Excellent intermediate book

I have had this book for a couple of years. It is one of the best games programming books I have read. Be aware that over half the book is devoted to developing a software 3D engine. I found this to be quite high quality and I have even ported it to C++ with no issues. The engine supports texture mapping, shade mapping, z-buffering, collisions, pathfinding and BSP trees. As the author states, learning how things work in software helps when you later use hardware 3D rendering. To be honest, I was really impressed with the speed the 3D demo ran at, considering most people still think Java is slow.

The first half of the book develops a nice game framework to help with redifining keys, choosing a screen resolution, sound effects, animation and 2D scrolling with collision detection. There is enough info here to produce a good Mario clone. There is a chapter on networking but it seems disconnected from the rest of the book (I think it was written by a different author).

One of the best things though is that all the source code (available from his site) compiles straight off the bat, and works with no modifications. I cannot tell you how rare this is for a computer book. All the examples are built as Ant scripts and I simply imported them into my IDE (IntelliJ IDEA, but most other IDEs can also import Ant scripts). They all compiled with no errors and ran exactly as described in the book.

In summary this is an excellent buy for the intermediate Java programmer who wants to get into 2D and 3D games.

Other Reviews

• Nice
• Great for game developing using JAVA.
• Developing Games in Java
• Excellent intermediate book
• It's OK, But It Lacks Thorough Explanations