Recommended Books for Game Developers

[WyrmMaster]

Here are some book recommendations from our staff and others.

Three really good series of books from Morgan Kaufmann are Graphics Gems, Game Programming Gems, and GPU Gems. Each book in each series is a collection of articles on different subjects related to the given fields.

The Graphic Gems books (five volumes at this point) are "intended to provide the graphics community with a set of practical tools for implementing new ideas and techniques, and to offer working solutions to real programming problems. These tools are written by a wide variety of graphics programmers from industry, academia, and research. The books in the series have become essential, time-saving tools for many programmers. "

The Game Programming Gems books (also up to five volumes) "continues to provide a road map through the vast array of development challenges facing today’s game programmers."

GPU Gems is the latest series with two volumes. "GPU" refers to the programmable Graphics Processing Unit in modern video display cards. These books provide information on how to exploit these processors for various 2D and 3D effects.

One word of warning: The older books in the series may contain articles that are "obsolete" in the sense that the problems discussed have been "solved" by advances in technology. Still, such articles may still be rewarding if you want to know why things are done the way they are done currently.

[Kay]

Thanks! In case anyone else looks, here are a couple of good online tutorials:

NeHe Productions has tutorials on OpenGL, a 3D graphics library.
Thinking In Tkinter is useful for anyone considering Tkinter, an interface system that works with several languages and is the basis for Python's IDE.
Pygame has tutorials and other projects for Pygame, a free game-development library for the (also free) language Python. Python/Pygame is a relatively easy language to learn, and still powerful and flexible.
The Game AI Page has info on Artificial Intelligence.
This person has info on the Model/View/Controller theory of program design, a way of organizing input and output.
Pixel (currently over its bandwidth limit) has a great series of tutorials on drawing 2D sprites and tiles.
Tile Studio offers a tutorial on its own program, which is meant for use with specific code but can export tiles you draw to BMPs.
POVRay offers a free raytracing program for producing impressive 2D "scenes," and has documentation.
Hero Machine is not a tutorial; it's a toy that runs in the browser and lets you design characters in paper-doll fashion, with some furry features available.