Fabien Sanglard

Doom

Game Engine Black Book

Game Engine Black Book, Wolfenstein 3D

Wolfenstein 3D

How was Wolfenstein 3D made and what were the secrets of its speed? How did id Software manage to turn a machine designed to display static images for word processing and spreadsheet applications into the best gaming platform in the world, capable of running games at seventy frames per seconds? If you have ever asked yourself these questions, Game Engine Black Book is for you. This is an engineering book. You will not find much prose in here (the author’s English is broken anyway.) Instead, this book has only bit of text and plenty of drawings attempting to describe in great detail the Wolfenstein 3D game engine and its hardware, the IBM PC with an Intel 386 CPU and a VGA graphic card. Game Engine Black Book details techniques such as raycasting, compiled scalers, deferred rendition, VGA Mode-Y, linear feedback shift register, fixed point arithmetic, pulse width modulation, runtime generated code, self-modifying code, and many others tricks. Open up to discover the architecture of the software which pioneered the First Person Shooter genre.

Game Engine Black Book: Wolfenstein 3D v2.1

The author presents a historical discussion of the hardware and software innovations that took place as part of id Software's creation of the Doom PC game.

Game Engine Black Book Doom

It was early 1993 and id Software was at the top of the PC gaming industry. Wolfenstein 3D had established the First Person Shooter genre and sales of its sequel Spear of Destiny were skyrocketing. The technology and tools id had taken years to develop were no match for their many competitors. It would have been easy for id to coast on their success, but instead they made the audacious decision to throw away everything they had built and start from scratch. Game Engine Black Book: Doom is the story of how they did it. This is a book about history and engineering. Don’t expect much prose (the author’s English has improved since the first book but is still broken). Instead you will find inside extensive descriptions and drawings to better understand all the challenges id Software had to overcome. From the hardware -- the Intel 486 CPU, the Motorola 68040 CPU, and the NeXT workstations -- to the game engine’s revolutionary design, open up to learn how DOOM changed the gaming industry and became a legend among video games.

Fabien Sanglard

About

Books

Join the club