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My book 3D Game Engine Design (3DGED) was written to explain the high-level details that arose in the development of the real-time 3D game engine NetImmerse. Read the first page
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Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Index
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Thankfully Mr Eberly has taken a different approach in this book, and has minimized the mathematical mumbo jumbo, and focused on the engineering issues in architecting a game engine which with the advent of vertex and pixel shaders has entered a new level of complexity.
The text focuses around the 'Wild Magic' engine developed by Mr Eberly, and which is included on a CD with the book. The engine all in all is a pretty nice piece of work. It doesn't contain everything a commercial game engine might have - such as scripting or networking support, but its got pretty much everything else. Each piece of functionality in the engine is broken down in the books text along with suitable extracts from the source code. One of the great things is if you want the detail you can just go to the source base, and find out really goes on.
One of the other great aspects of the book is that Mr Eberly often describes why he's made a specific implementation choice, explaining competing solutions, and perhaps why he changed an implementation from a previous Wild Magic version. This is excellent stuff, and provides a real depth of understanding of what it takes to engineer a modern engine, which is passed on directly to the reader.
Another great aspect of the book is the implementation in the engine of the vertex/pixel shaders that is used. Its well explained and implemented, and I don't know any other book that covers this fairly new subject matter in the context of engine architecture.
So in summary:
A really nice piece of work. Mr Eberlys best book so far. A great place to find out what makes a modern engine work, or to help building your own.
The best game engine architecture book currently available to my knowledge.
Despite this, there are a few improvements / weaknesses I can see with the book. The TArray class has a crash bug in it (setting the grow size to 0 on an empty array and then try adding to it), The TList class is extremely simplified for low memory consumption and not speed (i.e. only one variety is presented to you). There is not enough detail on custom heap management, which is essential for console game development.
However, these are very minor issues that are easily spotted if your implementing your own game engine. Its not really practical in a book covering so much detail in this kind of depth to talk about all the different types of each data structure (get a data structure book !) but it certainly gives you on a plate the ones you need in a game (from there you can look into lumped lists etc.). On the whole, this is an excellent book that makes you aware of all the issues involved in writing an engine of your own and ties up how the different areas fit in with each other superbly. It allows you go away and thoroughly investigate specialised topics for better/other alternatives and you know it will be relevant to what your trying to do. If I had two words to describe this book it would be "Top Class". Get it.
Listmania!
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