Game Engine Black Books Update | Hacker News Reader

Game Engine Black Books Update

fabiensanglard.net

436 points_bxg168 comments

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I wonder if Stripe could help with publishing the hardcover.

The other books from Stripe press are really high quality: https://press.stripe.com/.

Though this may be a bit outside of what they normally publish.

Thanks for the suggestion, I have emailed them.

No Starch Press (https://nostarch.com/) also may work, they care a lot about their craft.

Having just discussed this with my partner (who is in the books industry), her suggestion is a limited number proper print run to get the cost of individual copies down. It may be a good idea to run a Kickstarter or Indegogo campaign to get interest up in the print run AND get money upfront for the costs. You could even limit the run number, and sign and number each copy for the first backers ?

Aside from that, I'd also be happy to sort UK/EU distribution for people using your current print on demand model, if I could have a free copy of each book? :)

Contact me via jaruzel [at] jaruzel.com if you are interested.

These numbers are brutal. We pay 58 dollar, het only gets 0.01 cent, and things get better if he can sell 1000 books.

I can't believe this site alone doesn't have 1000 doom lovers.

That makes zero sense to me. Why even bother? He'd be better off with us giving him $20 in exchange for a PDF.

His goal is not to make money, but to make content available. He accepts donations, but the books are being sold at-cost on purpose. PDFs are free.

There was a breakdown somewhere where he compared different printers. There were cheaper options but the print quality had issues. This is the reality if you want to print a full color book.

That is in the linked article

Exactly.

this is really sad.

the site has some pretty obvious bugs in the ordering sequence. if you click "billing address same as shipping address" before entering the shipping address the form fails; you have to check and uncheck it... when I see sloppy stuff like this, I always choose PayPal, but as that's not an option, I guess I will pass.

When I choose PayPal, I always see sloppy stuff like this

- Me 10 years ago.

Maybe it's better now.

I read the PDF version and donated 10 dollars a few months ago. The book is worth more than that, but given the numbers he expose I didn't even feel guilty.

This is absolutely insane. It would be cool to see a service where users could pledge cash for a book printing, then the number of pledges by the time of release determines the actual price and quality.

This is pretty much “running a Kickstarter with several stretch goals.” Although I guess having a one-stop shop that handles making the printing and shipping happen could be a thing.

My experience doing small press stuff via KS is that it’s probably not gonna be anywhere near worth doing until you can print at least a thousand books at once, though. There are economies of scale to deal with.

https://unbound.com/

As it turns out I don't actually have any original ideas

"Anticipatory plagiarism occurs when someone steals your original idea and publishes it a hundred years before you were born."

I have invented the holographic lens, bicycles and network cables. Each time, it turns out someone else invented it before I was born.

I thought I had the original idea of regenerative braking for recovering energy in cars... But it had been done.

Maybe the reason ideas come around again is because they haven't been fully exploited and people are unaware that they exist... Which could be another reason why execution matters more than the idea...

My partner is currently writing a book for them, and they go way beyond basic print on demand. They’re pretty stringent about what the quality they’ll publish, give loads of support in the fundraising process around things like producing the pitch video and workshops on promoting it, and once the book is done put it in front of professional editors. I can’t recommend them highly enough.

And because she’d kill me if I didn’t take the chance to put the book in front of a new audience, you can find it at https://unbound.com/books/all-my-worldly-joy/

The things most worth producing in the world are universally not profitable.

With a very subjective view on the worthiness of the enterprise

Indeed, profitability is a very subjective definition of worthiness.

But being profitable means that at least someone is willing to pay you to do the thing.

Note that there can be market distortions that either cause profitablity where it wouldn't otherwise be (e.g., government mandates) or prevent fully realizing costs (externalities).

I have met Fabien a few times at work, he is a lovely human being. I don't want to be too presumptuous and speak for him, but I don't think he cares about making a profit from this. He just likes to write and wants people to read and enjoy his works.

Contrast this with a niche firearms book from the host of Forgotten Weapons which is nearing $500k sales at a considerably higher price point.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/headstamp/chassepot-to-...

I wonder how many people would prefer to pay more for his books if they were collector's quality. Kickstarter might be a good way to figure this out.

