Opengl Game Programming [Anglais] [Broché]

The book is very easy to read and understand. It's been written in such a way that I think even someone with no experience programming games will be able to pick it up and soon be able to create a simple 3D game.

In addition to the OpenGL coverage, the coverage of DirectInput and DirectSound is some of the best I've ever seen. The chapters on special effects and physics were of particular interest, as were the chapters on engine design and the final creation of a game.

Whether you're just getting interested in game programming, or have been doing it for a while but don't know OpenGL, you need this book.

What the book cover and abstracts fail to emphasize is that despite the "OpenGL" in the title, this is a rather Microsoft Windows specific book in many aspects. A considerable portion of it is spent talking about Windows specific APIs like DirectSound, and most of the examples use Windows event handling. It's probably hard to avoid the former issue, as there are no platform independent APIs for high quality sound, but many of the examples would not have suffered from being written using GLUT event handling.

Overall, the book is written in a sensible style that may be more accessible to some readers than the "official" OpenGL manuals. However, the areas that I had independent knowledge on (Math and Physics), I noticed numerous mistakes and sloppy reasoning, which may or may not extend to the areas that I can't verify independently.

Not overly valuable to me as a non-Windows programmer who has read the "official" tutorial volume, probably quite a bit more valuable to a Windows based programmer with little prior OpenGL experience.

This book explains OpenGL in the context of other PC programming interfaces such as DirectInput and DirectSound. It also explains practical game-oriented programming tasks such as loading animated Quake2 models.

Recent OpenGL features such as multitexturing are also explained. Multitexturing is really important for dynamic game lighting effects and extra realism.

While other books such as the OpenGL Programming Guide and Reference Manual explain the OpenGL API in more detail, this book explains OpenGL in the specific context of game development on the PC.

I recommend this book for anyone interested in learning about PC game programming. While you may be learning about OpenGL for programming games, you should also be aware that OpenGL is the industry-standard 3D graphics API for professional 3D graphics applications and is the only truly multi-platform standard 3D API available. OpenGL is supported on Windows, Apple, Linux, and Unix workstation platforms. This makes knowledge of OpenGL an important asset for any computer programmer.

I am pleased to have been asked to author the foreword of this book.