Hey look a new book on Irrlicht!
What it covers:
- Detailed information on setting up your dev environment (covers Windows, linux and OSX)
- Basic overview of the engine accompanied by some simple example code. I don’t think the longest code example is more than two pages.
- Using sprite sheets
- Using CopperTube to export a scene with lighting
- Using ScapeMaker (I’d never even heard of that tool before) to generate a terrain and how to render it
- Quick if a bit shallow tutorials on getting things like particles, mesh loading, etc
Ha, it mentions Ludumdare in passing, one of the examples require a sprite sheet image from “A Practical Survival Guide for Robots” and gives an LD url to get it.
What it doesn’t cover:
- Any hard/tricky stuff
- Dynamically doing stuff like shooting bullets and making real-time changes to the scenegraph
- Advanced collision or advanced anything
- Bringing it all together in a simple game like pong or something
- Detailed info and gotchas
So there you have it, it does what it says on the tin: a no-nonsense, well illustrated, beginner’s guide. Only useful for those absolutely new to Irrlicht – very quickly you’d want to switch to the real tutorials to go deeper.
The thing is, if you really have the required skills to develop a 3d game with Irrlicht, you probably aren’t going to be hung up on issues like understanding model formats or adding library paths to MSVC++. Now where is the advanced book…
Seth’s rating: [3.5/5] duck heads
Disclosure: Packt Publishing sent me this book for review
Note added Jan 19th, 2023: The asshole from Packt Publishing kept contacting me and making demands that I create accounts and publish the review in more places. I eventually had to create a filter to junk his emails. This was the first and only time I ever agreed to review a free book that was sent to me, better to just buy stuff and avoid the dumbassery. Anyway, I just noticed this post today and decided I’d like to vent a little!
Irrlicht 1.7 Realtime 3D Engine Beginner’s Guide
Paperback : 272 pages [ 235mm x 191mm ]
Release Date : October 2011
ISBN : 1849513988
Author(s) : Johannes Stein, Aung Sithu Kyaw