Mastering Unreal Technology, Volume II: Advanced Level Design Concepts with Unreal Engine 3

Comment: Hi,
It is a good book. Do not be fooled! It has tons of informations and the author tries hard to make it cohesive and comprehensive.
Although, I would sense this volume II as an advanced Level design book. It does not cover all "advanced" functions with tutorials or hands on examples. Although the author still demonstrates understanding for all functions.
I would suggest to get this book, go through it and still lurk around for more tutorials or video tutorials. This book will provides a good basis and will definitely help create an understanding of the Editor's "advanced" functions.
Varrying tutorials within categories would potentially help users create deepeer understanding in various scenarios such as for particles. A flame/smoke and electric particles effects are excellent ideas, though river/fountain and much much more would help reader perceive and understand intricate nuances for particles functions in much deeper sense. This goes for many other categories.

I would still recommend this book to anyone. It is good, it is fun to go through, and the reader will get something big out of it.

Comment: I am a game developer, i know a lot about it, but i needed this book in my learning process, couse it covers a lot of things that are "not covered" in the free 3dbuzz tutorials, or any other tutorials for that matter,
the book requires the basic understanding of unreal engine 3 and its editor, so it takes you in detail, explaining many of the advanced features of unreal engine 3, I did knew a lot of those things from before, on the other hand I also learned a lot from this book, I was especialy happy with parts about working with UI interfaces,
FaceFX , Cinematics and postprocessing, thou i picked up a lot of other tips as well!

The obvious downside is that it is written for Unreal Tournament 3 PC game, which is included in the book as a free digital download(awesome)!!!
I say that becouse of Unreal Development Kit, for example many of the things that work in Unreal Tournament 3, do not work in UDK, I also noticed a lot of extra functionality for UI scenes - kismet was removed in UDK(along with lots of other things), that basicly means you are limited in actually creating and publishing something untill you learn scripting with unreal script!!!

Overall i must say i "love" the book, and the price was really low for such a gem,
i think this book has no real competition, and is a must have for all game designers!
I cant wait for the release of Volume 3, which will cover unreal scripting, and thou i expect some problems (most of scripts made in Unreal Tournament 3 wont work directly in UDK-it will require some more editing couse UDK native scripts are changing and updating constantly), i am sure it will be a great succes and will teach me more then enough to become an experienced UDK unreal script programmer!
Tnx for this great book!!!

Comment: I purchased Volume 1 of this series because I wanted to develop a good understanding of the Unreal Engine 3. I use the UDK, rather than UT3 Editor, because I like the licensing that the UDK offers. I really enjoyed that book, and I was able to use most of the techniques described in Volume 1 with the UDK. So I purchased Volume 2.

However, this book is not relevant if you are using the UDK. The examples work when you download the 8G UT3 game and editor. But if you are using the UDK, you are going to have a lot of trouble with this book. I had to stop half way through, and download the UT3 game and editor from steam and start over.

So use the UT3 Editor with this book and you will not be disappointed. But whatever you learn, it will not be very helpful if you want to move to the UDK.

Comment: the product was a massive help in me understanding the more advanced features of unreal tournement 3 editor. However, they dont get stocked in the UK so the waiting time for this was soo long that by the time i got it was at the end of my univerity siemesta.

So if you are interested GET IT NOW!

Comment: The book is excellent and detailed. However i only gave it 4 stars because the print quality and iilustrations are a very light blk and white hard on the eyes.
All computer graphics books should be reqired to have color illustrations. This book does not include a pdf like most other graphic books to off set this problem and allow for portability. Authors should stop listening to book editors and use color. The price difference is mute because the booksellers discount the books quickly,so you do not profit from this cost cut and only disappoint customers.