Friday, August 8, 2008

New C++ Game Developing Book Arrived

Yahoo! Google! It´s finally here. I ordered it about 2 weeks ago, and it´s here: Game Programming All In One by Bruno Miguel Teixiera de Sousa. It´s a pretty big book, but Amazon told me of its size before hand: 952 pages including index and contents and a biography of the author. The book was published in 2002 by Premier Press. The book has it´s own website, but I haven´t gone there myself, thus I don´t know if it actually works: http://gpaione.kyuumu.com. The author also says you can go to http://gamedev.net chat if you want to talk to him personally ("Just ask for Akura" he says) so I went there only to find out that he probably hasn´t visited gamedev since he published the book. Anyhow, I met some nice peopel on the Gamedev chat that helped me out with some of the issues I encountered going through the first chapters of the book.

Problems With The Book

1. It was published in 2002. I overlooked this on Amazon. The next time I get a book on C++ I´m going to ask for some references at the Gamedev chat and probably not ask for a book that´s so out of date. I can still learn a lot from this book, but I know I´m going to have to buy another book after this or rent a professional game programmer to teach me about the Source... code.

2. So far, I´ve caught 1 fat error in the question section of Chapter 2. It´s cool that he has a exercise section for the reader to test their knowledge, but it sucks when the answer to the question in the answer section is wrong. You probably want to know the question, here you go:

What would be the value of Result after following operations?

int Result, A, B;
A = 4;
B = 23;
Result = 9 + (A++ - --B) * B

The answer is -471 and I spent at least thirty minutes with a calculator trying to figure out how. I finally went to Gamedev chat to find out that the code is undefined behavior or something. Wierd stuff. For those that don´t know what A++ or --B are, i´m happy to inform that they are Unary Operators.

What´s Wizard(cool) About The Book?

It teaches you how to make a very simple game called Monster and it teaches you about Artificial Inteligence and Physics in programming games.

*adding GameDev to my favorite sites :D*

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