Game Engine Design And Implementation [Tapa blanda]

I don't have any game engine experience and I got this book to help me out.
The first few chapters are great. They explain a lot about game engines; generally, how they work and why.
The author even shows you how to create your own c++ game engine from scratch. I love this.
He also makes a point that game engine design is a huge topic that cannot be covered in one book, however at times it seems like he is trying to, which hurts the content.

In the chapter about a DirectX 10 Render Manager, he spends over 100 pages talking about it and how to write a basic one. At the end he explains that the manager he just showed you is actually a piece of crap: camera doesn't move at all, no lighting, etc. The very next chapter (3D Scene Manager) he completely throws out directX and uses OGRE 3D.

I have no problem at all seeing a lot of different examples / ways of creating the different parts of the engine. But I'd also look to different books/resources for different examples. I was looking at this for consistency, which falls apart midway through.

The goal as stated many times during the early chapters of the book is to get a basic but functional framework of compatible code for an engine. The first 9 chapters nearly get this working except that, once it gets into making a DirectX10 renderer, he just gives up never writing a complete renderer with mesh loading from file. He doesn't complete it, instead switches to Ogre3D. Ogre3D is a fine SDK nothing wrong with it. It however does only load one kind of mesh/model. A ".mesh" file. A custom format.

He doesn't incorporate Ogre3D into the engine that the whole book is about making. He only goes over the basics. Also the next chapter is physics, again he picks an sdk introduces you to it and does not implement it in the engine. Ok now the final chapter in the book is where he nearly shoots the whole book in the foot. He talks about DXStudio. He goes on about how it can be used to build a scene easily and output to xml so your engine can use it. But DXStudio Does NOT I repeat NOT load ogre3D's ".mesh" files. So it will not work with Ogre3D. And since the directx10 renderer built in the book doesn't load models at all, the chapter basically has the point of, forget trying to build your own engine and just use someone else's engine/tools instead. After reading 600+ pages of a book that claims to teach you Game Engine Design, having it end with the "Just use someone else's engine/tools" lesson is a hard pill to swallow.

What makes it all so strange is that the first 9 chapters are all excellent, and you are constantly building a game engine from scratch. It's a lot of work, but it's all explained well, and the code is great. So why in the world do the final 3 chapters not just give up on that plan, but kick it in the nuts?

This book goes over the implementation of a Game Engine using frameworks.

The frameworks used in the book include: OGRE, OIS, SDL, BASS, and a few others. There is hardly any grounds-up work.

This book puts together the engine, but doesn't do any implementation of it (by this, I mean a game implementation, it does implement the parts, not the whole), nor does it really show you code to test the engine. Also, due to the structure, the book is a little bit hard to code along with (in conjunction with the lack of test code).

This book is good if you want to learn some abstract interfaces for a game engine, and maybe get a clue of where to go, itll also teach you the basis of the frameworks. And it's price also isn't too bad.

I rated this 5 stars because I feel like I got something out of it, reading the entire way through, more advanced people probably won't find this book rewarding.