Any good books on ECS?
Books for Game Developers
11–20 of 62 posts
Re: Books for Game Developers
#12Circa 90s and early 2000s. I like how there's a whole book on quaternions. I've never understood them and I'm convinced every definition I've read was written by someone who also didn't understand them. I might try to find a copy if I ever dabble in 3d again Edit: To clarify, I understand the need for quaternions (to avoid gimbal lock), just not how to use them manually. Euler angles are simple enough, I can change w…
makes it easier when you understand complex numbers
Re: Books for Game Developers
#13Good selection of older books. I didn't see [1] Game Programming Patterns. [1]: https://gameprogrammingpatterns.com/
I assume, given the headings there, it talks about Model/View/Controller as the way to organise a game (and an application as a whole)?
If you’re interested in how to put a game together, MVC is an obvious model to follow.
For those who don’t understand what I mean, you firstly worry about data and have a way to represent that. That data only been the “actors” state and position in the game. Nothing graphics related. Nothing to do with how they interact. This is the “model”.
You then have completely separate code that can move those actors around by changing the values in the model. This will include state changes like collisions. No graphics involved.
You then have separate code that draws the actors in the model based on their state.
It isn’t obvious to many but this allows you to concentrate on the various areas that need coding. It also allows you to, say, easily change parts of the code as needs be.
Re: Books for Game Developers
#14Wow. This post gave me emotional whiplash.
I opened the collection of links, which is quite good if a bit old. But then I had a subconscious mental itch, and thought, wait... where had I heard the name mrelusive before? That sounds _really_ familiar.
And then I remembered - oh, right, mrelusive, JP-what's-his-name. I've read a huge amount of his code. When I was working on Quake4 as a game programmer and technical designer, he was writing a truly prodigious amount of code in Doom 3 that we kept getting in code updates that I was downstream of.
And he was obviously a terrifically smart guy, that was clear.
But I had cut my teeth on Carmack's style of game code while working in earlier engines. Carmack's style of game code did, and still does, heavily resonate with my personal sensibilities as a game maker. I'm not sure if that particular style of code was influenced by id's time working with Objective-C and NeXTStep in their earlier editors, but I've long suspected it might have been - writing this comment reminds me I'd been meaning to explore that history.
Anyway, idTech4's actual game (non-rendering) code was much less influenced by Carmack, and was written in a distinctly MFC-style of C++, with a giant, brittle, scope-bleeding inheritance hierarchy. And my experience with it was pretty vexed compared to earlier engines. I ultimately left the team for a bunch of different reasons a while before Quake4 shipped, and it's the AAA game I had the least impact on by a wide margin.
I was thinking about all this as I was poking over the website, toying with the idea of writing something longer about the general topics. Might make a good HN comment, I thought...
But then I noticed that everything on his site was frozen in amber sometime around 2015... which made me uneasy. And sure enough, J.M.P. van Waveren died of cancer back in 2017 at age 39. He was a month younger than me.
I didn't really know him except through his code and forwards from other team members who were interacting with id more directly at the time. But what an incredible loss.
Re: Books for Game Developers
#15Circa 90s and early 2000s. I like how there's a whole book on quaternions. I've never understood them and I'm convinced every definition I've read was written by someone who also didn't understand them. I might try to find a copy if I ever dabble in 3d again Edit: To clarify, I understand the need for quaternions (to avoid gimbal lock), just not how to use them manually. Euler angles are simple enough, I can change w…
One thing to know about quaternions is that you do not need to understand them in order to know how to use them, much as you do not need to understand how an automatic transmission works in order to drive a car. The knowledge of how to use them is completely separable from the knowledge of why they work, and if you concentrate on the former, and don't worry about the latter, much progress can be made.
Edit to add: When I say "you don't need to understand how they work to use them", I mean, you can literally implement all the math to multiply, conjugate, scale and invert quaternions from basic math operators and floating point numbers in C, and use those operations to rotate 3d objects around in your program successfully, all without having any idea why they work. I know this, because I have done it.
The basis for my understanding how to use quaternions, and how to build the basic operations on them comes from this site, which is quite concise and dense, but contains the necessary information if you can beat your head against it persistently: http://www.tutis.ca/Rotate/7quaternions.htm
Re: Books for Game Developers
#16Missing any Game Design books so my picks: Game Feel - Steve Swink - 2008 The Art of Game Design a Deck of Lenses - Jesse Schell - 2014 101 Things I Learned in Architecture School - Matthew Frederick - 2007 Writing for Games: Theory & Practice - Hannah Nicklin - 2022 Procedural Generation in Game Design - Tanya Short/Tarn Adams - 2017 Procedural Storytelling in Game Design - Tanya Short/Tarn Adams - 2019 A Theory of…
Another good one on the game design side of things:
Designing Games: A Guide to Engineering Experiences by Tynan Sylvester (RimWorld)
Re: Books for Game Developers
#17Wow. This post gave me emotional whiplash. I opened the collection of links, which is quite good if a bit old. But then I had a subconscious mental itch, and thought, wait... where had I heard the name mrelusive before? That sounds _really_ familiar. And then I remembered - oh, right, mrelusive, JP-what's-his-name. I've read a huge amount of his code. When I was working on Quake4 as a game programmer and technical de…
My biggest takeaway from my time programming in Objective-C was not being afraid to name functions and variables more verbosely.
Curious to hear what aspects of Objective-C you feel influenced id?
Re: Books for Game Developers
#18Missing any Game Design books so my picks: Game Feel - Steve Swink - 2008 The Art of Game Design a Deck of Lenses - Jesse Schell - 2014 101 Things I Learned in Architecture School - Matthew Frederick - 2007 Writing for Games: Theory & Practice - Hannah Nicklin - 2022 Procedural Generation in Game Design - Tanya Short/Tarn Adams - 2017 Procedural Storytelling in Game Design - Tanya Short/Tarn Adams - 2019 A Theory of…
Just want to add a +1 for these, particularly Art of Game Design, A Theory of Fun, and the Tanya Short/Tarn Adams books.
To add to your list: I have a copy of Designing Games: A Guide to Engineering Experiences that I recently started reading.
Re: Books for Game Developers
#19Missing any Game Design books so my picks: Game Feel - Steve Swink - 2008 The Art of Game Design a Deck of Lenses - Jesse Schell - 2014 101 Things I Learned in Architecture School - Matthew Frederick - 2007 Writing for Games: Theory & Practice - Hannah Nicklin - 2022 Procedural Generation in Game Design - Tanya Short/Tarn Adams - 2017 Procedural Storytelling in Game Design - Tanya Short/Tarn Adams - 2019 A Theory of…
Another good one on the game design side of things: Designing Games: A Guide to Engineering Experiences by Tynan Sylvester (RimWorld)
Ha! I must have been editing my comment as you were writing yours. I just started into Sylvester's book.
Re: Books for Game Developers
#20Missing any Game Design books so my picks: Game Feel - Steve Swink - 2008 The Art of Game Design a Deck of Lenses - Jesse Schell - 2014 101 Things I Learned in Architecture School - Matthew Frederick - 2007 Writing for Games: Theory & Practice - Hannah Nicklin - 2022 Procedural Generation in Game Design - Tanya Short/Tarn Adams - 2017 Procedural Storytelling in Game Design - Tanya Short/Tarn Adams - 2019 A Theory of…
+1 for A Theory of Fun
Raph illuminated things about the psychology of what makes games fun that Id never realized nor seen before.