori
  
• Everything by Wolfgang Engel
  
• Robert Nystrom's Game Programming Patterns is surprisingly very good. See note below!
  
• Beej's Guide to Network Programming
  
• Gaffer on (Networked) Physics
  
• Matt Pharr's Physically Based Rendering, Second Edition: From Theory To Implementation is fantastic
  
• OpenGL Insights is good
  
• Everything by David H. Eberly, such as the Game Physics Even the ancient 3D Game Engine Architecture: Engineering Real-Time Applications with Wild Magic is worthwhile -- but this should be last on your list.
  
• Everything by Michael Abrash
  
• I was never impressed by Tomas Akenine-Moller's Real Time Rendering though some people like it. The object/object intersection website is fantastic
  
• The ancient Texturing and Modeling, Third Edition: A Procedural Approach is an oldie but goodie!
  
• The AI Game Programming Wisdom series is decent
  
• Now I'm really dating myself! Avoid everything by Andre LaMothe -- he was popular in the '90s
  
• Likewise Avoid Algorithms and Networking for Computer Games It is overpriced academic crap that barely includes 2 chapters on networking!
  
  The first few guys are all old-skool hard-core developers. The younger crowd doesn't like them since newer game devs usually spend more time arguing over pointless subjects such as the "proper" C++ pointer to use. Good game developers are more interesting in practical and pragmatic engineering tradeoffs then worrying about theoretical "perfection."
  
  Speaking of Design Patterns, Christer Ericson recently said:
  
  > Design Patterns are spoonfed material for brainless programmers incapable of independent thought, who will be resolved to produced code as mediocre as the design patterns they use to create it."
  
  And to some degree I would agree with that.
  
  i.e. You'll notice this sub likes to waste time arguing over "proper architecture" such as Entity Component System
  
  My view is: IF your data, code, and model match this problem, then go ahead and use them. However keep in mind that rarely does the real-world exactly match some theoretical problem set. At the end of the day all you care about is shipping -- not being some academic writing theoretical "perfect" architecture -- whatever that is supposed to mean.
  
  Hope this helps!
  

This is a huge topic and there's a lot of ways to do this. Just looking at how the game itself communicates is only one very small part of the picture though of course it's very important. In terms of things like authentication, storing what items a user has, friends lists, matchmaking (if relevant), and stuff like that, you'll find that those elements have far more in common with enterprise web application development than traditional "game development" (just look at what Riot is doing in terms of scalability, great presentations on GDC Vault for the last couple of years but not sure they're free or not). A good start is to investigate service oriented architecture (SOA), this is a good overview and Roy Osherove has some good stuff as well that you can investigate in his blog. Start googling for resources, they are plentiful.

For the actual server-server communication in terms of managing world state, you need a good understanding of networking in general first. Once you have that, then read this: http://www.stanford.edu/class/cs340v/papers/colyseus.pdf

That will probably answer a lot of your questions while simultaneously creating a lot more questions. Look at the references in that paper and explore some of those. Area of interest filtering is something you'll find quite useful to understand as well, which Colyseus goes into detail about but you can find more generalized information in the book [\"Algorithms and Networking for Computer Games\" by Jouni Smed and Harri Hakonen])http://www.amazon.com/Algorithms-Networking-Computer-Games-Jouni/dp/0470018127) which is expensive so try to find it used if you can (might be worth the money though). Those authors also have some research papers published that are worth looking at as well.

There are a few books out there about MMO development specifically but most of them are absolute shit and have almost no relevant technical detail, particularly in terms of how to actually network these things and (more importantly) how to make them scale.

> I really don't why know there aren't any good "Game Networking" books??

Have you looked at "Algorithms and Networking for Computer Games"? I don't own it and haven't read much of it, but I've flipped through it at bookstores a few times and found it interesting...

http://www.amazon.com/Algorithms-Networking-Computer-Games-Jouni/dp/0470018127