Game Coding Complete, Second Edition is the essential hands-on guide to developing commercial quality games written by master game programmer, Mike McShaffry. This must-have second edition has been expanded from the bestselling first edition to include the absolute latest in exciting new techniques in game interface design programming, game audio programming, game scripting, 3D programming, network game programming and game engine technology. All of the code in the book has been completely updated to work with all of the latest compiler technology.

This book is written for: * Programmers who want to create their own high-quality games * Developers and project managers who are involved in the game development process * All programmers who want to develop their game coding skills

Mike McShaffry’s first edition of Game Coding complete rapidly became one of the top-selling game programming books and was widely praised by readers around the world. The best description of the first edition comes from two Amazon reviewers; the first proclaiming, "I got the same feeling of enlightenment when reading this one as I did all those years ago when I read the classic book "Code Complete" and the second stating "This is the first game book I have read that I was sorry when I got to the end because there wasn’t any more."

For Game Coding Complete, Second Edition, McShaffry returns with many more of his highly popular, shoot-from the hips war stories and expert game programming insight that only a real insider could provide. McShaffry uses his experience as a leading programmer for Origin Systems, Microsoft, and Ion Storm a division of Eidos, to illustrate real-world techniques and solutions, including examples from his recent work on the major game, Thief Deadly Shadows. Game Coding Complete, Second Edition takes programmers through the complete process of developing a professional quality game using hundreds of insider tricks and techniques developed and perfect by the author from over a decade of game development experience. It covers a range of topics that will appeal to the most discriminating programmers such as key "gotcha" issues that could trip up even veteran programmers. The new edition features expanded coverage of 3D programming, several new chapters on game interface design, game audio, game scripting, game engine technology, code optimization, production and scheduling, plus it now includes a CD-ROM packed with valuable source code and game development tools. The appendix offers solid advice on starting your own game company. The C++ language is used to explain specific programming concepts with added discussion of development with C# and Managed DirectX programming.

Excellent

As a hobbyist, this book has been immensely useful. I would especially recommend it to anyone at an intermediate level of programming skill making small or medium-size games. In particular, the chapters on initialization, the main loop, and events give a good big-picture view of what a game’s structure looks like. If your ideas about game architecture are a bit mushy, this book will likely help you sort them out.

Great book

although i did not read all the book thorougly, from the topics covered in the book. i can say that it is a very good book and a good reference for almost all your requirements

Great insights from a game development veteran

Game Coding Complete will teach you how to be a professional game programmer. It assumes that you already know how to program in C++. The tone of the book is conversational, and the author does an excellent job of explaining complex ideas.

This book is filled with practical knowledge hard-won from years of experience. I prefer getting advice from someone who has shipped games, someone with a MobyGames entry. Mike McShaffry qualifies on both counts.

Chapter 18, Debugging Your Game, is a gem. It contains many practical tips that could only have been learned by someone who has worked "in the trenches" on numerous shipped games. This chapter alone is worth the price of the book.

At first, some of the topics included in the book may seem random or unrelated, but by the end of the book you realize that every topic covered is relevant to being an effective game developer.

I know of no better introduction to all the topics that are important to a professional game developer. I use this book in the UW Game Development Certificate class that I teach.

Not the same as Code Complete, but different

This is one of those books that you need to be able to read some of it first to understand it’s value. I’ve read some unflattering reviews that said the book was entirely inadequate for an experienced developer and they are right. This is not a Code Complete that encapsulates an entire discipline’s wisdom. This is a book that talks about the rest of game programming, all the other stuff unrelated to what most DX/OGL/most graphics "games" programming books talk about. Here’s a tidbit, why would a physics system be related to the refresh rate of your display?

Another example, using a debugger and interpreting things by a combination of memory addreses, and assembly is pretty arcane fare these days compared to the early days when most programmers needed to do this to micromanage their allocs and stack calls. Neverthenelss this knowledge is invaluable, and even Mike himself mentions he coded for 4 years before running across a debugger (and I don’t mean the common step through, step into stuff). There are all kinds of weird but essential (and interesting) wisdom here that cover issues that you can only really run into on a commercial product.

This is essentially game dev mentor in a book. Highly recommended

Bad Code

I only got about 150 pages into the book before trying to check out the sample program that can be downloaded from the author’s site. It will not compile for several reasons. First, he just has some basic errors in it that you can fix. Secondly he uses three 3rd party SDKs that are no longer available in the way he used them. His response to me was that I should talk to someone else on the forum that figured out all the changes that must be made to get the game to work with the latest SDKs. Apparently, he does not see it as his job to provide working samples, and no one has gotten the game to function correctly even after fixing the many compile problems. Thus the 2 stars.

Other than that, the book is geared to teaching you how to handle the larger aspects of game development, like how to manage your files, and what source version manager he thinks is best. Having been a mainframe programmer for 18 years, I can tell you that there is not one way to do anything, and if you go into a new job with a long list of ways you think they should be done, you will have difficulty adapting to the methods, procedures, and tools of that shop.

