Quote:
Originally Posted by STA_SirTiger
If anything, your attitude is absolutely horrible.
|
plz. You're the one that's always trolling.
Anyway, I'm not bashing it, it's just horrible. That's all there is to it. Here's my reasoning to make sure that none of you buy this because you'd be better off simply flushing the money down the toilet.
The examples on his site are definitely like, copy/pasted right into the book. The sentence/paragraph structure is horrible. It really looks like he just pasted it into Word and told a company to print it - I can't imagine any publisher would ever let a book like this get into production. The lettering goes to the center of the page so you have to bend the pages to read everything. It randomly ends mid-paragraph and starts a new paragraph without double-spacing and is horribly ugly and hard to read. He re-uses screenshots for the same example showing a general sense of laziness (for example, he used a screenshot referencing a lighting tip also for a texturing tip later on - I double-taked at first and wondered if he had simply copy/pasted the same section twice).
Some sections just start without warning. Most sections have a big preface, like you'd expect in any educational book, but sometimes you'll flip the page and it'll just randomly have at the top in normal size font "The Theory of Texturing" when you were reading about something completely fucking different. It's bad to that point that just reviewing it is making me angry.
It's thin as hell (but obviously it tells you how many pages it is when you order it so I can't fault it for that) but it's an absolute ripoff when you conider it's not hardcover and it's only 150 fucking pages, and with shipping it came up to like 50 bucks.
Oh, I haven't discussed the actual content yet, haha. Well, if you have common sense, you don't need this book. I was hoping he would've done study about colored lighting and the implications from color theory/mood lighting in maps but basically all it goes into is that "don't color an entire map one color, and don't make it a rainbow mess of colors" - I think that example is on his site - and seriously, that's pretty much all there is to it. The same goes for texturing, he explains that textures that aren't scaled up and repeat over a landscape look bad but if you scale them up they look good. There's seriously little side-by-side screencaps with the text "BAD" and "GOOD" and then like 2 sentences of a bullshit explanation.
blarg, it's just terrible. Shame, too, since this is basically like the first "real" book about level design (which is why I bought it).
Hopefully
this one will be a touch better, although it doesn't claim to do anything other than teach the programs so I don't know if it'll have value past that. I'm just interested in basically anything that covers mapping, really. It's a shame that this one was disappointing being that it was, like I said, pretty much the first real computer graphics book dedicated to level design, but sadly it's below even saying "you could just look it up on google" - it's just common sense. What looks good and what looks bad, pointed out in 150 pages of obnoxiousness. Blerg.
