Product Description

A genuinely useful text that gives an overview of the state-of-the-art in system-level design trade-off explorations for concurrent tasks running on embedded heterogeneous multiple processors. The targeted application domain covers complex embedded real-time multi-media and communication applications. This material is mainly based on research at IMEC and its international university network partners in this area over the last decade. In all, the material those in the digital signal processing industry will find here is bang up-to-date.

Product Description
Codesign for Real-Time Video Applications describes amodern design approach for embedded systems. It combines the design ofhardware, software, and algorithms. Traditionally, these designdomains are treated separately to reduce the design complexity.Advanced design tools support a codesign of the different domainswhich opens an opportunity for exploiting synergetic effects. The design approach is illustrated by the design of a videocompression system. It is integrated into the video card of a PC. AVLIW processor architecture is used as the basis of the compressionsystem and popular video compression algorithms (MPEG, JPEG, H.261)are analyzed. A complete top-down design flow is presented and thedesign tools for each of the design steps are explained. The tools are integrated into an HTML-based design framework. Theresulting design data can be directly integrated into the WWW. This isa crucial aspect for supporting distributed design groups. The designdata can be directly documented an cross referencing in an almostarbitrary way is supported. This provides a platform for informationsharing among the different design domains. Codesign for Real-Time Video Applications focuses on themulti-disciplinary aspects of embedded system design. It combinesdesign automation and advanced processor design with an importantapplication domain. A quantitative design approach is emphasized whichfocuses the design time on the most crucial components. Thus enablinga fast and cost efficient design methodology. This book will be of interest to researchers, designers and managersworking in embedded system design. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Good and Comprehensive
This is a good and comprehensive book. It covers all the info I want and content in-depth. ... Read more

Product Description

Dave Eberly's 3D Game Engine Design was the first professional guide to the essential concepts and algorithms of real-time 3D engines and quickly became a classic of game development. Dave's new book 3D Game Engine Architecture continues the tradition with a comprehensive look at the software engineering and programming of 3D engines.

Customer Reviews (9)

Yes, gives a good start to 3D graphics development
The book combined with the working(!) examples on the CD really get you started. The very first example shows how you can draw an object, view it in perspective projection, rotate and translate the object, and rotate and translate the camera.
The examples use OpenGL API, and I compiled only the VC++ 7.1 project that use OpenGL as the rendering mechanism in VC++ 8.0 on Windows Vista - this works well.
Only complaint is that there is no chapter that explains the matrix model of OpenGL. Sure enough this is to be found in a lot of other books, but if the author had decided to put in a chapter explaining the matrix model - e.g. how the perspective transformation matrix is derived from first principles, then this would be the only book you ever need.

It got me programming
I've had several false starts at 3d programming.I've tried using the code from several other books but quickly gave up after getting a short distance into the concepts.Making the sample programs work with Windows XP and Visual Studio just isn't that easy in most cases.These programs worked as indicated with Visual Studio.I was quite happy.

None the less the code could use more documentation and clarity.For instance in the simple drawmesh program the LoadBmp24 routine returns Hight and Width as a side-effect of the call.I tried my own odd shaped bitmap and the routine kept failing.These two comment lines would have been really helpful:

// OpenGL prior to 2.1 requires textures be in 2d arrays
// whose dimensions are multples of 2.

After spending hours tracking that down it was easy to adjust the routines to actually work with arbitrary bitmaps and triangle meshes.

Good software engineering book
Well, needless to say, Eberly rocks. This is a great book on game engine architecture - even though it's less mathematically intensive than Eberly's other books (which, for many, is a good thing), it has a very good coverage of software engineering aspects of game engines, as it explains in detail how (and why) the WildMagic engine is organized. Do keep in mnid, though, that the book's purpose is not teacing how to develop games or algorithms for that - it's a software engineering book, and a good one at that.

Acceptable book with some significant failings
This is an acceptable introductory book for the architecture of an AAA-quality game engine, under the consideration that it has so little competition.

The most significant criticism I have of the book is its repeated digression of topics into a documentation of the Wild Magic engine.If you intend to use the Wild Magic engine, I highly recommend the book, but for anyone not using it, this book saves far too few pages for discussions of general engine architecture.

For example, the entire second chapter is basically a documentation of the basic types defined for the Wild Magic engine.If you are architecting a large scale project, you do not want to start the discussion with talk of a smart pointer class.Or an array class.Unfortunately, this is exactly how the book begins.

Throughout the book, the reader is constantly forced to shift through documentation for each Wild Magic class.While the author does use the engine to illustrate points, often the point is so heavily mixed with the documentation that it is tedious to pick out the general discussion.

My secondary criticism of the book is that too many words are used in specific (but uncommon) ways - making it hard to follow at times. The sad part is that the author acknowledges this for some words (which helps the reader) but fails to for others.An example of the latter is when the author concedes that he uses the word `animation' to mean any event that happens over a period of time.You will not find that definition in any dictionary, but at least he specifies his intent, which is slightly forgivable.What is not forgivable is the other phrases/words that are not acknowledged as being uncommonly used, such as `world bounds' and `local bounds'.Too often I found myself carefully following discussions not because I found the material difficult, but because I needed to extract the context for which the author is using a word or phrase. In this sense it makes it hard for anyone to simply use the book for reference purposes.

This book deserves three stars because it is a good (although sometimes short) treatment of the many subjects that are part of a 3D game engine.It loses one star for trying to combine two related, but what should be separate discussions - general engine architecture and documenting Wild Magic.It loses another for being overly verbose and dry (see my secondary criticism).It has so few competitors that you might just have to accept its failings and shift through the material to dig out the general architecture nuggets that are dispersed throughout the book.

3d Game Engine Architecture
The title says everything, this book treats most aspects concerning game engine design architecture and programming. Although not focusing in the next generation graphics architectures and shaders, it does provide an excellent basis for core engine andunderlying graphics architecture design. General programming topics such as memory layout and shared object references are also discussed. A great book for begginers and a nice reading for professionals. ... Read more

Product Description
The authors set out to address fundamental design issues facing engineers when developing the software for real-time computer-based control systems – in which all programs must be safe, reliable, predictable and able to cope with the occurence of faults.

Despite rapid progress in computer technology, the attention of designers is still focused on finding logically correct algorithms to implement the required control. It has, however, become evident that this is insufficient and that attention must be paid to meeting the complex timing interactions which occur between the systems under control and the computers controlling them. This book suggests that the answers lie in the use of understandable, engineering-relevant, mathematically sound tools for expressing and analysing the complex temporal interactions.

Timing Analysis of Real-Time Software is not a designer's handbook; rather it discusses the nature of the problems involved and how they can be handled. The focus is on the use of modelling techniques based on the so-called Quirk-model, initially developed in the United Kingdom and, over the past decade, extensively developed in institutions in the ex-Soviet Union and Europe. This book shows how the techniques can be used to form the basis of a new generation of CASE (computer assisted software engineering) tools, and examples are given of how these can be used to design embedded systems ranging from digital controllers through to communication protocol handlers. ... Read more