Comments on: Noah from PhoneDog.com: Mobile Games – Nokia N81 and Madden NFL 08 Mobile 3D Game Development: From Start to Market (Charles River Media Game Development)

By: Pappalardo Simona

Pappalardo Simona — Fri, 09 Jul 2010 02:45:29 +0000

Review by Pappalardo Simona for Mobile 3D Game Development: From Start to Market (Charles River Media Game Development) Rating: This book is a very good introductory manual to 3D mobile game development,
with a clear explanation on basilary concepts. It provides a summary on basic
3D mathematical concepts. This is excellent to refresh this topic but not for
learning but, on the other hand, it is not the aim of the book.

The 3D examples have been made with 3DStudio and LightWave but not with Maya
which would have been appreciated considering its use in real world 3D
applications.

The chapter on distribution of the game on the market is really interesting. It
provides practical examples on possible distribution channels on the market.
For instance, the creation of a paypal-enabled web page created to distribute
and sell the mobile game on the market has been really appreciated.

Unfortunately, the porting of the game on the various target devices has been
discussed with superficiality, without any detail, too much generic with very
little usefulness.

It would have been nice to see some screenshots of the implemented games as
examples in the book, just to have a general idea on the final game appeal.

Overall, I highly recommend this book since I effectively learned the basic on
3D mobile game programming.

By: J. S. Harbour

J. S. Harbour — Fri, 09 Jul 2010 01:47:37 +0000

Review by J. S. Harbour for Mobile 3D Game Development: From Start to Market (Charles River Media Game Development) Rating: This book gets right down to business of creating Java ME games without any fluff. By the end of chapter 3, you will be on the way to creating a reusable game class containing a game loop, and chapter 4 gets right into the 2D graphics capabilities of Java Me with an example game. The rest of the book is devoted to 3D game development in Java Me, based on OpenGL ES (M3D). I was extremely happy with this book, and am using it in my mobile course now. This was a welcome find and a good alternative to the misleading Java ME Game Programming book by Flynt.

By: Joshua Newnham

Joshua Newnham — Fri, 09 Jul 2010 00:51:13 +0000

Review by Joshua Newnham for Mobile 3D Game Development: From Start to Market (Charles River Media Game Development) Rating: Very easy to read and a great way to get started in developing 3d games. Unlike alot of other j2me game developer books it is specific for games and not so much J2ME itself, it provides a create resource for the whole process from developing the game to creating the models.

Recommend to anyone interested in getting started for J2ME 3d game development.

Will be looking forward to your next book.

By: Short Dog

Short Dog — Fri, 09 Jul 2010 00:38:01 +0000

Review by Short Dog for Mobile 3D Game Development: From Start to Market (Charles River Media Game Development) Rating: This book is really very well written and the only one I know on the market of its kind. It's great if you are moving from 2D to 3D J2ME games. I gave it 4, instead of 5, stars firstly, because all the art work is done for Maya, Lightwave, or 3DS. These are very expensive modelling tools. The authors could have used an excellent alternative, Blender, which is just as powerful but free. Secondly, the authors use NetBeans. A better choice might have been Eclipse with the EclipseME plug-in since I believe the Eclipse community is bigger and perhaps more resourceful. Thirdly, there are a number of small errors in the book, particularly in Chapter 7. Finally, speaking of Ch 7, the book is rough going with the math. It's almost as if the authors were afraid to go into more detail knowing many people might be turned off by 3D math. But this seems to me just the place to slow down rather than breeze through the subject. For instance, they don't explain how or why matrix inversion is used nor how it can fail. Then, they go through all this math and don't give example code or even a snippet, of how to use it, for instance, the Transform class. That's too bad. They had this tiger (called 3D math) by the tail and let it go. Actually, to cover more of the math and details of mobile 3D I would recommend Hofele, C., "Mobile 3D Graphics", as a companion text. Hofele is also very good although the focus is less on mobile games than mobile 3D.