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Comment by jdkee | Hacker News Reader

Agree. I learn so much about programming by reading how he dissects old game programming techniques on relatively limited hardware. His piece on the Doom flames is incommensurate.

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If you don't know it yet, https://www.flipcode.com/ is also a great source of information. It comes from era of early 3D realtime graphics, when everyone was making their own engines using early Direct3D, OpenGL and Glide APIs. A lot of those articles aren't relevant anymore, but they show many algorithms that were used in that period of time.

> A lot of those articles aren't relevant anymore, but they show many algorithms that were used in that period of time.

I would actually argue the inverse. There are many articles that are still very relevant, some just don’t realize it since modern engines abstract the logic away. But there are some developers that work in engines that still need that knowledge. BSPs, VFSes, raytracing, 2d blitting techniques, 3D mathematics, etc are all still very useful.

This is one of the reasons I’m so glad these archives have stayed online for so long.

I first wanted to make a raycaster for fun and to learn more about it, and now I'm making a game enhancing the Rise of the Trian engine (itself an enhancement over the Wolfenstein 3D engine) while still meeting original system requirements (386, 4MB RAM free). Fabien's site and flipcode have both been essential in my journey, I appreciate them both immensely.

Awesome! I just got into game programming, and I've been looking far and wide for a resource like that one. Google has only provided a ton of blogspam, but I knew there was some old 90s looking website somewhere filled with code and handcrafted images about vector math and other game engine tricks.

Bookmarked and I will visit later. Thank you!

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