The Game Programmer's Guide to Torque: Under the Hood of the Torque Game Engine (GarageGames)

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Product Description

The author takes readers on an in-depth walkthrough of the Torque Game Engine---one of the most popular, powerful, and easy to use game engines available today. With clear explanations of how to use Torque to create your own games and detailed discussions of the engine's inner workings, this book is a must read for any programmer interested in making games for fun or profit. It offers step-by-step examples, detailed system descriptions, in-depth references, practical tips, tricks, and more that provide readers all they need to understand the Torque Game Engine. See the Support page on the author's website for a revision of Chapter 15 (Torque Lighting). A CD is included with the book.

The Game Programmer's Guide to Torque: Under the Hood of the Torque Game Engine (GarageGames) Review

This book could have really been excellent with a little more work. It contains all the elements you'd want. A programming overview, a Torque overview, sections on the architecture of Torque, sections on torque script, really nice large reference sections, a step by step game project in torque, and lots more. Sounds great right? Well, it would be, except for the really poor organization of the book. Fully half of the book is not in the bound softcover book, but rather on the cdrom that accompanies it. To me this largely defeats the purpose of buying a book, since if I wanted to rely on online references I could always just go to the garagegames website.

The other part that really frustrates me about the book is that the book and the cdrom don't seem to be ingegrated well together. The book constantly references "the appendix", yet there is actually no appendix in the book. There are adobe acrobat documents on the cdrom named "appendix" yet they don't always contain the things that the book is referencing. Also the game project which is at the very heart of the book is also very disorganized. If you try to read the book and do the project, you won't be able to, because many of the steps needed are written about only in the appendix, and the book does not point those out.

So what's the bottom line, is the book worth getting? That is a tough call. Given that it is so disorganized, and carries such a high price tag, I'm tempted to say "no". But there really aren't many alternatives, and it does contain useful infrmation if you have enough patience to dig through it. You might check out the book: 3D Proramming All-In-One, which is also written about the torque engine. That book is much better organized and professionally put together, but the problem with that book is that it's based on an ancient version of Torque, and doesn't have near as much treatment of the Torque script language as this book.

One additional thing to be aware of: This book is certainly not aimed at those new to programming. If you are new to programming, I don't think this book will be of much use to you. If you are comfortable with C/C++/C#/Java, or something similar, you can get something out of the book if you try hard enough, but be prepared for a lot of frustration.

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