Essential Math Weblog Thoughts on math for games

9/6/2015

Third Edition Announcement, Plus Demo Code Notes

Filed under: General — Jim @ 11:11 am

It occurs to me that while I’ve been plugging this on Twitter, I haven’t mentioned it here: Essential Mathematics for Games and Interactive Applications has just come out with a third edition, kindly published by our friends at AK Peters and CRC Press. The book has been brought up-to-date and certain chapters have been revised to flow better. The most significant change is probably the lighting chapter, which still uses a very simple lighting model but builds it out of a physically-based lighting approach. There are also updates in the discussions of floating point formats, shaders, color formats and random number generators, plus much more! Please take a look, I think you’ll find it worthwhile.

Another piece of big news is that the code with the book has been updated as well. The previous edition used OpenGL 2.0 and D3D 9 — now it uses OpenGL 3.2 Core Profile, and D3D 11. Anything that depended on the old fixed-function pipeline (such as the old OpenGL varyings and uniforms) has been updated. And the book no longer comes with a CD. All the code is freely (both in terms of beer and of speech) available at GitHub. This should be good news for those of you who purchased the electronic edition; other than the platform updates it should be compatible with the second edition.

Finally, I’d like to include a few notes on the demo code. Some of the code was written after the text for the book was largely complete, so some of the minor challenges and decisions in writing a cross-platform renderer aren’t really covered, or aren’t covered in much detail.
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