Black Art of Java Game Programming

Black Art of Java Game Programming:
Designing of a great game takes much more than the reading of a good programming book. A game needs a story, fantastic graphics and many other non-programming assets. This range of input is probably only manageable if you have a number of developers. A group of friends will probably go far with this book. E.g. a programmer, a graphic designer and the kind of person who downloads and uses level editors.The object oriented design is quite excellent. Some books are quite weak at showing you how to create and manipulate objects, this book however is a gem. Object Orientation lends itself well to game design. This book exploits that fact and right from the start you will use inheritance and polymorphism to your advantage. This is only sensible, but you will find in many books such subjects only get a couple of paragraphs. I feel for this reason that many programmers new to Java/OOP would find this book very useful.The book is quite old. This is not a problem as it forces the reader to solve problems in the code that have arisen from depreciation etc. This is beneficial, as you will have to engage the code straight away rather than over viewing techniques. The techniques will still apply in the new context of Java 2.A benefit old code is that most projects involving the native compilation of Java will of course only as yet support older versions of Java. In other words your games may not make use of Java2D, Java3D or Swing but they can be very fast.The games in the book are applets, I don’t recall any applications. This is great if you want to write web based video games but I don’t think that Quake would work very well as an applet. (Download Time) So for specific techniques on application programming you probably want a Deitel & Deitel book or a Sams book.If you’re interested in Java Programming, buy this book its not just for Gamers. If you want to write a game then you can do no better. This book will teach you most of what you need to know.
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