Game Coding Complete 4th Edition

Book Preface

The first edition of this book was published in the summer of 2003, just as I was making some big transitions of my own. The first edition gave me a chance to stand back and show programmers what really goes on in the world of game development. Writing the book was a challenge, but the rewards were many. I heard from programmers all around the world who enjoyed the book and found the stories, insight, and programming tips to be helpful. The second edition was almost a complete rewrite. The book went from around 700 pages to 1,110, and it was more popular than the first edition. In 2009, the third edition added AI, multiprogramming, Lua, and C# with the help of my friends James Clarendon, Jeff Lake, Quoc Tran, and David “Rez” Graham.

Three years later, I made a call to my publisher, Cengage Learning, and asked if a fourth edition would be a good idea. They said yes, and somehow I had to figure out how to find time to write it.

One of my friends, the co-author from the AI chapter of the third edition, and the only person second to me in posting threads on the book’s website, Rez, was a natural choice to help me. I called him, but I didn’t get the answer I expected. He not only wanted to help, but he wanted to do half the book with me and become partners.

What you hold in your hands is the result.

How This Book Is Organized

The book is organized into four parts:

• Game Programming Fundamentals (Chapters 1–4): Exposes some stuff that you’ll want in your game programming toolbox, like a good random-number generator. It also introduces the major components of games and how they interact. After you read the chapters in this part, you’ll have a good working knowledge of the real architecture that game developers use.
• Get Your Game Running (Chapters 8–9): It’s now time to learn how to get all of the main building blocks of your game together, including the initialization and shutdown code, the main loop, game actors, user interfaces, and input device code. You’ll find your first meaty game code examples. Often, many programming books just gloss over this stuff and jump right into the cool 3D code. But, in reality, this is the stuff you really need to know to create a successful game, no matter what type of game you want to build.
• Core Game Technologies (Chapters 10–18): The tougher code examples are in this section, such as 3D programming, scripting with Lua, game audio, physics, and AI programming.
• Advanced Topics and Bringing It All Together (Chapters 19–24): In this section, you’ll find chapters on networking, programming with threads, creating tools in C#, and bringing all the code in the book together to make a little game. You’ll also see some great debugging tricks and an entire chapter on how it feels to be there when you release a commercial game.