The $0.01 (not cents, Verizon) comes from him not trying to make money.

He mentions that $0.01 is the minimum allowed, so I guess his aim isn't to make money on them.

To improve the profit I was going to suggest Createspace, then I read the article. Then I felt embarrassed for even thinking of recommending Amazon printing to anyone ever. Unfortunately Createspace support has never been great, and the transition to Kindle Direct has lowered the level of support even further.

Their PDF restrictions are sometimes nonsensical and whether or not it gets approved seems to be blind chance. You can spend days resubmitting the same PDF like a gambler at a slot machine. Win some lose some.

I always thought it was just me, but reading the author's experiences shows this isn't the case.

There are similar problems with uploading to publishers in ePub format. The last time I was bashing my head against ebook publishing, about a couple of years ago, many (most? all?) of the sites were validating ePub uploads using an old version of the ePub suite which rejected some ebooks which were valid per the up-to-date validator. Which version they were using was ofc not documented, and you were lucky to even get to see an error message. And of course tech support was largely unhelpful. (Especially kobo.com 's.) The people working on the ePub spec seemed to be largely unbothered by the fragmentation/noncompliance and hideous experience for those authoring and uploading in the format, too.

Which is a pity, because aside from this and some other bugs and pitfalls EPUB 2.0 has some attractive features and is nice to work with for anyone who doesn't mind bashing out a good old directory tree of HTML docs by hand.

I have said this elsewhere but there is little more satisfying for this 90s nerd than curling up on the couch and spending the afternoon with one of Fabien’s books. Nostalgia and tech detail, doesn’t get much better than this.

These are some pretty great books. There isn't much that isn't covered on his blog, but that sets the bar very high. If you have any interest in software archaeology and particularly early PC hardware architecture, get them. They look damned good on the shelf too.

Thanks for the updates, Fabien. I purchased a hard copy of the Wolf 3D book and have found it incredibly insightful. You've got a knack for breaking down complex subjects into easy to parse gems of information. Looking forward to the Quake book!

Thanks for your kind words :) !

I bought the first W3D edition via Amazon and loved it! It had it's quirks and such (addressed in the errata) but it was enjoyable and educational nonetheless.

This update comes at a great time; I hadn't known he'd released a DOOM version of the book and found that out a few weeks ago. But certain situations have left me to wait on purchasing it.

Now with this update, I'm glad I waited. I can't wait to get my copy!

Amazing content and quality in both books. Got the PDF and donated $40, well worth it.

I would love to get the dead-tree versions, these books certainly deserve their own space on a shelf, but I'd rather the content creator get money than having to pay printer and shipping companies. Lower carbon footprint as well.

Could someone give an overview of what is covered and whether it is still worth to invest reading these books ? Are any of the techniques still valid ?

You can download the PDFs and look at the table of contents if you'd like

Yes, doing that now. :)

I've only purchased and read the W3D book.

To answer your question would depend on what you want to gain from the book(s). Are you looking to solely learn how the games were made and work to learn their techniques to apply to your own projects? Are you wanting to understand the history and other things that surrounded the period of development, and why certain choices in coding were made? Are you just a fan of historical perspectives in PC game development?

I think for each of these questions, the answer would be that there is value in investing time reading the book(s), but that level of value will be different for each person and for why they are thinking of reading the books.

I think if you had no idea about how these games worked or had never implemented a similar engine yourself, that they wouldn't be the best source to go to in order to learn how to do it. There are many other sources, in books, on the internet, and in various archives that will have details to teach you far better.

However, after doing so, you may still have some questions relating specifically to W3D or Doom about how their engines worked - and that's where these books (based on what I know from reading the W3D book) shine - they give you a fairly well written account about how these engines work at their core. I suspect that they also may help you understand the techniques you've already read about and/or implemented better - or give you a different perspective on them.

As far as whether the techniques are still valid?

Well - if you're interested in building a pseudo-3D engine in software, and understanding how that works, how to optimize things, etc - then yeah, those techniques are still valid. They are probably good techniques to know which tricks might still be applicable even in today's hardware powered 3D realm - knowing how to do these tricks might inspire a solution for, say, a shader implementation to eek out a tad bit more performance or something? Or maybe you just want to understand how old-school games did what they did?

