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Windows Game Programming with Visual Basic and DirectX (With CD-ROM)
by Wayne S. Freeze
List Price: $39.99
Our Price: $27.99
ISBN: 0789725924
Publisher: Que (15 December, 2001)
Edition: Paperback
Sales Rank: 122,002
Average Customer Rating: 3.4 out of 5
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Rating: 4 out of 5
Helpful; has me thinking about things
I just bought this book, and it is actually quite helpful. I have never written a game, but am fairly experienced in VB6. I wanted to explore DirectX programming, and this is a good start. As far as other reviews complaining about having to use Truespace, you can also use 3dStudio Max, get the file exporter from Microsoft and you can can create .x files with that. Should also work with Maya, and you can get that for free. I thought the code was well organized, and on my 1.2 ghz machine, I get excellant frame rates. I only wish there was more detail about Direct3d, but still, enough here to get started. I recommend this book if you are an intermediate level VB programmer, and need some ideas on how to program games, if you are new to VB, probably not the best book to get.
Rating: 5 out of 5
worth its weight in gold
In the context of showing you how to make a simulation game, this book shows you how to load meshes from outside sources like 3dsmax. What's more it's done simply and clearly explained. It also shows how to make your game scriptable and is a very good example of how to make your code object orientated. Every thing talked about in the book while shown in the use of a simulation game would apply to any other type of game with a little creative thinking. This book is a must, the price seals the deal.However, it's not without its faults. One thing to remember though is that you will need to refer to the cd, because the author cut the size of the book by only showing the relevant portions of the code to the topic in the book not the whole picture. However since the code makes use of a debug log you can't run the code from off a cd. You need to copy it to a space on your hard drive first and then open it in vb and run it. Lastly the modeling package featured in the book seems to be another me too product.
Rating: 3 out of 5
Good, but better with add-ons.
Wayne S. Freeze, Windows Game Programming with Visual Basic and DirectX (Que, 2002)First and foremost, a warning. Freeze's book, despite its publication date, deals exclusively in Visual Basic 6. If you're using VB.NET, a lot of this stuff is going to cause you to wonder what on earth Freeze is on about. I strongly suggest reading Keith Sink's DirectX 8 and Visual Basic Development in conjunction with this, and asking a lot of questions on a lot of VB.NET tech support mailing lists. (Microsoft's documentation on how to go from VB6-VB.NET with DirectX is not nonexistent, but it is such that nonexistent would have been better.) Given that .NET had already been in prerelease for over a year by this book's publication, one would think that, at the very least, the publisher would have made it very plain somewhere on the cover that the book dealt in a technology that's not compatible with the next generation of the language. An unforgivable oversight, especially if you happen to spend the full retail price for a copy of this book. That aside, Freeze's book is quite good in the way it introduces the reader to the new, and largely esoteric, combination of Visual Basic and DirectX (the latter technology was exclusively the realm of C++ programmers until 2001, when DX8 began to include VB wrappers). He's not afraid to use repetition to get his point across, and he does so in a laid-back atmosphere that's quite different from what one sees in most how-to programming manuals. Freeze teaches the VB/DX intersection through the programming of a SimCity-style games called SwimMall, which is in and of itself at least worth a discounted copy of the book. Needless to say it's not a commercial-quality game, as one would expect from a single person programming such a thing while under the pressure of a book deadline. But the routines and ideas therein are just the thing to spark the imaginations of novice game programmers; no matter what genre a person is working in, there are certainly routines here that will help a programmer out in various ways. Much of this code is easily ported to any other type of game framework. Very good stuff. Just remember the admonition in the first paragraph if you're working with .NET and haven't used VB before. (Actually, I recommend Sink in conjunction with this book anyway; the atmospheres of the two are a pleasant mesh, and when you can't find a niggling piece of information you need in one, the other is sure to have it.) *** ½
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