Game Engine Toolset Development

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Game Engine Toolset Development
| 2006-03-06 00:00:00 | | 0 | Game Programming


Toolset development is an extremely broad topic. Game Engine Toolset Development provides you with a core set of skills and a comprehensive insight that will aid you in the development of game engine utilities, significantly reducing the time period associated with the construction phase of a project. The book starts off with topics regarding development methodologies and best practices, and then proceeds into advanced topics like swap chain management and MVC object model automation with CodeDom. An introductory working knowledge of C# and the .NET 2.0 framework is expected, allowing the content of each topic to be directed towards the subject and avoiding trivial and introductory explanations. Readers are not required to have any experience developing game engine tools. Terminology and design fundamentals specific to toolset development are clearly depicted and explained. The companion Web site provides downloads of all source code from the book, as well as several bonus chapters.

User review
,,.
I didn't like the tone of this book at all. I don't like the corporate speak. Instead of talking about people coding tools its `companies` or `studios`. What ever happened to the hobby programmer?


I can do my own case studies of game tool sets. If GUI's are so simple to create in HLL's then we probably don't need to read a book on it (at least not this one). There are also better places to go to learn about UML and overall design.


Bottom line,,. I'll take API documentation and a book on general software design over this garbage any day.



User review
Interesting little compendium
I admit that at first I was thinking this book would focus more on the game engine part of the toolset development in its title. I knew it wasn't REALLY about developing a game engine but even so, make sure you understand what you're getting.


That said, I really liked this book. I'm halfway through it already (it's a very quick read given how discrete each chapter is and the clear and easy to read print and examples).


I've read a number of game development books and you rarely get everything done right. This book gets close. The author describes the particular problem the chapter seeks to solve (e.g. encryption, batch processing, etc.) and goes through the steps of solving it.


The book is similar to those programming gems types of books that aren't organized in some linear fashion but are discrete chapters on specific topics that can be picked and chosen as you see fit.


The author does a very good job of putting the examples together and many of the chapters have been useful to me (I plan on implementing a number of the tools/frameworks he mentions).


If you're working on a game engine, I really suggest trying this book out. This assumes you're not already an expert game programmer who already built a lot of these sorts of tools before.


If you're looking for something that will help you build a full-fledged game engine, look for another book,,.then come back to this and get it to help you flesh out your toolset.

User review
Recipe book for tool developers
This is an excellent book, which covers a lot of important aspects of game/engine tool development, but it is more like a recipe book, as each chapter subject is almost stands on its own - just like game programming gems series. My favorite is how to integrate native code into a managed application. The book is well written (one of the best I've read recently), and the only thing i missed is a few chapters on how-to integrate into an existing pipeline - like importer/exporter for a common 3d package at least. A better title for this book would be `(game)tool programming gems`

User review
If the industry pros chiming in weren't enough,,.
Then, as a hobbyist, I'll just let you know that this book not only teaches, but flat you gives you some great modular code that you can work into many different types of tools.


There's also some great design principles covered that have improved my workflow, even though i'm currently working solo.



User review
An excellent Microsoft.NET 2.0 introduction relating to gaming
I just received my copy of Game Engine Toolset Development and I have been unable to put the book down. The author gives a good introduction to .NET 2.0 and relates it to toolset development for games. The chapters are easy to read and follow and he gives good advice on how to build good tools. He could have looked at other toolsets to make the book more complete, but I see this book as a way to introduce students to game programming who have a basic programming background (Java, C++, C, Alice 2.0, etc.).