A game is only as intriguing as the characters that inhabit its world. Game Character Design Complete demonstrates each step of modeling, texturing, animating, and exporting compelling characters for your games. You’ll learn how to model in 3ds Max from sketch references, texture in Adobe Photoshop, rig bones, and animate a character back in 3ds Max. Game Character Design Complete covers all aspects of character creation-from the technical to the artistic. Don’t worry if your artistic ability isn’t awe-inspiring. You’ll cover every aspect of the design process in easy-to-follow steps, including texturing and animating your character. If you have a working knowledge of 2D and 3D graphics, then you have all of the skills you need to begin creating cool characters for your games.

Dave Eberly's 3D Game Engine Design was the first professional guide to the essential concepts and algorithms of real-time 3D engines and quickly became a classic of game development. Dave's new book 3D Game Engine Architecture continues the tradition with a comprehensive look at the software engineering and programming of 3D engines. This book is a complete guide to the engineering process, starting with a walk-through of the graphics pipeline showing how to construct the core elements of 3D systems, including data structures, the math system, and the object system. Dave explains how to manage data with scene graphs, how to build rendering and camera systems, and how to handle level of detail, terrain, and animation. Advanced rendering effects such as vertex and pixel shaders are also covered as well as collision detection and physics systems. The book concludes with a discussion of application design, development tools, and coding standards for the source code of the new version of the Wild Magic engine included on the CD-ROM. Wild Magic is a commercial-quality game engine used by many companies and is a unique resource for the game development community.

The Game Maker's Apprentice shows you how to create nine exciting games using the wildly popular Game Maker game creation tool. This book covers a range of genres, including action, adventure, and puzzle games–complete with professional quality sound effects and visuals. It discusses game design theory and features practical examples of how this can be applied to making games that are more fun to play.

Game Maker allows games to be created using a simple drag-and-drop interface, so you don't need to have any prior coding experience. It includes an optional programming language for adding advanced features to your games, when you feel ready to do so. You can obtain more information by visiting book.gamemaker.nl.

The authors include the creator of the Game Maker tool and a former professional game programmer, so you'll glean understanding from their expertise. The book also includes a CD containing Game Maker software and all of the game projects that are created in the book–plus a host of professional-quality graphics and sound effects that you can use in your own games.

Beginning .NET Game Programming in VB .NET presents the work of David Weller (.NET Game evangelist at Microsoft) and a group of key Microsoft insiders who decided to write the ideal introduction to game programming for VB .NET programmers. Weller has switched his previous book to VB .NET and added a bonus chapter. The book has passed all internal Microsoft tests as to programming style. This thoroughly revised and improved version (including a bonus chapter) is the ideal way to get into .NET game programming using the VB .NET language.

Like music and movies, video games are rapidly becoming an integral part of our lives. Over the years, you've yearned for every new gaming console, mastered each blockbuster within weeks after its release, and have even won a local gaming competition or two. But lately you've been spending a lot of time thinking about a game idea of your own, or are exploring the possibility of making a career of this vibrant and growing industry. But where should you begin?

Beginning Game Development with Python and Pygame is written with the budding game developer in mind, introducing games development through the Python programming language and the popular Pygame games development library. Authored by industry veteran and Python expert Will McGugan, who most recently worked on the MotorStorm game for Play Station 3, you'll be privy to insights that will not only help you to exploit PyGame to its maximum potential, but also make you a more creative and knowledgeable games developer all round.

• Create advanced games by taking advantage of the popular open source Python programming language and Pygame games development library.
• Learn step-by-step through the creation of a real-world game (tank warfare), involving gaming preferences, sound, visual effects, and joystick/keyboard interaction.
• Discover the concepts that are crucial to success in today's gaming industry, such as support for multiple platforms, and granting users the ability to extend and customize your games.

Job titles like "Technical Architect" and "Chief Architect" nowadays abound in the software industry, yet many people suspect that "architecture" is one of the most overused and least understood terms in professional software development.

Gorton's book helps resolve this predicament. It concisely describes the essential elements of knowledge and key skills required to be a software architect. The explanations encompass the essentials of architecture thinking, practices, and supporting technologies. They range from a general understanding of software structure and quality attributes, through technical issues like middleware components and documentation techniques, to emerging technologies like model-driven architecture, software product lines, aspect-oriented design, service-oriented architectures, and the Semantic Web, all of which will influence future software system architectures.

All approaches are illustrated by an ongoing real-world example. So if you work as an architect or senior designer (or want to someday), or if you are a student in software engineering, here is a valuable and yet approachable source of knowledge.

"Ian's book helps us to head in the right direction through the various techniques and approaches… An essential guide to computer science students as well as developers and IT professionals who aspire to become an IT architect". (Anna Liu, Architect Advisor, Microsoft Australia).

Algorithms and Networking for Computer Games is an essential guide to solving the algorithmic and networking problems of modern commercial computer games, written from the perspective of a computer scientist. Combining algorithmic knowledge and game-related problems, the authors discuss all the common difficulties encountered in game programming.

The first part of the book tackles algorithmic problems by presenting how they can be solved practically. As well as "classical" topics such as random numbers, tournaments and game trees, the authors focus on how to find a path in, create the terrain of, and make decisions in the game world. Part two introduces networking related problems in computer games and focuses on three key questions: how to hide the inherent communication delay, how to utilize limited network resources, and how to cope with cheating.

Algorithms and Networking for Computer Games provides a comprehensive resource that offers deeper algorithmic insight into game programming and explains game-specific network considerations. Read on for…

• Algorithmic solutions in pseudo code format, which not only emphasizes the idea behind the solution, but also can easily be written into the programming language of your choice.
• A section on the Synthetic player, covering decision-making, influence maps, finite-state machines, flocking, fuzzy sets and probabilistic reasoning.
• In-depth treatment of network communication including dead reckoning, local perception filters and cheating prevention.
• 51 ready-to-use algorithms and 178 illustrative exercises.

Algorithms and Networking for Computer Games is a must-read text for advanced undergraduate and graduate students on computer game-related courses, postgraduate researchers in game-related topics, and game developers interested in new approaches and the theoretical background to games.

"You may think you know OpenGL. As a software engineer with ten years of OpenGL experience, I thought I did. However, this book quickly convinced me that I was very much mistaken. David Blythe and Tom McReynolds have taught me much that I did not know, and in the process improved my company's products. This is a book for computer graphics enthusiasts, both amateur and professional. If you use OpenGL in your work, Advanced Graphics Programming using OpenGL will be your constant companion. Be sure to get your own copy, however - my copy is not leaving my desk under any circumstances!" Ian Ashdown, President, byHeart Consultants Limited.

This introduction to 3D computer graphics emphasizes fundamentals and the mathematics underlying computer graphics, while also covering programming techniques using OpenGL, a platform-independent graphics programming environment. The minimal prerequisites make it suitable for self-study or for use as an advanced undergraduate or introductory graduate text as the author leads step-by-step from the basics of transformations to advanced topics such as animations and kinematics. Accompanying software, including source code for a ray tracing software package, is available freely from the book's web site.