Actually I found it quite good, well packaged and complete with the new state system and glsl demos … of course there is some old and online stuff , but it’s a book you can keep in hand, and it’s good for beginers as well as reference for advanced users … just my 2 cents.
I found the book to be good but he is right; there’s so much stuff copy and paste. If you can fidn it for free, what’s teh point in paying? I’ve also been a abit angry about it. And I so waited for better game demos. Was waiting for a nice FPS, i somehow thought there would be one. Well in any way it is a good book but copy pasting isn’t what u paying for.
The point in paying for it is supporting the Blender Foundation and getting a concise and updated guide to the current Blender game engine, instead of a bunch of outdated tutorials scattered to the four corners of the internet.
I can’t tell you how much time having this as a printed book has saved me. I’m able to have it open while working fullscreen in Blender rather than flipping back and forwards. I was able to read it in one long sitting (on a plane) where my battery would have run out. It was more portable than my laptop. I’m able to flip through 100 pages in 2 seconds looking for the exact image I was looking for. More to the point, it’s all concise, well written and laid out, which is very rare with any no-cost documentation given away without supporting anyone financially.
I’ve wasted so much time searching for free answers online before that I’m extremely happy to avoid both and support the Blender Foundation with the modest cover price. I can always make a few extra bucks, but I’ll never get wasted hours of my life back.
I have a bit of mixed opinions about the Game Kit 2. I read the first tutorial with much interest, but then directly skipped to the Reference, which is the most useful part of the book in my opinion. But that is something that I would expect to find in the wiki, but not as the most useful part in a book with several hundred pages. Also the reference is useless to find a particular sensor quickly, because there is no alphabetical order or a table of content for the reference.
I would have prefered a “Essential Blender” approach. Essential Blender is just awesome, I have seldom found a book with that much information per chapter. In my opinion, it would have been better to tackle all aspects of the GE one after another organized in different topics, rather than game examples with different levels of difficulty. Instead of reading those, I used the great tutorial on blendenzo’s site to dive into GE python and then just experimented with the GE.
The Game Kit ist still a great way to support the Blender Foundation, I did not regret that I bought it.
the books is good and i like it and its very usefull. in fact i would buy one more if it was centered more on creating one whole game. for example: make a first person shooter step by step. its just very interesting and this way no steps will be missed out and the person reading can create his own game by the end of the book. so yes i would buy another book if there was one. still copy pasting is kinda a sin but in case of putting one whole game it is a good thing.
I bought the GameKit2 and I love it. Sure you can find the information in other places and I would have loved a complete list of all the BGE objects with their functions and properties, but I also get a better BGE out of buying the book. And for those of you who haven’t bought any of the books or DVDs from you might want to consider it.
They fixed and added a lot of things to Blender and will continue to do so as long as they can still feed themselves and their families from it. It is difficult, esp. when you have a significant other, to spend more than your full time job programming. So if you can afford it and want to help things move forward faster; buy the books and DVD’s and even t-shirts. If you can’t afford it then just enjoy what you get.