Booktastic

Reviews of Books I Have No Business Owning: A Possibly Ongoing Series Part Two

3D Games Real-Time Rendering and Software Technology by Alan Watt and Fabio Policarpo

Oh, man, how did I get ahold of this one?

And what did I expect to do with it?

True, there is a CD-ROM attached to the back cover with an old version of the Fly3d engine on it, and they spend some later chapters discussing said engine, but in the end you're paying for a basic introduction to 3d math and pages of stuff that you can find free on the Internet.

It's not quite the humbling, godawful math orgy of the last book, but it's definitely not made for coding lunkheads like me.

There is a possibility that if you are an intermediate programmer and you want a 3d engine to tinker with then this book might suit you.

There seems to be enough reference in the back to suss out what different systems do, though not a lot on different implementations or extensibility. You'd have to figure that out on your own; And by the time you did you probably could have written your own engine from scratch.

But, really. You'd be better off messing with Crystal Space or Open Scene Graph.

And I'm better off sticking with Harry Potter.