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Title: Focus On 3D Terrain Programming by Trent Polack ISBN: 1-59200-028-2 Publisher: Premier Press Pub. Date: 11 December, 2002 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $29.99 |
Average Customer Rating: 3.73 (15 reviews)
Rating: 2
Summary: It should be called "Stories about terrain for teenagers"
Comment: I am beginner to terrain programming but:
If you want to learn how to load heightmap or to generate it, this book is for you. If you want to learn something about algorithms, you would bless whitepapers after reading that. Trents explanations on algorithms are kind of:
"Phew! That's a lot of pseudo-code and lot of ugly little bit shifting/masking ops! Well, never fear. It's all a lot simpler than it looks." - explanation to extremely hard to understand code (a lot of k,cx,ix, (index==0?1:-1)&3 type of code, etc)
Style of this book gives me idea that it was written for about 15-year old teenagers, his jokes are even not funny at all. (about 10% of book are his jokes)
Code is pretty slow and he USES OPENGL, making his programs completly useless for game developers. I'm really disapointed wasting my money. I gave 2 stars because now I know few ways for generating heightmaps and for whitepapers available to download for free from elsewhere...
Rating: 3
Summary: Not bad
Comment: First of all, Polack's writing style is very annoying. He tries to make his writing "hip" by randomly adding in references to pop culture. It just doesn't work. It makes the book harder to read. At worst, his style is insulting.
Style aside, the content of the book is not bad. It shows you the main concepts in terrain rendering. Three popular Level of Detail algo's are presented: ROAM, Geomipmapping, and quadtree rendering. The implementation details are pretty much left to the reader (or you can read his code in the CD-ROM). You WILL have to read the terrain whitepapers and understand them (also on the CD).
The book is basically for the person who knows a bit about gfx programming (OpenGL, Direct3D, or whatever) and wants to get his/her feet wet in terrain rendering.
If you have already read the geomipmapping whitepaper and understand its concept, you will find this book useless.
Rating: 2
Summary: I didn't want to learn how to make SLOW terrains
Comment: This book teaches just the basics. For more info, you need to get other books. The samples use OpenGL and are useless for real game coding. There are better terrain books available.
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Title: Focus On 3D Models by Evan Pipho ISBN: 1592000339 Publisher: Premier Press Pub. Date: 27 December, 2002 List Price(USD): $29.99 |
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Title: Real-Time 3D Terrain Engines Using C++ and DirectX 9 (Game Development Series) by Gregory Snook, Greg Snook ISBN: 1584502045 Publisher: Charles River Media Pub. Date: June, 2003 List Price(USD): $49.95 |
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Title: Tricks of the 3D Game Programming Gurus-Advanced 3D Graphics and Rasterization by André LaMothe ISBN: 0672318350 Publisher: SAMS Pub. Date: 02 June, 2003 List Price(USD): $59.99 |
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Title: Focus On Curves and Surfaces by Kelly Dempski ISBN: 159200007X Publisher: Premier Press Pub. Date: 25 November, 2002 List Price(USD): $29.99 |
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Title: Game Coding Complete by Mike McShaffry ISBN: 1932111751 Publisher: Paraglyph Publishing Pub. Date: 01 May, 2003 List Price(USD): $39.99 |
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