Computer Books
7.68K subscribers
852 photos
153 links
Doctors say: A new book a day

@computer_books
Download Telegram
Building Minecraft Server Modifications - Second Edition

Minecraft is a sandbox game that allows you to play it in any way you want. Coupled with a multiplayer server powered by Spigot, you can customize the game even more! Using the Bukkit API, anyone interested in learning how to program can control their Minecraft world by developing server plugins.

This book is a great introduction to software development through the wonderful world of Minecraft.

We start by instructing you through how to set up your home PC for Minecraft server development. This includes an IDE complete with the required libraries as well as a Spigot server to test on. You will be guided through writing code for several different plugins. Each chapter teaches you new skills to create plugins of increasing complexity, and each plugin adds a new concept of the Bukkit API By the end of the book, you will have all the knowledge you need about the API to successfully create any type of plugin. You can then practice and build your Java skills through developing more mods for their server.

#Minecraft #Gaming #Games

@computer_books
Unity 2018 Shaders and Effects Cookbook - Third Edition

Since their introduction to Unity, shaders have been seen as notoriously difficult to understand and implement in games. Complex mathematics has always stood in the way of creating your own shaders and attaining the level of realism you crave.

Unity 2018 Shaders and Effects Cookbook changes that by giving you a recipe-based guide to creating shaders using Unity. It will show you everything you need to know about vectors, how lighting is constructed with them, and how textures are used to create complex effects without the heavy math.

This book starts by teaching you how to use shaders without writing code with the post-processing stack. Then, you’ll learn how to write shaders from scratch, build up essential lighting, and finish by creating stunning screen effects just like those in high-quality 3D and mobile games. You'll discover techniques, such as normal mapping, image-based lighting, and animating your models inside a shader. We'll explore how to use physically based rendering to treat light the way it behaves in the real world. At the end, we’ll even look at Unity 2018’s new Shader Graph system.

With this book, what seems like a dark art today will be second nature by tomorrow.

#Unity #Games #Gaming

@computer_books
Hands-On Deep Learning for Games

The number of applications of deep learning and neural networks has multiplied in the last couple of years. Neural nets has enabled significant breakthroughs in everything from computer vision, voice generation, voice recognition and self-driving cars. Game development is also a key area where these techniques are being applied. This book will give an in depth view of the potential of deep learning and neural networks in game development.

We will take a look at the foundations of multi-layer perceptron’s to using convolutional and recurrent networks. In applications from GANs that create music or textures to self-driving cars and chatbots. Then we introduce deep reinforcement learning through the multi-armed bandit problem and other OpenAI Gym environments.

As we progress through the book we will gain insights about DRL techniques such as Motivated Reinforcement Learning with Curiosity and Curriculum Learning. We also take a closer look at deep reinforcement learning and in particular the Unity ML-Agents toolkit. By the end of the book, we will look at how to apply DRL and the ML-Agents toolkit to enhance, test and automate your games or simulations. Finally, we will cover your possible next steps and possible areas for future learning.

#DeepLearning #Games

@computer_books
Python Game Programming By Example

With a growing interest in learning to program, game development is an appealing topic for getting started with coding. From geometry to basic Artificial Intelligence algorithms, there are plenty of concepts that can be applied in almost every game. Python is a widely used general-purpose, high-level programming language. It provides constructs intended to enable clear programs on both a small and large scale. It is the third most popular language whose grammatical syntax is not predominantly based on C. Python is also very easy to code and is also highly flexible, which is exactly what is required for game development. The user-friendliness of this language allows beginners to code games without too much effort or training. Python also works with very little code and in most cases uses the “use cases” approach, reserving lengthy explicit coding for outliers and exceptions, making game development an achievable feat.

Python Game Programming by Example enables readers to develop cool and popular games in Python without having in-depth programming knowledge of Python. The book includes seven hands-on projects developed with several well-known Python packages, as well as a comprehensive explanation about the theory and design of each game.

It will teach readers about the techniques of game design and coding of some popular games like Pong and tower defense. Thereafter, it will allow readers to add levels of complexities to make the games more fun and realistic using 3D.

At the end of the book, you will have added several GUI libraries like Chimpunk2D, cocos2d, and Tkinter in your tool belt, as well as a handful of recipes and algorithms for developing games with Python.

#Python #Games

@computer_books