Book review: Game Coding Complete, Third Edition
One of my personal favourite intermediate programming books, if only for the ‘Tales from the pixel mines’ that are dotted throughout the book which are the author’s first hand experiences from developing games professionally. Some of which a very entertaining and gives an insight on how some features were in done in the real world.
There are also other highlighted tidbits for ‘Best practise’ and ‘Gotcha!’ that helps break up the pages of text to make the very large book easy to digest. It covers a huge range of topics relating to using C++ in games developing which includes memory management, smart pointers, resource handling, 3D math and programming style which are explained in a matter that is straightforward, understandable and if need be, are accompanied by clear diagrams.
The last few chapters of the book cover areas of software development for scheduling and testing which are a nice addition that sets it apart from other programming books and shows that development is not just about code.
Unfortunately, it focuses heavily on using DirectX which means a lot of the sample code is not directly applicable if you are using OpenGL or developing on Linux or Mac. However, all the principles still apply regardless of API and the book is well worth getting for any programmer that is past the beginner stage and starting large projects.
Game Coding Complete, Third Edition by Mike McShaffry
Hg Init: a Mercurial tutorial by Joel Spolsky »
Great tutorial and induction to the Distributed Version Control Mercurial which includes a section dedicated to the differences between using Subversion (SVN) and Mercurial for those that are used to using a Centralised Version Control system.
A presentation by Jonathan Blow on ‘How to program independent games’ at a UC Berkeley’s Computer Science Undergraduate Association.
Quite a interesting talk where the main message is not to over complicate the process and focus on getting the product done rather then getting everything perfect.
Well worth a watch.
(Source: the-witness.net)
Automated Testing: Building A Flexible Game Solver »
Interesting article on using an AI script to ‘solve’ complete a game and be used for automated testing. I have been looking into this type of thing myself and researching if it would be possible to write one for the games I am working on at Playfish using something like Sikuli as the player.
However, for it to be useful as an automated tester, it would need to be able to pick up on crashes and where the player would be stuck and report to a server/email the developers on where and how it happened.
