Rating: 
Summary: A great book. now ...a reference book in the future
Review: This book is , in my opinion, the best choice for a serious amateur or a shareware games developer. Most of the games programming books now available on the market, explain, step by step, how to design a 2D or a 3D graphic engine. As a matter of fact a graphic engine is just a tool for a game developer. It is not needed to go through in detail a so complicated and boring code, to develop a game. Even some professional software houses purchase the graphic engine. My ideal game programming book should focus on graphic techniques and game logic, instead. This is what Mr Watt and Mr Policarpo do.(1) They provide a detailed explanation of computer graphic, even exceeding the needs of a game developer (2) a powerful graphic engine. Look at the demos,they are impressive (3) 12 tutorials to get familiar with it. (4) All the needed facilities. Some other books do not even supply a utility to load a .3ds file format (5) The foundations of A.I. ,collision detection etc (6) They use OpenGL instead of Direct X The MS library seems to become a standard for professional games developers but,in my opinion ,they are a nightmare for an amateur (7) Last , Vol 2 has been announced by July 2001. If Mr Watt and Mr Policarpo take note of the critics of the readers who rated this book , 1 or 2 stars, a reference book for our wonderful hobby will be, at last, available
Rating:
Summary: Excellent technical reference
Review: This book is an excellent reference for 3D Game techniques. It is well researched and easy to follow. The SDK requires effort to get it working (read all documentation & readme files first), but that doesn't detract from the quality, depth and breadth of the material presented in the book.
Rating: 
Summary: A good general 3D reference, if you don't own others
Review: This book sits nicely between the uber-advanced likes of Eberly's "3D Game Engine Design" and the basic (and largely worthless) 3D programming books that seem to get churned out every year. It covers some of the same topics as Eberly, but explains things much more, and includes many diagrams to help make things clearer. It does, however, stop short of giving you good example code in some of the more advanced techniques, mainly because it comes with it's own engine API. At these points you should turn to Eberly for the nitty-gritty. Covers a good range of topics and explains them well. It duplicates a lot of stuff from other books and www resources, but it is a very nice collection of techniques in my opinion and worth the investment if you don't own others of it's type, because it is very well presented.
Rating:
Summary: A good general 3D reference, if you don't own others
Review: This book sits nicely between the uber-advanced likes of Eberly's "3D Game Engine Design" and the basic (and largely worthless) 3D programming books that seem to get churned out every year. It covers some of the same topics as Eberly, but explains things much more, and includes many diagrams to help make things clearer. It does, however, stop short of giving you good example code in some of the more advanced techniques, mainly because it comes with it's own engine API. At these points you should turn to Eberly for the nitty-gritty. Covers a good range of topics and explains them well. It duplicates a lot of stuff from other books and www resources, but it is a very nice collection of techniques in my opinion and worth the investment if you don't own others of it's type, because it is very well presented.
Rating:
Summary: 3D Games
Review: This is 800 pages of concentrated goodness, bringing together a whole package of technology needed for computer games and putting it in one place. The authors have the courtesy to give you the full story, instead of expecting you to buy their other books (which contain lots of material you probably won't need for games). There is also a peek at the emerging image-based techniques which are likely to play a part in some new games. It is a great source of teaching material, for VR as well as games material. Criticisms? I didn't try the Fly SDK disk, which some have reported negatively on. There were some places where I had to work to get from the description to the practicalities of an implementation. But given the scope and length of this book this is only to be expected, here and there. Overall, this is an excellent addition to a sparse literature.
Rating:
Summary: Good Book For Real-Time Rendering Concepts
Review: This may not be my favorite book, but I do seem to keep picking it up time after time. If you are trying to get a handle on the concepts that are used in current 3D games, this book may prove to be very helpful. I was not very impressed by the Fly3D SDK, but this could be because the demo levels were not really great examples of what the engine could do. It does appear to have many advanced features though.
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