Review of Programming Role Playing Games with DirectX (Game Development Series) (Paperback)

I found the 1st edition of this book to be the best book on this topic I have found.I use much of the code and many of the concepts from this book in a hobby level multi-user RPG I have written.My review of that book is attached below.

Because I greatly appreciated the content of the 1st edition, I also bought the second edition.

Basically, the second edition is the first edition updated for DirectX 9.0.The text and the code are practically verbatim with small changes here and there to account for changes in technology and probably minor improvements the author wanted to make from the first edition.

The most obvious difference (aside from using DirectX 9.0), is that the first few chapters from the first edition have been removed.The discussion on how to design rpgs from a story line perspective, intro to C++ and a few other things were removed as well as the last chapter on marketing your game.

Editorially I can see why they did that.It makes the book much more focused on the "meat" of programming an RPG using DirectX.Also, I personally barely paid any attention to those chapters in the first book anyway as I focused on the programming myself.However, I thought they added an element of style to the book that was quite nice, so I miss them a little.

In summary, this book is pretty much the same as the first edition in all of the important ways.Since I thought extremely highly of that book, I think extremely highly of this one too.

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Review of Programming Role Playing Games with DirectX 8.0

I had a specific objective in mind when I bought this book. I'm in the process of writing a hobby level multi-user RPG for me and maybe up to a hundred or so other players (not many hundreds or thousands). I have a solid background in C++, less so in DirectX.

I've bought many books on game programming to help me with this process and to my surprise I've found this one simply amazing while most of the others I've found to be little more than expensive doorstops. :)

Like all the books of this nature, I read it in very much a "pick and choose" manner, focusing on chapters I liked and extracted code from the CD for places where it helped me. I found the material covered and, more importantly, the code representation of that material to be extremely helpful in my coding process.

I believe the tips and code the book provides (which all compile and provide very reasonable and practical applications for the ideas demonstrated) saved me (literally) hundreds of hours of research (not to mention trial and error) finding methods that work and work well and covered all of the core components I would want in a role-playing game. It covered multi-player over the internet, 2d and 3d rendering in directX, how to construct combat, spells, chat, and inventory systems and a variety of other items.

Naturally, I had to do a lot of customization to make the game do what I wanted it to do and I had to merge several of the ideas discussed into my own framework (for example the multi player network section is covered more or less stand alone where clearly other parts of the book need to be integrated with it to form a real game), but the result is I have a basic game up and running in a fraction of the time it would have otherwise taken, which no other book has ever really brought me.


Product Description
No game draws a player into its world in quite the same way as a role-playing game does. In role-playing games, players break through the barrier that exists between their actions and the fantastic world that they're navigating through and instead become an inhabitant of that world. Get ready to put your creative ideas in motion and try your hand at creating your own role-playing game! "Programming Role Playing Games with DirectX, 2nd Edition" will show you how to do it as you create cool graphics and combat engines, handle players in your game, use scripts and items, and make your game multiplayer-capable. This book breaks a role-playing game down into its essential components, examining the details of each and showing you how to use them in your game project. Learn how to draw with DirectX Graphics, play audio with DirectX Audio, network with DirectPlay,and process input with DirectInput. By the time you finish, you'll possess the skills you need to create a complete role-playing game.

About the Author
Jim Adams has been programming since age nine. For the past 22 years, he has worked various jobs in the business and entertainment industry.He has contributed to several books on game development and maintains a core library of DirectX functions to assist in game development.Jim is the author of the book "Programming Role Playing Game with DirectX" (Premier Press, 1931841098) and "Advanced Animation with DirectX" (Premier Press, 1592000371).

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