Programming Linux Games Available Online

Newtonian_p writes "The LaTeX source and a PDF file of the book Programming Linux Games by Loki Software and John R. Hall has been released online. According to Happy Penguin, it is not available under a free documentation license and is for personnal use only. Get it from one of these mirrors."

Thanks for the book

[Charlton Heston]

I've looked at this book in the store, but like most people, my budget is not infinite. It just never moved very high on my priority list. I appreciate the free book very much.

Maybe there's a new law on the internet: Everything will be free if you wait long enough.

Re: Thanks for the book

[Black Parrot]

> Maybe there's a new law on the internet: Everything will be free if you wait long enough.

Excepting Steamboat Willie.

what an amazing coinkidink

[Froze]

Iwas just talking to a friend about getting into some game programming under linux. I have been working with linux for years, but alway at a sysadmin or number crunching (molecular dynamics, etc) level. The fact that I always sent my data into something like povray and then rendered into animations seemed somewhat clunky.

Perhaps this will be my chance to make doing graphics directly a workable idea. Thanks to whoever posted this story and thanks to the author for making this free on the web. If it turns out to be the reference I hope it will be, they have just netted themselves another sale!

Re:what an amazing coinkidink

[Raiford]

Java works just dandy on Linux and you could graphcially render your MD solutions quite nicely using the Java graphics APIs. There's existing code out there already for MD. You really wouldn't have to go to the trouble of learning game programming.

Why a book?

[Trusty Penfold]

Why do you need a book called "Programming Linux Games"? Can't you just post the source to Tux Racer?

Re:Why a book?

[CableModemSniper]

Because the source to Tux racer maybe very informative in terms of a racing game, it may not help in making a flight simulator, or a platform sidescroller, or a FPS...you get the idea. The book presumably [slashdot.org] provides a good overview of programming games, issues specefic to Linux, design, implentation, and all that other good bs. The source code to tuxracer might be able to tell you how, but hopefully this book (which I haven't read) tells you why

Re:Why a book?

[Thomas A. Anderson]

please, somebody with mod points, mod the above post as moronic. "Why a book?" was a joke, not meant to be taken seriously. "Re:Why a book?" is posted by some dolt with no sense of humor....

Re:Why a book?

[CableModemSniper]

Shhh! You'll ruin my karma whore! Sheesh, what has slashdot become?

Re:Why a book?

[Thomas A. Anderson]

Now *thats* funny! :)

overcode

[fault0]

great, the author of the book is the president of my LUG (lug@gt [lugatgt.org])

ty overcode :-)
can you sign the printed version of the pdf :-d

Re:overcode

[fault0]

er, sorry, I was on crack, I meant the amateur radio club :-p

Re:overcode

[gi-tux]

Lucky you having a ham club and a LUG both. I wish that I did also.

But I really appreciate the release of the book. I had thought about purchasing it recently, but like a poster above, it hasn't reached the top of my list yet.

This will let me get started looking at it and purchase it when it does make the top of my list. It likely will still reach the top of my list within the next couple of months.

Re:overcode

[brandonY]

Ah, THAT explains why I've had the book in pdf format for so long.

Servers Bursting into Flames

[Boglin]

A couple of days ago, when this was posted on linuxgames, the site dropped to an absolute crawl. If the previously unheard of linuxgames effect nearly killed it, what's the slashdot effect going to do to it?

Re:Servers Bursting into Flames

[OverCode@work]

Not sure exactly *what* effect it was, but we've seen around 7000 unique IP's in the past two days.

Hey, the more the better... but I wasn't expecting nearly that much traffic. The box has been /.'ed before, much harder, but Georgia Tech's network is pretty slow these days, mostly due to Kazaa and similar.

-John

free CS department printing

[Anonymous Coward]

printing file plg-final-pdf-no-really-i-mean-it-this-time.pdf.
Page 433 of 433.

I hope I sent it to the right printer.

Definatly an Anonymous Coward

Re:free CS department printing

[OverCode@work]

Might want to edit the page size in the source, and re-typeset. It'll kill the hand-tweaked paragraph flow, but printing on 8.5x11 will probably save a lot of paper.

-John

Re:free CS department printing

[sh4na]

How exactly would I go about re-tysetting it?

Re:free CS department printing

[OverCode@work]

Install TeX, then 'make clean pdf'.

-John

Re:free CS department printing

[Anonymous Coward]

don't forget the part about setting the paper size before you regenerate!

Re:free CS department printing

[wmspringer]

Personally, if the book is good I'd rather just buy it than mess with a 400-page printout :-p

Assuming, of course, that it's in the discount section..

I have the dead tree version.

[heffel]

It is a very good book.

It got me started into SDL programming.

If you are looking to get started with SDL this is the best intro I have seen.

SDL's great for Linux

[Scotch Game]

SDL [libsdl.org] is great for Linux and has an added plus, if you believe it is a plus, that it works well on Windows, too, so your games will be cross-platform. More specifically, you can develop for Linux even if, for some mortifying reason, you don't have a Linux box at home.

In addition to being fully cross-platform, it supports events, audio, basic thread-creation, and has wrapper libraries around it for C++.

One of the best SDL tutorials I've seen (for Windows) is here [gamedev.net], but there's great Linux stuff available too, and it also runs on BeOS, MacOS & MacOS X.

If you'd like to get up to speed on Linux (and other platforms') games programming quickly and you've got C or C++ skills, do yourself a favor and check this out!

Programming OS X Games Available Online...

[h0tblack]

Altho primarily aimed at Linux game programming, a lot of this book will prove useful to OS X coders too. All those nice open API's, CLI tools, scripting etc :) There'll obviously be some tweaks needed here and there to get code samples to work and not everything is 100% relevant, but hey. Definitely another one to add to the bookshelf for OS-X-philes as well as straight Linux crowd IMHO. Also a handy reference to have if your porting something from Linux to OS X.
Cheers overcode!

review wanted

[bcrowell]

A review on The Assayer [theassayer.org] would be very welcome!

Great...

[deviantonline]

Thats great... I paid like $60 dollars CDN plus tax for this and now its free?