Monday, April 28, 2014

Learn PhysX Modeling with PhysX: A Review

Recently, Packt publishing has released a new book on Game Physics called Learning Physics Modeling with PhysX Examining the accompanying code tells me that the author has shamelessly copied some of my tutorial code into this book. While I am not asking anything from neither the author nor the publisher but at least an acknowledgement or a reference to the original tutorials/source code should have been given in the book as the main source of this text or at least a mention some where in the book's source codes.

Here is my review for this book. The book starts with a gentle introduction to PhysX v 3.3.0 in Chapter 1. Chapter 2 is a copy of my simple box tutorial with the only difference being that the author does not render anything on screen; he simply outputs the box position to console. Chapter 3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10 are ripped from the PhysX guide. All of the code snippets as well as the figures are taken from the PhysX guide. There are no concrete use cases given in any of these chapters. I would suggest the reader to follow the official PhysX guide rather than reading through these chapters as the former is more elaborate. Apart from the simple box tutorial, the author has given his own examples for instance one on particles, character controller, joint, queries are based of PhysX guide.

All in all, I would ask the readers not to buy this book. Save your money as the information contained in this book is available for free both online and in the free PhysX guide. The books sample codes are good. You can read them alongside the PhysX guide which should be enough to understand whats going inside.
 
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2 comments:

pep said...

I did not buy this books. I am using your tutorials. Waiting for your book about PhysX, Bulletphysics, Havok. Your book "OpenGL Development Cookbook" is great.

add.

"Learning Game Physics with Bullet Physics and OpenGL" is it worth to buy?, Older OpenGL 1.2 and little information (only 126 pages).

MMMovania said...

Hi Pep,
I have not read the Bullet physics book. Let me see if I could find time to read it.

Thanks,
Mobeen

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