If you're asking whether such techniques could lead to creating the next breakthru AAA game - well, unlikely, unless you did something compelling and the idea of it being completely done in software and old-school was part of its selling point/strategy...

I couldn't say whether the techniques will still be applicable to your field (not knowing what you do), but these books are a dive into how to squeeze the most effiency out of limited hardware.

Even if you don't directly use any of the techniques,I think books like this give you a better appreciation of how to make your software more efficient and how well architecture software and choices in data structures and algorithms can massively improve your software. And more efficient software is something I think we should all strive for

Nitpick: The HN link goes to the non-https site and I guess the site doesn’t force ssl. Maybe the link can be modified?

I was considering buying the old books on amazon but had put it off since shipping to a different country is expensive. I didn’t know about the free pdfs before. Might as well donate directly to Fabien for the great amount of work put into this.

I came across this when I listened to Fabien’s interview on a podcast https://www.hanselminutes.com/666/episode-666-game-engine-bl...

I wonder if Quake will happen.

I'm pretty sure that a Quake black book is in the works.

He is working on that at the moment. I wish he did some crowdfunding.

It is hard to setup. A lot of printer will agree to print a batch of 1000...and ship it all to me. Then i will have to figure out how to ship to each individual, deal with lost parcels, import taxes, shipping fees and all that :(.

Ideally i would like a printer which let everybody pre-buy a copy and ship to each customer when it is ready. I don't think this exist yet.

What you want is a fulfillment service. You have the printer print 1000 copies, then ship all of those copies to the fulfillment service's warehouse. Orders go through the fulfillment service's system and they ship directly to customers. They take a small cut from each purchase. This is standard practice, as far as I know.

https://unbound.com/how-it-works seems to suggest they handle this. Perhaps email them?

Maybe talk to the guys at bitmap books. They do Kickstarters for their retro gaming books, they really care about the print quality of their books and it always shows. The colours are always vibrant and the pixel art is crisp. They also get a fulfilment house to dispatch their books so they don't have to.

Maybe if you drop them a message they might be able to point you in the right direction

So I wanted to order a print from bookpatch.....cheapest shipping to the UK is...$76.97. That's....nuts.

Edit: obviously I don't blame the author in the slightest. I'm just saying that thebookpatch shipping prices are insane - there is no way USPS takes $76 USD to ship a book to UK. I've checked and sending a (very generous for a book) 2KG parcel from UK to US would cost £15 with DPD and £25 with UPS. £50 gets you guaranteed next day delivery(across the ocean!). No idea where they get that $76 postage cost from.

I wanted to order, by delivery to Canada is brutal. More expensive than the book.

Sorry dear compatriot, I wish it was otherwise. If you can find a printer based in Canada, you can use the pdf and print it yourself.

Don't need to be sorry, it is not your fault but printer's. For you I'm grateful. Thank you for the amazing material.

I see in the comments that he has been working on a Quake Black Book, but I hope he plans to eventually do books on other types of games as well, instead of just Carmack/Romero-centric, raycasted first-person games. Don't get me wrong, I'd love to see a Commander Keen Black Book, but I'd also love to see a Morrowind Black Book or a Secret of Mana Black Book. The series could be really cool if he delved into other game engines and game mechanics.

For that matter, it would be cool to see a breakdown of how even earlier games like Elite for the NES achieved their pseudo-3D using wire mesh graphics and how they packed so much content into such a small cartridge.

The free DRM free Google Play ebook costs over £11.

Get the PDF? I tried it on an iPad and it looked good.

I got the PDF. this was a 'side' comment, more about the nature of Google's play store than about the book.

It doesn't say the google play version is free, it says it's DRM free

good point... semantics

Still haven't picked up the Doom book but Wolf3D was an amazing read. These books deserve to be in university libraries everywhere, for people to really see a proper dissection of real world code.

Awesome stuff and looking forward to the next thing

I just finished Wolf 3D Black Book last week & my copy of Doom arrived yesterday. Just before the updated version (grah), but they've both been great reads.

Thank you Fabien :) Love your work

Will "that other" black book receive a similar update?

Mr. Abrash, are you reading this?

Merci Fabien!

Definitely picking up a copy of this when I get the time.

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