{"id":71,"date":"2009-01-03T10:28:22","date_gmt":"2009-01-03T16:28:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.realtimerendering.com\/blog\/?p=71"},"modified":"2009-01-06T19:07:47","modified_gmt":"2009-01-07T01:07:47","slug":"yet-another-free-book","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.realtimerendering.com\/blog\/yet-another-free-book\/","title":{"rendered":"Yet Another Free Book"},"content":{"rendered":"

So I had such plans for all the things I’d get done during the holiday break. Well, at least I fixed our bathtub faucet, and kept the world safe from\/for zombies in Left4Dead<\/a>\u00a0versus mode.<\/p>\n

In contrast, Wolfgang Engel, Jack Hoxley, Ralf Kornmann, Niko Suni, and Jason Zink did something nice for the world: gave us a DirectX 10 book for free online<\/a>. There’s more information about it at the site hosting it, gamedev.net<\/a>. To quote Jack Hoxley, “It’s more of a hands-on guide to the API at a fairly introductory\/intermediate level so doesn’t really break any new ground or introduce any never-seen-before cool new tricks, but it should bump up the amount of D3D10 content is available for free online.”<\/p>\n

There are some great topics covered, including a thorough treatment of shading models, lots about post-processing effects, and an SSAO implementation (which I disagree with their specific implementation a bit in theory – convex objects shouldn’t really have self-shadowing ever, that’s why you usually ignore half the samples that are obscured, as a start – but SSAO is so hacky that it should be considered an artistic effect as much as photorealistic one). Lots of chewy stuff here.<\/p>\n

Don’t be fooled because the book is only on the web, by the way. This is a high-quality effort: well-illustrated, the sections I sampled were readable and worthwhile, and there are solid code snippets throughout. The authors didn’t work out a print deal that they liked, so released the book to the web. You can see its original listing on Amazon<\/a>. To quote Jack again, “We’re all glad it’s now out … for everyone to use.”<\/p>\n

If you find errors or problems in the book, please let the authors know – the whole book is on a wiki, so you can add discussion notes (note: I found the wiki doesn’t work well with Chrome, but Internet Explorer worked fine). As the gamedev.net article notes<\/a>, this release may form the basis of a book on DirectX 11, so could be considered something of a free beta. Please do reward the authors for their hard work by contributing feedback to them.<\/p>\n

Update:<\/em>\u00a0Do keep in mind that this is a first draft (i.e., cut them some slack). Reading more bits, quality varies by section. I trust the authors will read and fix each others’ work as time goes on. I do like the wiki element. For example, there are some comments from Greg Ward in the corresponding discussion page<\/a> for the implementation of the Ward shading model that should help improve their text.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

So I had such plans for all the things I’d get done during the holiday break. Well, at least I fixed our bathtub faucet, and kept the world safe from\/for zombies in Left4Dead\u00a0versus mode. In contrast, Wolfgang Engel, Jack Hoxley, Ralf Kornmann, Niko Suni, and Jason Zink did something nice for the world: gave us […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[590,126,125,102],"class_list":["post-71","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-resources","tag-book","tag-post-processing","tag-shading-models","tag-ssao"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.realtimerendering.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/71","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.realtimerendering.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.realtimerendering.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.realtimerendering.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.realtimerendering.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=71"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.realtimerendering.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/71\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.realtimerendering.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=71"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.realtimerendering.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=71"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.realtimerendering.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=71"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}