Real-Time Collision Detection (The Morgan Kaufmann Series in Interactive 3-D Technology)
by Christer Ericson

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Book Reviews of Real-Time Collision Detection (The Morgan Kaufmann Series in Interactive 3-D Technology)

Book Review: Very good indeed!
Summary: 5 Stars

The biggest strength of this book is its broad range. Ericson steps through the whole gamut of collision detection tasks: from simple collision tests for bullet intersections, through to accurate collision manifold generation for moving objects (the kind of collision data needed for high end physics simulation).

The book includes a wealth of information on geometrical primitive collision detection (working out when a sphere and plane collide, and so on), but so do many other books. He includes information about spatial data structures and how to work with them, covered well in only a handful of other books. He also looks at combining them all together, with really powerful optimisation, and how to write code to automatically generate the collision geometry and high-level data structures from the underlying geometry. I've never seen this covered in more than an off-hand paragraph before, and it makes this book worth double its price tag for serious game developers.

I've worked in the games industry for a long time, and I learned a lot from this book. Already some of his suggestions have made it into the game engine my company owns, and have made a performance difference. I can't think of higher praise than that.

Its not aimed, I don't think, at hobbiest game programmers, because it really handles the subject in great depth (although the simpler algorithms would be useful). It is a serious book for serious developers, and I wouldn't hesitate to recommend it to anyone working at the sharp end of games.

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