Hacker News Reader

This pops up on HN every few months, and I don’t even mind. At a minimum, read the last couple chapters on the development of Quake. So fun.

View on HN

Pretty sure you're thinking of Abrash's Graphics Programming Black Book (understandable). Abrash was a developer on Quake and the GPBB has a couple of chapters on it at the end IIRC.

Whereas: this book was written by André LaMothe, who did not work on Quake. It predates Quake and AFAIK doesn't mention it.

Also worth noting is Abrash's Black Book is pretty specialized for the x86 PCs of the 90s. It's not really all that applicable to game programming today, unless you're deliberately doing retro development for 486/pentium class machines w/VGA.

It's kind of mind boggling how things have changed from doing your own bit blitting to having Unreal Engine doing all the hard work and you just coding up the game logic.

Crazy

Oh no you are right! My mistake - my first “real” programming job was at a game studio in 1997, and I devoured both of these books (well, and more, including Expert C Programming by Peter van der Linden). Great books.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com