3D Game Engine Architecture: Engineering Real-Time Applications with Wild Magic (The Morgan Kaufmann Series in Interactive 3D Technology) 1st Edition by David Eberly (PDF)

Description

Dave Eberly’s 3D Game Engine Design was the first professional guide to the essential concepts and algorithms of real-time 3D engines and quickly became a classic of game development. Dave’s new book 3D Game Engine Architecture continues the tradition with a comprehensive look at the software engineering and programming of 3D engines. This book is a complete guide to the engineering process, starting with a walk-through of the graphics pipeline showing how to construct the core elements of 3D systems, including data structures, the math system, and the object system. Dave explains how to manage data with scene graphs, how to build rendering and camera systems, and how to handle level of detail, terrain, and animation. Advanced rendering effects such as vertex and pixel shaders are also covered as well as collision detection and physics systems. The book concludes with a discussion of application design, development tools, and coding standards for the source code of the new version of the Wild Magic engine included on the CD-ROM. Wild Magic is a commercial-quality game engine used by many companies and is a unique resource for the game development community.

User’s Reviews

Editorial Reviews: Review “Eberly has done it again. [Here] is everything needed for the development of commercial quality 3d games…Let the games begin.” -Timothy Prepscius, DimensionDoor, Inc.”Readers of Eberly’s previous books, 3D Game Engine Design and Geometric Tools for Computer Graphics, asked for a volume with more code samples and fewer equations. This book will please and aid them greatly.. That key points are sometimes underscored with a dry wit is characteristic of how a great teacher makes studying a difficult topic personally rewarding for the student.” -Joseph Goldstone, Lilliputian Pictures”Credo Interactive has been using the WildMagic API for the past 3 years in various commercial projects. 3D Game Engine Architecture provides an excellent source of theoretical background and practical usage information for the API. Together the textbook and the WildMagic sourcecode form a comprehensive and well designed foundation for any 3D application.” -Lars Wilke, Director of Development, Credo Interactive Inc.”For those that have searched for a commercial quality rendering library available at virtually no cost and with extensive clear documentation. Let them look no further. From low level structures, to high level application design, Eberly has laid out everything necessary for commercial quality game development. May the projects inspired by his writings be plentiful and prosperous.” -Timothy Prepscius, DimensionDoor, Inc. Book Description The eagerly awaited companion to the bestselling 3D Game Engine Design- the book that set a standard for the industry From the Back Cover Dave Eberly’s 3D Game Engine Design was the first professional guide to the essential concepts and algorithms of real-time 3D engines and quickly became a classic of game development. Dave’s new book 3D Game Engine Architecture continues the tradition with a comprehensive look at the software engineering and programming of 3D engines. This book is a complete guide to the engineering process, starting with a walk-through of the graphics pipeline showing how to construct the core elements of 3D systems, including data structures, the math system, and the object system. Dave explains how to manage data with scene graphs, how to build rendering and camera systems, and how to handle level of detail, terrain, and animation. Advanced rendering effects such as vertex and pixel shaders are also covered as well as collision detection and physics systems. The book concludes with a discussion of application design, development tools, and coding standards for the source code of the new version of the Wild Magic engine included on the CD-ROM. Wild Magic is a commercial-quality game engine used by many companies and is a unique resource for the game development community.Features*CD-ROM with the complete C++ source code for Wild Magic version 3, a commercial-quality game engine for Windows, Linux, and OS X.*A comprehensive, practical guide to all the steps necessary to build professional-quality real-time simulations with just minimal mathematics required.*Emphasizes the application of software engineering principles and describes the architecture of large libraries. About the Author Dave 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 that computer 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 Read more

Reviews from Amazon users which were colected at the time this book was published on the website:

⭐In preparation for my 3D game engine, I have been trying to read all I can on 3D engine design and architecture. Although there are some good books out there, it’s very difficult to find a text that will walk you through everything you need to know. That said, 3D Game Engine Architecture: Engineering Real-Time Applications with Wild Magic by David H. Eberly gives it a good attempt.The book covers the author’s Wild Magic engine, and discusses certain choices he made when developing the engine. It briefly touches on OpenGL, discusses abstracting away platform-specific details, 3D mathematics (and there is a lot of math in this book), an object system, scene-graphs, level of detail, render states, sorting, terrain, animation, collision detection, physics, and more. A lot of ground is covered in less than 800 pages.However, I found much of the book difficult to follow and still feel like I could have a better picture of the “architecture” of an engine. When I think of “architecture” I think about a broad 500 foot view of a project. I think of flow charts or UML. I expect discussion on how all these disparate elements come together a form a whole. Sadly, that is mostly missing from this book. What the author provides is a good insight into his particular engine, and certain specific aspects of that engine. While this is still a great example to look at, I feel the text could have been more robust in terms of painting the big picture. Some of the things that I found missing were an event system, which seems crucial to an object-oriented engine, or a component architecture, really any type of structure that allows communication between classes.Additionally, I found myself getting lost multiple times while reading the book. The author would frequently put in dense mathematical equations and proofs, sometimes spanning multiple pages, and by the end you would be left to wonder what the purpose of the equation even was. I feel like having proofs of equations was not really relevant to the architecture, and surely there are many books on straight math if the reader needed that. Some math is necessary, of course, for a 3D engine but the space could have been used for more important topics.Not really a jab at the book so much as it is the author’s coding conventions, I really did not like his style. I realize this is somewhat of a holy-war with programmers, but I guess we all have a style that is comfortable for us. Personally I found the author’s style to be really obtuse, and made reading the code snippets more difficult. For example, for a camera’s forward vector, he would use something like:m_pkFVecWhere “m_” was a member variable, “p” is a pointer, “k” is of a class type, and “FVec” for forward vector. Personally I would use simply:forwardVectorJust glancing through the code, which one is more apparent to what it is? This really bothered me to no end, but I guess you can chock it up to personal taste.All-in-all it may sound like I am putting down on this book, but I actually did find it useful in a lot of ways. Certainly if you are aiming to create a 3D game engine from scratch, you will need any and all the help you can get. So yes, still read this book. However, I had much higher expectations and I feel it was a missed opportunity for the author. While it is still a decent resource, this should not be your first stop in engine development.

