The Game Programming Golden Rules by Martin Brownlow offers nine chapters on various game programming topics. For this review I will go through the chapters with a brief comment on each of them.
1. Embracing C++: This chapter is all about using the compiler to your advantage, the preprocessor, macros and other C++ goodies that are not so much game specific and it is making sure you know the language you are working in, and how best to save you time.
2. Orders of Complexity: Some Big O notations, Self Balancing Binary Trees, Red Black Trees, and Binary Space Partitioning (BSP) Trees.
3. Hashtables: Including creating hashtables and hash functions, reducing hash collision frequency, file name hashes, and probably the most interesting part of this chapter DNA hash for vertex shaders. Localization of text assets was also in this chapter, although I think that for a large game, an approach that used key value pairs in the same file is more maintainable than having the keys and values in separate file, since if a file gets very long it will be difficult for the person writing it (often more proficient in language than coding) to debug why the lines are not matching up properly.
4. Scripting: Creating your own scripting language with some sub rules: scripts should be easy to create, scripts should never crash the game, scripts should be dynamically loaded, scripts should handle multitasking, scripts should have a debugger, scripts should be extendable, scripts should never break the game build.
5. The Resource Pipeline: Handles some of the resource pipeline tools, similar to the Game Asset Pipeline book, suggests an intermediate format for all assets that the artists create, that has everything possible that you can think to include in the intermediate format (version numbers, dates, authors, etc.). The book also focuses on some file compression, platform differences, and cummulates in a version of a build assistant (called DataCon by Brownlow), which is a simple example of what should be the case for all development teams, a one-click build system.
6. Processing Assets: Includes, fonts, images, geometry and creating triangle strips.
7. Finite State Machines: Explicit vs. implicit state machines, scripting FSMs, creating combos, linking FSM objects, indirect animation lookups to allow the same FSM to be used for each character type (with different animations).
8. Saving Game State: The difficulties of saving game state, saving and loading a game and autodetecting object changes with a saving template.
9. Optimization: Measure Twice, Cut Once, using profilers, realizing that some optimizations do not actually improve the overall process, since all the moving parts can actually make it slower.
Overall the book was interesting, although a lot of the techniques I think could apply to any field and are not just game specific. I think this book would be good for beginners to intermediate and the source code that is provided is pretty clear for the examples.
Happy coding,
Michael Hubbard
http://michaelhubbard.ca
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