Director 8.5 has fully embraced the 3-D online world and Real-Time Interactive 3D Games describes in detail how to build an immersive and exciting world using this rich and powerful tool. More than just an examples-according-to-feature book, it takes us on the journey of building a handful of finished products, from ideas scribbled on napkins through building and testing to marketing and selling a finished game.This is a large book, with ample technical examples and code snippets to complement the discussion at hand. (Don't worry, it's all on the CD-ROM.) The author presents both a broad view--there are chapters devoted to properly designing the flow of the game and the design of the characters and their traits--as well as specific Director techniques. Screen shots accompany the majority of examples when appropriate, and code snippets are clearly formatted in a different font and are well commented on.
Structured around three main parts, Partridge's book first explores the "dramatic structure of games." This is less about how an interactive 3-D game is built than why one is built the way it is; this first part is worth the price of the book alone. There is insight here that goes far beyond the usual technical how-to guide.
Another section worth noting includes the chapters on 3-D character creation using 3ds max or Maya. Building, texturing, and animating low-resolution polygon characters is an art in itself, but successfully importing that data into Director and using the models would be nearly impossible without the vital insight given in this book.
3-D rendering on the fly? An environment for authoring first-person-shooter games? Low-polygon models with textures rendered dynamically? This is not your father's Macromedia Director. --Mike Caputo
