Game Coding Complete
by Mike McShaffry · first published 2003
60% recommend40% neutral
Why HN recommends it
Practical, industry-experienced tour of game engine design in C++, covering architecture, design considerations and patterns; suited to developers who want a solid starting point for building games.
Summarised by Claude from recommending comments
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…reflection of the idiosyncrasies of the author and his personal code base than an investigation of game engines as developed and used in the industry. I've also heard good things about Mike McShaffry's Game Coding Complete. McShaffry is a game industry veteran, so he knows what he's talking about. However, it seems to be targeted at rank beginners, so a lot of the material might not be very useful to you. Below that tier,…
on “Gorgeous Unreal Engine 4 brings direct programming, indirect lighting” ↗For programming, "Game Coding Complete" by Mike McShaffry and David Graham. The book gave a very nice intro to a number of design considerations and given that McShaffry did a decent amount of game programming in the early days of programming,…
on “Ask HN: What book impacted your life the most and how?” ↗http://www.amazon.com/Game-Engine-Architecture-Jason-Gregory... http://www.amazon.com/Game-Coding-Complete-Third-McShaffry/d... Those two will clean up most of the biggest newbie mistakes, especially the Gregory one. I also suggest this book for collision detection: http://www.amazon.com/Real-Time-Collision-Detection-Interact...…
on “Ask HN: (html5) game development books for a seasoned programmer?” ↗…wonderful resources, it is much less about game development than it is about design patterns. Basically, it's a gamedev flavored book about design patterns. A much better books about game development would be Game Coding Complete [0]. [0] https://www.amazon.com/Game-Coding-Complete-Fourth-McShaffry...
on “Godot 3's renderer design” ↗…"Compiler and Interpreter Design and Implementation for High Schoolers". It's a massive tome, and covers both Lua integration and then rolling a scripting engine from scratch (lex and yacc and all). Game Coding Complete by McShaffry is utterly fantastic. Another tome (just shy of 1000 pages), it goes over how to structure a game, covering a lot of important but banal stuff like resource management and passing Microsoft…
on “Books For Game Developers” ↗The Jason Gregory "Game Engine Architecture" is a good place to start for a 10,000 foot overview. Also try "Game Coding Complete," (aka "the Dinosaur Book") which has some more details and nuances. Both books are valuable starting places regardless of what your target language or platform is. After those two I would consider what…
on “Ask HN: How to step up my coding skills?” ↗…Principles, Patterns, and Practices There's now an updated version of this book for C# but the first one deals with C++. This book explains, in details, how to architecture your application around use cases. "Game Coding Complete 5" also talks about moderately large scale C++ high-level design. Of course, it's focused on games, but unlike other game programming books, it deals with things like dependency inversion, abstracting…
on “Generic programming to fight the rigidity in the C++ projects” ↗…with Handmade Hero a series that I have been going back to frequently over the past few years. https://handmadehero.org The series is great but I wanted something more guided so I am eyeing purchasing Game Coding Complete. It teaches the internals of a game engine and uses DirectX for rendering. https://www.amazon.com/Game-Coding-Complete-Fourth-McShaffry... Because deliveries are on lock down in my country the book…
on “Ask HN: What are you learning?” ↗semi-related, but also helps me to believe that this is the case (and not only because the different regional servers were called "shards" in Ultima Online): in the "Game Coding Complete, Fourth Edition" book by two programmers who worked on Ultima and Sims (and other Origin/EA games of the time) back in the day, they share some war stories of programming, and if memory serves there is…
on “Database “sharding” came from Ultima Online? (2009)” ↗One of the Thief game devs wrote the book Game Coding Complete, 4th Ed. it mentions Thief game several times and it has some code and explanation about component-entity system. Also 3 articles about this topic: http://www.reddit.com/r/gamedev/comments/1f83c5/3_articles_a...
on “0 A.D. Alpha 15 - Osiris” ↗It depends on how the physics engine has been integrated into your game/engine. The book "Game Coding Complete" shows how to isolate a 3rd-party physics engine so you can switch implementations. Of course, every physics engine behaves a little differently from the others, so, if you game is physics centered (pinball,…
on “Opensource your abandonware (2010)” ↗…crashed. Because the PC speaker wasn't dependent on the CPU, it would remain emitting the tone of his last check. "Hmm...that's a D," he would say, and zero in on the line of code that caused the crash." - Game Coding Complete, Fourth Edition
on “Database “sharding” came from Ultima Online? (2009)” ↗I bought a copy of Game Coding Complete a long time ago, but couldn't remember which edition and your comment made me curious. Turns out I have the first edition from 2003. Old gamedev books really have some wild stuff.
on “Database “sharding” came from Ultima Online? (2009)” ↗