Hacker News Reader

Comment by creeble | Hacker News Reader

Andre LaMothe, my counterpart writer for Waite Group Press. I wrote “The Black Art of Windows Game Programming” in 1994. Mitch (Waite) loved those “Black Art” titles.

Edits for spelling and year, which I’m still not sure about.

View on HN

Man I LOVED the Black Art of Windows Game Programming! I was in high school when that book came out and I grabbed it as I was curious about game development and development in general. Although it was over my head at the time, 25+ years later into my development career and I credit this book in having had a huge impact on that as it really furthered my interest in programming. Thank you!

Not to speak ill in any way of your guys’ works, I really enjoy these books for their nostalgic qualities - both LaMothe, yours, as well as a few other ones like the RTS Game Programming (1997?) from one of the AoE developers. I have a physical collection of majority of the “greatest hits” from 90s and early/mid 2000s - mostly Engine/Graphics type stuff. It’s nice to read and see how people solved issues having fewer abstractions and layers than we do now, potentially solving things “on the fly” as it were, not really knowing the One True Way but making things work one step at a time all the same. In hindsight, these books were written at a time where hardware acceleration was taking off, so it adds to the nostalgia somewhat.

The most recent holy grail of a book for me has been Luna’s D3D11 tome. I haven’t kept up since.

> I have a physical collection of majority of the “greatest hits” from 90s and early/mid 2000s

Would you mind listing your collection? I'd love to add some (many) titles to my (small) collection of old programming books.

Not parent, but here's my current collection from that era (always on the lookout for more):

- tricks of the game programming gurus

- more tricks of the game programming gurus

- tricks of the 3D game programming gurus

- black art of 3D game programming

- tricks of the windows game programming gurus

- game programming gems

- AI game programming wisdom

- designing virtual worlds

- gardens of imagination

- flights of fantasy

- cutting-edge 3D game programming with C++

- dungeons of discovery

- action arcade adventure set

- amazing 3-D games adventure set

- DOS undocumented

(not from the era, but about it):

- game engine black book: wolfenstein 3D

- game engine black book: doom

It would be interesting to see the list of those books.

Some would enjoy nostalgia and some perhaps would actually learn something from them. May be you can recommend a few titles that would be relevant for today or simply fascinating, regardless of their relevance."

Thanks for giving me (and others) such a great/fun resource! I recall at least in LaMothe's at the end there was a contest to make the best mod/improvement off of the book's engine. Do you know if those actually happened and if the winners are accessible anywhere?

I read your book in high school. Thanks for getting me interested in my future career.

I’m so humbled by your comment, and the one below.

I really knew nothing about “game programming” when I wrote the book, but I did know a few things about graphics programming, and in particular a thing called “WinG” that was a very short-lived extension to Windows that I had used a lot in a product I helped develop.

But most importantly for me, I wanted to write something that inspired a young person of the right inclination to become as fascinated by programming as I was.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com