HN Books @HNBooksMonth

Before I developed a serious rendering engine, I'd read Advanced Animation & Rendering Techniques by Watt & Watt [1], cover to cover, a dozen times. It's pretty dated now, but at the time I first acquired it (90s) it was the most comprehensive overview of rendering I knew of. I'd also read Real Time Rendering, and Math for 3D by Lengyel, which are both on this list. For really proper collision, Real-Time Collision Detection (on the list) was absolutely invaluable, but I didn't get to that until a few years later. Around that time, I also read the excellent architecture book Game Engine Architecture [2] which I don't see here. It's well written, does things in the right order, and it's very comprehensive.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Advanced-Animation-Rendering-Techniqu...

[2] https://www.amazon.com/Game-Engine-Architecture-Jason-Gregor...

I've found the book Game Engine Architecture extremely helpful with this. http://www.amazon.com/Game-Engine-Architecture-Jason-Gregory...

If you're looking to find out how a physics engine works you should check out Box2D, it's an open source 2D physics engine. https://github.com/erincatto/Box2D

yes there are many technical aspect in game development

Game Engine Architecture(non affiliated)

http://www.amazon.com/Game-Engine-Architecture-Jason-Gregory...

I cannot speak more highly of Game Engine Architecture by Jason Gregory[0] as an introductory text.

It's extremely readable for an 800 page textbook (I actually read it cover to cover), and covers a wide range of topics including basic software best practices and challenges unique to game development, introductory 3D math, rendering, animation, collisions / physics, and basic gameplay. The author speaks from a wealth of experience from having built several real game engines in the industry.

[0] http://www.amazon.com/Game-Engine-Architecture-Jason-Gregory...

I read Jason Gregory's "Game Engine Architecture" cover-to-cover and I'd highly recommend it for someone new to the industry who's interested in learning about game development. Gregory is a developer at Naughty Dog (Uncharted series).

http://www.amazon.com/Game-Engine-Architecture-Jason-Gregory...

⬐ psykotic

Indeed. Having been in the game industry for close to a decade now (apropos of this thread, my first job was at Epic Games as an engine programmer working on UE2 and UE3), I can't say I personally learned a lot from Gregory's book (outside of some tidbits on character animation, where the book is especially strong), but I can say that it's the best book on the subject I've read.

An older book like Eberly's 3D Game Engine Design was more a loosely knit compendium of theory and algorithms. Eberly's more recent 3D Game Engine Architecture is closer to Gregory's in intent. Unfortunately, it's more a 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, of course, you have an endless array of how-to books written by incompetents. The worst is the "here's my shitty homebrewed codebase" variety.

For rendering in games, you'll need a separate book. Real-Time Rendering is the canonical reference. The first and second editions were my favorites. The third edition added a lot of information on recent techniques but at the expense of reading too much like an annotated bibliography, skating from topic to topic while rarely going into enough detail to be useful and often listing several alternative solutions to a given problem without comparing their relative merits and trade-offs. The first editions flowed more like textbooks and were thus better suited as introductions. Some of that might be hindsight bias on my part; I'm curious what others think who first learned the subject from the third edition.

I also want to give a shout-out to Christer Ericson's Real-Time Collision Detection book. It's full of clear explanations and practical, hard-earned knowledge that you can't get anywhere else. Plus, the accompanying code is robust and well written, a far cry from the usual crap that either straight-up doesn't work or is inextricably entangled with a massive code base (I'm looking at you, Eberly!).

⬐ sjm

Game Engine Architecture and Real-Time Collision Detection were both prescribed material in my games technology course (done as a double major with CS). Cool to hear that they're recommended by industry folk :) Gregory's book is especially good and taught me a lot. +1!

⬐ malexw

It seems that each time I come back and read your comment, you've added a new recommendation. Awesome!

That Real-Time Collision Detection book sounds particularly interesting to me. I had resigned myself to just using Bullet in the toy engine I'm working on since I couldn't find any good resources on the subject. I'll check that out!

The only book you're missing is the one that explains how to get your foot in the door ;)

I would like to second jeffool's sentiment. I've gone down this path a bit (without really succeeding), and although it's cool to imagine what it's like to do all that really low level manipulation, it takes a REALLY long time to get anything satisfying out of it. Just doing basic 3D collision detection in a simple scene isn't trivial unless you have experience. Physics simulation is a whole beast on it's own, but pretty necessary to make a fun 3D type game.

Anyway, I would suggest picking a small area to fiddle with at a low level, and come up with a small project as a goal for learning it. Maybe just AI at first... text graphics, but create agents that wander in a virtual world. Or maybe just start with a basic 3D scene and try getting lighting going. Think about what seems the coolest to you, then just try to work that little part out and build a proof of concept.

I might try the Open GL books to get started with graphics. I would look around for books like these: http://www.amazon.com/Game-Engine-Architecture-Jason-Gregory... (although I haven't read that one, so I can't vouch for it's quality).

⬐ satori99

I have tried similar personal experiments down this path, with the same result. However, for fairly instant gratification, it may be easier to learn about WebGL first.

The code to create a fully lit and rendered scene is much smaller for WebGL, but the principles are the same, and you will still learn about writing shaders.

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...

However, I haven't found the book that can adequately explain integrating collision into the rest of the game. It's a tricky subject which I'm still learning and might write about someday.