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Textbook (Hardcover - New Edition)
Textbook Information
A major revision of the international bestseller on game programming!
Graphics hardware has evolved enormously in the last decade. Hardware can now be directly controlled
through techniques such as shader programming, which requires an entirely new thought process of a
programmer. 3D Game Engine Design, Second Edition shows step-by-step how to make a shader-based graphics engine and how to tame the new technology. Much new material has been added, including more than twice the coverage of the essential techniques of scene graph management, as well as new methods for managing memory usage in the new generation of game consoles and portable game players. There are expanded discussions of collision detection, collision avoidance, and physics &151; all challenging subjects for developers.
* Revision of the classic work on game engines &151; the core of any game.
* Includes Wild Magic, a commercial quality game engine in source code that illustrates how to build a
real-time rendering system from the lowest-level details all the way to a working game.
* Fully revised and updated in 4 colors, including major new content on shader programming, physics,
and memory management for the next generation game consoles and portables.
Audience: Professionals or students working in game development, simulation, scientific visualization, or virtual worlds.
More Reviews and RecommendationsDave Eberly is the president of Geometric Tools, Inc. (www.geometrictools.com), a company that specializes in software development for computer graphics, image analysis, and numerical methods. Previously, he was the director of engineering at Numerical Design Ltd. (NDL), the company responsible for the real-time 3D game engine, NetImmerse. He also worked for NDL on Gamebryo, which was the next-generation engine after NetImmerse. His background includes a BA degree in mathematics from Bloomsburg University, MS and PhD degrees in mathematics from the University of Colorado at Boulder, and MS and PhD degrees in computer science from the University of North Carolina at ChapelHill. He is the author of 3D Game Engine Design, 2nd Edition (2006), 3D Game Engine Architecture (2005), Game Physics (2004), and coauthor with Philip Schneider of Geometric Tools for Computer Graphics (2003), all published by Morgan Kaufmann. As a mathematician, Dave did research in the mathematics of combustion, signal and image processing, and length-biased distributions in statistics. He was an associate professor at the University of Texas at San Antonio with an adjunct appointment in radiology at the U.T. Health Science Center at San Antonio. In 1991, he gave up his tenured position to re-train in computer science at the University of North Carolina. After graduating in 1994, he remained for one year as a research associate professor in computer science with a joint appointment in the Department of Neurosurgery, working in medical image analysis. His next stop was the SAS Institute, working for a year on SAS/Insight, a statistical graphics package. Finally, deciding thatcomputer graphics and geometry were his real calling, Dave went to work for NDL (which is now Emergent Game Technologies), then to Magic Software, Inc., which later became Geometric Tools, Inc. Dave's participation in the newsgroup comp.graphics.algorit
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January 14, 2007: Are you a professional or student working in game development? If you are, then this book is for you. Author David H. Eberly has done an outstanding job of writing a second edition of a book which focuses on the design of the scene graph management system and its associated rendering layer. Eberly, begins this book by discussing the details of a rendering system, including transformations, camera models, culling and clipping, rastering, and issues regarding software versus hardware rendering and about specific graphics application programmer interfaces in use these days. In addition, the author discusses rendering from the perspective of actually writing all of the subsystems for a software renderer. He also takes a look at the essentials of organizing your data as a scene graph. Then, he focuses on specifically designed nodes and subsystems of the scene graph management system. The author then looks at some general concepts you see in attempting to have physical realism in a three-dimensional application. Next, he discusses a lot of mathematical detail for much of the source code you will find in Wild Magic. Then, he takes a brief look at the basic principles of object-oriented design and programming. The author continues by discussing memory management. Finally, he takes a look at a handful of sample shaders and the applications that use them. This most excellent book is very much enhanced, describing the foundations for shader programming and how an engine can support it. Perhaps more importantly, the book is the most comprehensive reference available for the development of shader-based 3D graphics engines!
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May 06, 2002: This text applies a rigorous mathematical background to the design of 3D graphic engines. I suggest that you pick up some textbooks on linear algebra and introductory 3D transforms before delving into the underlying structure that this book exposes.