Irrlicht 1.7 Realtime 3D Engine Beginner's Guide [Kindle Edition]

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

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 official online 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

I have to tell in advance that I'm one of the Irrlicht programmers, a long-time user and loving the Irrlicht 3D engine madly. So I was reading the book rather out of curiosity than out of need to learn about Irrlicht and can't really comment out of a beginners perspective.

The readers are expected to have basic c++ knowledge without much project or programming experience. A short introduction on templates is also added, probably because this is a topic which beginners often struggle with. No knowledge about 3D is assumed, but also not too much background is given. So there is for example a small chapter about the Irrlicht vector-math class, but there is no real introduction to vector math. Which means readers have to learn about typical 3D math like vectors and matrices from other sources.

The book is going over a few simple examples for every topic in a detailed step-by-step approach. Many of the examples are close to the examples coming with the Irrlicht engine, but usually more streamlined. The descriptions are unfortunately often a little mechanical and missing some depth. For example setting up an IDE with screenshots for every step sounds nice until you realize how fast such information is outdated. An explanation about general principles of project files, include files and linking which allows readers understanding how to set-up a project even on an IDE which they've never seen before would have been better. Also some details feel a little like page-filling. Going over function-parameters one by one, in many cases without really adding anything to the API documentation, just teaches beginners bad habits. People should rather learn how to find the information fast within the API documentation as that will serve them a lot better in the long run.

The quality of the chapters varies somewhat. There are very good chapters, with nice background information and great introductions like the chapter about lights. But then there is for example also a really weak chapter about Irrlicht class-types which seems to have a near random presentation of basic classes while important concepts for Irrlicht like the reference-counting mechanism, the material system or the vertex structures are completely ignored. Maybe those were seen as too advanced concepts, but from my experience this is stuff beginners run into within days.

Another thing I've been missing is some glossary about the terms used in the book. For example when there is a chapter about XML reading/writing, then there should at least be a short description somewhere about what XML is and when to use it.

Despite some criticism - the book generally delivers what it promises and helps beginners to take their first steps with Irrlicht and 3D programming. It might sometimes forget to show the forest for all the trees it presents, but the major parts of Irrlicht are all introduced in an easy to follow manner. So for anyone just starting out on their game programming journey - get this book together with a nice book about c++ and maybe freshen up your math a little bit and you'll have your own space-invaders running in no time!

If you want to get started with Irrlicht and don't want to wade through API docs and samples, you'd rather learn it in book format, then this is a good book for you.

Emphasis is put on examples and results-driven learning. Thanks to the power of Irrlicht, most examples are just a few added lines of code, or they build up in steps that are each just a few lines long. At times, I almost saw these examples as recipes. For example, one of the very first actions is to create the IrrlichtDevice object. There's a nice step-by-step explaining to create your main method, initialize the IrrlichtDevice with createDevice, check the pointer, and then drop the device. The next examples build on this one with more steps. And when the chapter is over, you have a working demo - essentially the equivalent of one of the samples included with Irrlicht, but instead of looking at the sample's finished code, you've built it up step-by-step in the order that you would actually build a program.

Along the way, explanations and advice are also given. When a new function call or type is introduced, it's explained. When a new 3D topic is introduced, it's (very lightly) explained. Never, along the way, is anything confusing. Every example is introduced first in the steps to implement it (so for example you could just follow the steps in your own program to add the feature), followed by an actual complete code sample of the feature. This makes the usage abundantly clear. Also, screenshots are used throughout the book, both on every sample and to supplement explanations of theory.

Now, there are things this book is not. It is not an introduction to 3D theory at all. The cover even says, "learn by doing: less theory, more results". And indeed the use of Irrlicht requires very little 3D knowledge, since Irrlicht abstracts away the low-level graphics operations for the user. It's probably not a good reference - sure, you could check a section to see how to use a certain feature, but for anything non-trivial you're going to need to look elsewhere. It's not a start-to-finish book on developing an application; instead, every chapter builds up a new sample application using the new features introduced in that chapter. And of course it's not a game development book - game development is only one of the uses for the Irrlicht engine, and while games are mentioned in a couple of the topics in the book (sprite sheet rendering, rendering and moving a 2D ball), a game is not made.

It's also not perfect; I did find one logic bug. To be clear, I did NOT see any errors with the usage of Irrlicht. And there is the occasional grammar error, which I certainly excuse because the author's native language is not English. Nothing that cripples the usefulness of this book as a beginner's guide, though.

In summary, the book is exactly as its title describes - it is a beginner's guide to Irrlicht. It is not a guide to 3D concepts, it is not a reference manual or advanced guide. It does not instruct you on how to extend Irrlicht. It isn't a guide to making a game with Irrlicht. But it is a complete walkthrough of every feature of Irrlicht, explaining each feature with explanations, examples, and screenshots.

I've given it 5 stars because I believe as a beginner's guide to Irrlicht (which is exactly what it advertises itself as), it hits the mark. I would love for a more advanced Irrlicht book to come out, but this does not take away from the fact that I think this book is extremely useful to someone who has no prior knowledge of Irrlicht other than its purpose/features, and learns best by reading a book.