Review of Focus On 3D Terrain Programming (Game Development) (Paperback)

Wow.Let me just start off with that.I started this book with very little understanding of terrain algorithms.Now I know 4 major approaches to terrain and how to implement them, with many different possibilities for texturing, lighting and culling.If you are a beginner in the world of 3D terrain, then this book is the best one you can have right now.It can take you from a complete beginner with some basic openGL knowledge, like I was, to someone who knows how to write a very effective 3D terrain engine.

This book is NOT for advanced 3D terrain programmers.It will be very useful to a beginner, like I was.If you know how to do 4 chapters' worth of this book- the basics and one of the more advanced algorithms- then it's not worth it.If you know any less, I'd strongly recommend it!It teaches the main algorithms that have stood the test of time in 3D Terrain Programming, and ONE NEW ALGORITHM THAT'S SO CUTTING EDGE, IT HASN'T EVEN BEEN OFFICIALLY PUBLISHED YET- ROAM 2.O, the next iteration of possibly the most major CLOD algorithm yet developed!

Here are the contents:
Introduction
Ch2. Fractal Terrain Generation, Heightmap Loading/Unloading, building a base terrain class and a Brute Force implementation.
Ch3. Texture mapping, procedural texture generation, and detail texture mapping.
Ch4. Height-based lighting, hardware lighting and when you shouldn't use it on terrain (too much normal recalculation in CLOD), lightmapping and slope lighting.

The three major CLOD algorithms:
Ch5. Geomipmapping theory and implementation.
Ch6. Quadtree theory and implementation.
Ch7. ROAM, improvements to ROAM, new ROAM theory and the implementation of ROAM 2.0- the latest in CLOD.

This book culls together information that is scattered over the web, various books and conference articles into 203 pages of very useful information.It teaches you 4 major approaches to terrain: brute force, the initial algorithm for all developers, and 3 advanced Continuous Level Of Detail algorithms.A beginner would spend a month, easily, finding all of the resources to learn this material.Then when you want a quick reference, you have to rehunt for all of this material, which can waste a half hour or an hour.I read this book in 3 days.Whenever I want a quick reference, I grab it off the desk next to my computer.You be the judge.

Product Description
You have just found the only book on the market dedicated to 3D Terrain Programming.This title from the Premier Press Focus On series will be a very fun and exciting educational adventure through the world of 3D terrain packed full of demos, figures, and information. It will take you from the most basic terrain engines to those that play a very important part in flight simulations. Primarily targeted at the Win32/OpenGL platform, Focus On 3D Terrain Programming will teach you nearly everything that you need to know about terrain engines, period.

About the Author
Trent Polack has been programming for several years now.Trent is the OpenGL forum moderator GameDev.net.Trent is a contributing author for the book "Game Programming Tricks of the Trade" and the author of the book "Focus On 3D Terrain Programming" both by Premier Press.

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