Customer Reviews

Game Engine Architecture

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This book is special because it examines engine components in the context of a heterogeneous system, rather than placing each in a vacuum. It is thoughtfully written, and approaches problems from multiple angles - using examples from both open-source and commercially licensed engines. I appreciated the emphasis on designs that exploit parallelism and cache-coherency.

Of particular interest are the chapters on animation and collision/physics. They provide a great deal of depth without focusing on implementation specifics. The book lacks a chapter on audio. However, in its treatment of collision and the game object model, it addresses many of the issues related to data-sharing and event handling between disparate entities.

I would highly recommend this book to any new graduate, developer entering the game industry, or junior-level engine developer (because it is easy to miss the bigger picture when you are working within your specific area of engine code).

(Note: This is not an instruction book. It will not give you the source code to build your own engine. Instead, it is an excellent reference that will allow a developer to make informed decisions when designing their own engine or when designing components for a larger engine.)

(Note about the reviewer: I have contributed to two AAA game engines (PC/XBox 360/PS3), written two render engines, a ray tracer, a cross-platform game engine (PC/Mac), and a multi-threaded operating system. I wish this book existed years ago because it teaches many lessons that I had to learn the hard way.)

This is the book every game programmer should read. It starts small with a look at all the layers that go into a game engine, then with great care it outlines each one until you walk away with an understanding of almost every element that composes a game's core systems. As a programmer or architect, it's all too easy to get lost in the impossibly huge scale of game development - the immense scope of it all is daunting and sometimes you can feel completely lost. Jason walks you through each step with care, and even gives a couple examples from enormous works like Uncharted. Occasionally it can get a bit complicated, but he doesn't misstep and throw you into the deep end unassisted. Each section is carefully written to speak to you with english and comes with many illustrations.

While each section doesn't go into enormous detail, it's enough to springboard from. In some cases you'll have enough to just go off and do it yourself. In others, you will feel inspired to research further. In these cases, references to other books and web resources are provided. Excellent!

Having worked on some commercial projects before, I can say with confidence that this book helped me get up to speed with understanding the overall architecture of what needed to be built even in a large system. So it wasn't surprising when I found the book popping up on co-workers' desks. Definitely required reading for any developer. Can't recommend enough.

Complete!
Excellent for beginner or more advanced programmer. I recommande it to every one who want to learn new tips for optimize their code or to learn how game engine works.

There are many 3d engine(normally graphic engine), physics and other books but that's not enough for real world game engine.
To develop real world game, needs lots of things such as memory management, resource packing, data structure library (like custom STL), profiler and so on.

Author described all things for game engine and I believe there is no other books about these topics because it is very hard(really^53 hard) and only few people know everything.

The only thing I really want is.

Need more practical resources. This book has lot of text but just not enough. Author touched too many issues but some chapter just not enough. If author described all things and more detail
(including more practical resources, executable program or sources), this book will be over the 1500 pages or more.
I hope some other people help him or author do this for us, it will be amazing.

Oh, I need to talk about this book. Simple, there is only one book and you have no choice!!

If you wanna know how real world game engine works and constructed, this book is the best for you. But I don't recommend this book if you are looking for working projects(or examples)
(This is the only reason that I gave 4 stars)

Great explanations of game engine design all the way from the 3D math all the way to real-world sample code. I'm a Computer Engineer working in computer graphics, and this book was wonderful to read.