3D Game Alchemy for Doom, Doom Ii, Heretic, and Hexen

Rating:
Summary: 3D game Alchemy
Review: I bought this book used from the amazon.com market place, due to the fact that it is currently out of print. It really is an excellent buy for anyone wishing to partake in any kind of Doom/Heretic/Hexen editing. It is also fairly easy to understand for someone not familiar with game editing and gives full guidelines and tutorials on how to effectively use all the programs given on the CD (stuff like level editing programs, Graphics/sound extractors for Wad files and the actual Doom.exe file). In addition to this it includes loads of new levels for Doom/Doom2/Heretic/Hexen complete with a front end program for easy running of the levels.
This book does seem rather dated at first, what with Doom using 3d sprites as opposed to the Monster 3D games of today, e.g. Half-Life, but a lot of the things you learn through this book can be applied to newer games and the tools used to edit them. After using this book to make my own levels and TCs I found that it gave me a good grounding for the games I edit nowadays, e.g. the quake series and also Duke Nukem 3D.
In closing I would thoroughly recommend this book to Beginners and Master programmers alike as it contains a multitude of hints and grounding which will last the test of time through it's application to current and upcoming 3D game titles.