| Programming Linux Games discusses important multimedia toolkits (including a very thorough discussion of the Simple DirectMedia Layer) and teaches the basics of Linux game programming. Readers learn about the state of the Linux gaming world, and how to write and distribute Linux games to the Linux gaming community.
This book is for anyone who wants to learn how to write games for Linux. I assume that you know the basics of working with Linux; if you know enough to start X, open a terminal, copy les around, and re up a text editor, you're good to go. I also assume that you have a reasonable grasp of the C programming language. Flip through the book and see if you can decipher the syntax of the examples. We'll go through all of the necessary library calls, so don't worry if you see a bunch of unfamiliar function names, but you should be able to understand the majority of the actual code. No prior experience with multimedia programming is assumed, so don't worry if you've never had the perverse pleasure of hacking a graphics register or shoving a pixel into memory. All in good time!
Although this isn't a reference manual in the traditional sense, chapters 4, 5, 6, and 8 provide reference boxes for most of the API functions we cover. I hope that even experienced multimedia programmers can nd something useful here.
I will not discuss 3D programming in this book. There are already plenty of excellent books on OpenGL, and only a small bit of OpenGL programming is directly related to Linux. However, I will demonstrate how to use SDL as an eective replacement for the GLUT toolkit; see page 140.
Game programming has been one of my hobbies ever since my rst Commodore 64 computer, and I wasn't about to leave it behind when I left the Windows world for Linux. The SVGALib library held me over for a while, but SDL quickly took over as my favorite way to write Linux games. After meeting the Loki crew at a Linux trade show, I decided that Linux gaming meant business, and got the idea to write a book about it. A year later, it is nally nished, and I hope you enjoy reading it. |