There is some good information in it, but the lack of a working sample pretty much ruins it for me.

Serious technical info and process for game coders

I’m old enough to remember awful books with titles like "Graphics Tips from Game Gurus". From the cover I was worried that this was that type of book. But there is wisdom in the saying "don’t judge a book by it’s cover". This is a very serious book about both the technical aspects of the job, and the serious non-technical process aspects of the job. As the author says in the first chapter "game programming is freaking hard."

There are well written sections on 2D and 3D programming, including an excellent section on basic trigonometry. There is also some good timely material on working within the Windows framework. I would have liked some more material on 3D engines, but that’s a minor flaw.

There are two very solid chapters on process and testing. And a very good chapter on techniques that you can use to survive the death march.

Game programming sounds fun and sexy but it’s a very tough gig where the odds are stacked against you. Schedules are necessarily tight. Performance concerns are paramount. And the requirements are prone to change as the game play is refined. This means that all three points of the software project (quality, schedule, requirements) are in play. To survive you need knowledge, tools, wisdom, and a little luck. This book provides you with at least three of those four.

Covers too many topics

The author tries to hard to cover the basics of making games. It sort of reminds me a class study guide, i.e., everything lumped together in a highly condensed manner.

Much Broader Scope

This book purports to be for the programmer who wants to write a game. But actually the author sells himself short! The principles that he describes here as best practices for developing games, can be applied far more broadly. To any program that has a GUI for real time human interaction.

For example, he tells how automated build scripts are vital and how milestone builds and multiple projects are useful. But all this of course applies equally well to any code project with several programmers involved. The chapters on debugging/testing are also quite general in scope, and useful in explaining that this is a discipline, in and of itself.

The book specialises to code examples in C++ for the various Microsoft OSs. In no small part because most desktops are running these operating systems, and if you are in a commercial effort, you go where most of your customers are. The choice of C++ is good and realistic. For games with a quick response time, compiled code is usually faster than interpreted. But then why not C, you might ask? Because C is procedural and scales badly when the source code gets over 100 000 lines. C++ is a much better choice.

The coverage of 3D graphics is only the bare minimum, as the author points out. For any application using 3D, you need at least another book, dedicated purely to the algorithms in that field, to be used in tandem with this book.

Good intro to undercovered topics

The title of this book suggests two things to me. The first is that it provides a complete guide to game coding. The second is that it fills the same role for game programming that the book Code Complete fills for programming in general, i.e. a journeyman’s book that fills in the gaps left in introductory texts and broadens your knowledge to prepare you to move on to more advanced topics. Unfortunately by trying to do the former (which I don’t think is possible in a single book), it falls a bit short on the latter, resulting in a (very) good book rather than the great book it could have been given the author’s impressive background.

First, the bad.

It seems that the author never really decided what his audience is. Parts of the book (e.g. the introduction to 3D graphics) are written for total beginners, while others (such as the overview of game engines - all of which cost tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars to license) are really only relevant to experienced professionals. The author/publisher really should have picked an audience and stuck with it.

Some readers will be annoyed by how platform-specific this book is, which really isn’t apparent from the cover copy or even the other reviews. All of the code samples use DirectX, and there is a lot of space dedicated to Windows-specific information. Granted, Windows and DirectX are by far the most popular choices for PC-based game development, so this won’t be an issue for most readers.

And now for the good.

The best parts of this book were those covering topics that typically get overlooked in other game programming books, namely things like pointers and memory management, scripting, creating automated build enviroments and code/resource management, debugging, and notably the entire section on production, scheduling and testing. Although some of these topics are covered in other books that are not specific to game development, putting them in a single volume and exposing game developers to them early on is a Good Thing.

Although the sample code was fairly sparse, what he did provide was extremely useful, in particular the resource file implementation, random number generator, and scene graph.

Finally, props to the author for maintaining a website and actively supporting this book. As an author myself, I know how much work is involved in doing so, and I recognize that it reflects the author’s desire to really help people and not just sell books.

In conclusion, my overall impression of this book was very positive. It’s marred by a few shortcomings, but overall, I think that most new game programmers will benefit from it.

One of the best (and I buy ’em all)

I just wanted to weigh in with my thoughts on this book. I really enjoyed it, no I loved it.

I have an addiction that involves buying every darn programming book released on Amazon. Many (most?) of those books sit on my over-stuffed shelf barely dog eared. I tend to browse the books I own or just mark useful chapters.

Not so with this book! I read it cover to cover. I loved the real world advice, the conversational style, the war stories and the pragmatic advice on non coding aspects of game development like estimates, scheduling, QA etc...

I got the same feeling of enlightenment when reading this one that I did a all those years ago when I read the classic book "Code Complete".

Great job Mike. I hope it is selling well so we can hear from you again especially on topics like AI and Sound.