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Mstation Book Reviews
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Mon, 31 Oct 2005

Games: Developing Racing Games

Jim Parker, Start Your Engines: Developing Driving
and racing games, Paraglyph Press

Vroom, vroom, or if you're Mr. Toad, Toot, Toot! Anyway, this book starts out with basic design elements put together in C and then moves on to Open GL for graphics, Open AL for audio, and AI. We start with a simple platform game and work our way up to to the more sophisticated things you'd expect with Open GL. Along the way there are lots of implementational things like a messaging system and a finite state machine complete with code.

There is also time spent on the physics of the thing and commonly used simplifications to make the game doable and playable.

This is a pretty good starter book for someone who is serious to get coding. The lessons learnt can apply to all sorts of other game situations as well.

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