With every new volume, the Game Programming Gems series continues to provide a road map through the vast array of development challenges facing today’s game programmers. With the wisdom of many industry experts, Gems 5 includes 62 newly unearthed gems that were polished up for your reading pleasure. These gems are filled with practical insights and techniques that will solve your current problems and help inspire future games. You and your team need to develop for today’s platforms, while preparing for the new technology looming on the horizon and with the tools provided here, you can! So dig into this new collection and put it to work.

SECTION HIGHLIGHTS: * GENERAL PROGRAMMING: parsing text data in games, using templates for reflection in C++, a generic pager, CSG construction using BSP trees, building Lua into games * MATHEMATICS: geometric algebra for computer graphics, minimal acceleration hermite curves, minimal numerical approximation, oblique view frustums for mirrors and portals * ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE: fast target ranking using an AI potential field, parallel AI development with PVM, beyond A*, Dynamic A star, cover finding with navigation meshes * PHYSICS: aerodynamics for game physics, realistic cloth animation using the mass-spring model, pressurized soft-body model, realistic camera movement in a 3D car simulator * GRAPHICS: dimensional impostors for realistic trees and forests, gridless controllable fire, explosion effects using billboard particles, gemstone rendering, procedural level generation * NETWORK & MULTIPLAYER: keeping an MMOG online & persistent, seamless world server, a vulgarity filtering system, remote procedure call system, safe random number systems * AUDIO: multithreaded audio techniques, sound management by group, using 3D surfaces as audio emitters, reverb based on feedback delay networks, single-speaker speech recognition

ON THE CD-ROM: The CD-ROM is packed with source code and listings from the book and demos to compliment the articles. Windows demos were compiled using Microsoft Visual C++® 6.0 (.dsw files) or Microsoft Visual C++ 7.0 (.sln files). OpenGL® utility Toolkit (GLUT v3.7.6), Sun’s J2SE™, and Microsoft DirectX® 9 SDK are also included.

SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS Windows®: Intel® Pentium ® series, AMD Athlon or newer processor, Windows® XP (64MB RAM) or Windows® 2000 (128MB RAM) or later required. 3D graphics card required for some sample applications and DirectX® 9 and GLUT 3.7 or newer required. Linux systems require the Linux kernel 2.4.x or later, XFree86 4.0, and OpenGL driver, glibc 2.1 or newer. Mesa can be used in place of 3D hardware support. Videos require the DivX codec.

62 Hints & Tips for the Intermediate/Advanced Programmer

Intended for the intermediate to advanced game programmer, this is a book that will literally have something for everyone. It contains sixty-two ’gems’ that is, articles on how to some particular aspect of game programming. Sophisticated game programming is probably the most complex programming there is. And this book goes into some pretty sophisticated programming details.

For instance:
4.2 Dynamic Grass Simulation - Just how does grass move when the wind is blowing
5.7 Rendering Gemstones - you can see through them, you can see highlights
5.2 Let it Snow - And how does the appearance of snow change if you are moving through it.

There is no question that the main driving force for faster computers is to make for more realistic gaming. And the faster computers allow more sophisticated programming to be done to make the grass wave realistically.

This is probably not a book you’re going to sit down and read from cover to cover. You’ll probably scan through and read the ones that are applicable to just what you need to do next. But then in a couple of weeks, in a couple of months....