Hello There are a lot of game programming books on the market focused on graphic programming and recently also on A.I. I want to purchase a book which title should be " General technical stuff in game programming " For example , "how many tris per frame can I really use ? " " Load times from HD ? " " memory swapping " " skeleton animation vs vertex animation " etc I hope I made myself understood. The "Design books" now available on the market seem to focus on " How to make money with games " , very interesting , but it is not what I am looking for . May someone suggest a book as close as possible to my needs ? thanks in advance

Unfortunately you are talking about a book that probably doesn''t exist. I think the standard approach to learning programming through developing games is the culprit in people missing out on some fundamentals.

Something like load times from hard drive, that isn''t something specific to games. That is a basic operation that through programming experience (any kind!), you have an idea of what to expect based on the current system specifications. The same thing with number of triangles. Memory swapping? That is something that I have seen college degreed individuals learn about on the job. All of a sudden the hard drive light is steady on and you can hear the drive chugging... "All I did was allocate memory". Instead the program is using the hard drive to cache because it''s out of real RAM. This kind of stuff isn''t typically covered in books because experienced programmers have figured it out on the job, and less experienced programmers usually don''t have to deal with it at a critical level.

A certain small amount of experience can be gained from taking classes and reading books. A lot more is gained from doing the work over a long period of time. If you want to know how fast one sort algorithm is compared to another, then write a program that times two sort operations using the different algorithms. The kind of stuff you are talking about isn''t necessarily something you can quantify, because it is very much system dependent. As far as the animation systems, read books related to graphics and animation. If you don''t find the info you need, implement the system and see which one works better for your own needs. It''s all about experience.

fingh

Thanks for your answer
I was afraid that such book does not exist.
I agree with you that most of the operation are common to any kind of programs, as well as that no book can replace the experience, but some "tricks" are particulary suitable for game programming .
I have read some interesting articles about " memory management " or " Data structure " focused on games.
I do not mean that such technics are applicable to games only , of course.
I wonder wether someone can collect these articles in a book , same as they did for AI .
On the other hand some well known books , I own " Secret of the sages ", are in my opinion of no use , being too generic.

Reading over my original response, it seems a lot more harsh than I intended - I''m glad you didn''t take it as a flame

There are certainly resources on the web that discuss general topics in more specific detail to games, but I don''t believe there is a good book that compiles that kind of info. And those resources are sometimes dated, or very specific to one type of game/platform. Game Programming Gems might be a route to look at, sorry I didn''t suggest it earlier. I just got back from lunch and am thinking a little more clearly...