⭐This is an acceptable introductory book for the architecture of an AAA-quality game engine, under the consideration that it has so little competition.The most significant criticism I have of the book is its repeated digression of topics into a documentation of the Wild Magic engine. If you intend to use the Wild Magic engine, I highly recommend the book, but for anyone not using it, this book saves far too few pages for discussions of general engine architecture.For example, the entire second chapter is basically a documentation of the basic types defined for the Wild Magic engine. If you are architecting a large scale project, you do not want to start the discussion with talk of a smart pointer class. Or an array class. Unfortunately, this is exactly how the book begins.Throughout the book, the reader is constantly forced to shift through documentation for each Wild Magic class. While the author does use the engine to illustrate points, often the point is so heavily mixed with the documentation that it is tedious to pick out the general discussion.My secondary criticism of the book is that too many words are used in specific (but uncommon) ways – making it hard to follow at times. The sad part is that the author acknowledges this for some words (which helps the reader) but fails to for others. An example of the latter is when the author concedes that he uses the word `animation’ to mean any event that happens over a period of time. You will not find that definition in any dictionary, but at least he specifies his intent, which is slightly forgivable. What is not forgivable is the other phrases/words that are not acknowledged as being uncommonly used, such as `world bounds’ and `local bounds’. Too often I found myself carefully following discussions not because I found the material difficult, but because I needed to extract the context for which the author is using a word or phrase. In this sense it makes it hard for anyone to simply use the book for reference purposes.This book deserves three stars because it is a good (although sometimes short) treatment of the many subjects that are part of a 3D game engine. It loses one star for trying to combine two related, but what should be separate discussions – general engine architecture and documenting Wild Magic. It loses another for being overly verbose and dry (see my secondary criticism). It has so few competitors that you might just have to accept its failings and shift through the material to dig out the general architecture nuggets that are dispersed throughout the book.

⭐The book combined with the working(!) examples on the CD really get you started. The very first example shows how you can draw an object, view it in perspective projection, rotate and translate the object, and rotate and translate the camera.The examples use OpenGL API, and I compiled only the VC++ 7.1 project that use OpenGL as the rendering mechanism in VC++ 8.0 on Windows Vista – this works well.Only complaint is that there is no chapter that explains the matrix model of OpenGL. Sure enough this is to be found in a lot of other books, but if the author had decided to put in a chapter explaining the matrix model – e.g. how the perspective transformation matrix is derived from first principles, then this would be the only book you ever need.

⭐I’ve had several false starts at 3d programming. I’ve tried using the code from several other books but quickly gave up after getting a short distance into the concepts. Making the sample programs work with Windows XP and Visual Studio just isn’t that easy in most cases. These programs worked as indicated with Visual Studio. I was quite happy.None the less the code could use more documentation and clarity. For instance in the simple drawmesh program the LoadBmp24 routine returns Hight and Width as a side-effect of the call. I tried my own odd shaped bitmap and the routine kept failing. These two comment lines would have been really helpful: // OpenGL prior to 2.1 requires textures be in 2d arrays // whose dimensions are multples of 2.After spending hours tracking that down it was easy to adjust the routines to actually work with arbitrary bitmaps and triangle meshes.

⭐I work in the game industry and currently I’m jumping from general engine programming to more specialised areas in rendering programming. I bought this book by recommendation in gamedev forums.I have to say it’s very easy to read, these kind of books are my favourites, the author had the guts to actually show his code to the world and nowadays is a luxury to see more than maths everywhere because people are afraid of other programmers pointing out the flaws.That said, be very careful of the usage of general programming guidelines in this book. Grasp out for the core concepts and learn from it but when you do implement it, take your time and design the stuff in “better” ways, Mr Eberly is a mathematician after all.Things like: RTTI, polymorphism, streams for IO, are a NO-NO in efficient gaming engines. Get functions should return a value, not calculate it on the spot, that is also a recurring thing in this book which will sink your framerate.That being said I definitely recommend this book to the aspiring 3D graphics programmer, is worth a read as long as you are able to spot the pitfalls of the programming aspect. If not, you are better off reading about the efficient usage of C++ language for games or real time applications.But hey, we all have to start somewhere.

⭐Good Book

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