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Game Engine Black Book Postmortem
- kar1181 9y agoI have been reading Fabien's book over the past few nights and it has been enormous fun. Programming for most of us has moved a long way from the metal our code eventually executes on. And it's quite fun to go real low level and understand at an almost atomic how to make a computer do what you want it to do. That's why this (and Michael Abrash's earlier Graphics Black Book that served as inspiration for this)is so much fun. As an kid who grew up playing games on these machines at that time it all seemed like magic. With quality documentation and the power of nostalgia you can now fully understand (and appreciate) what the likes of Carmack achieved in the early 90s on these machines and now we too can go in and hack around and achieve the same results. I hope the book does well and Fabien can do the proposed 486 and Pentium companion editions.
- retSava 9y agoI agree, I hope this does well. Born around the time to be in "suitable age" when Amos the creator on Amiga, and similar things, where the foshnizzle. This is a really cool thing with today though - the technical barrier to creating and publishing physical books (and ebooks too of course) is just so so low. Making it financially viable and worth it is another thing. I certainly hope this does well and will buy a physical copy.
- kar1181 9y agoAgree, indeed barriers to entry in computing generally is getting lower and lower all the time. The issue is that computers are so good now that the need to 'play around with them' is getting less and less. But for those of us that remember peeking and poking memory addresses and programming by trial and error can recognise how good we have it today.
- speedplane 9y agoNot sure I agree. Entry into computing is definitely getting easier, but it's decelerating due to a number of factors, namely the slow death of Moore's law and the huge amount of data you need to crunch to create useful solution. Tech is improving, but it feels like we're falling off the exponential into something more linear. As computer performance improvements decelerate, we're starting to see more specialization into particular tech verticals. This specialization makes it harder for people to break into. For example, it used to be that if you wanted to crunch more data in Excel, you'd just wait six months for the better intel chip. It was faster and easier to do that than write custom software. Now the new chips are only marginally better than the last, and we need to rely on distributed systems linking dozens or hundreds of computers. A 10 year old kid in the 1990s could easily create and launch a website from scratch, which was the state of the art medium at the time. It will be far more difficult for a 10 year old in the 2010s to grab terabytes of data and process it easily.
- retSava 9y agoBut that's moving the goal posts...? It's significantly easier to launch a website from scratch today, there are even more frameworks with very easy to follow tutorials and hello world-examples to extend to also make it look good. One simple one-liner copy for eg bootstrap. What's changed is that it is today even _possible_ "for a 10 year old in the 2010s to grab terabytes of data and process it". Wait a little while for the "easy" part :)
- speedplane 9y agoMy point is more about the rate of change. If computing power continued to increase in the 2010s at the same rate it was increasing from the 1950s through mid 2000s, that 10yo kid would be playing with terabytes of data on his laptop.
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- gallerdude 9y agoYeah, the deeper I go into CS, the more it reinforces the idea that learning things makes them more interesting. Sounds obvious, I guess, but you wouldn't know it from how turned off people are to books or online lectures.
- psyc 9y agoOn an emotional level, the further down the stack, the more excited and enthralled I am, and the higher up, the more disillusioned I am with how and why things are done. I've been looking for a foot in the door to embedded.
- fatline 9y agoI remember I accidentally come to know about Masters of Doom which got me interested in Game Programming. Googling around I found a number of interesting articles such as "1500 archers on a 28.8: Network programming in Age of Empires and beyond", and I eventually stumbled upon Fabien Sanglard's site. The guy is great and I waited eagerly for the release of his book (hopefully the first of a long series) :)
- unkown-unknowns 9y agoWould love to read this book. Any chance of a DRM-free ePub edition being made and put up for sale?
- gortok 9y agoWhy not buy the paperback edition? He put years into making this book, you want to read it ("love"), but you won't buy it because he wants to protect his labor of love? (Not interested in arguments why DRM is ineffectual as it has no bearing on this). Buy the paperback. I just did. If you would really and truly "love" to read it, then buy it. But really, is the DRM just an excuse? A reason not to part with $32 dollars? A way to virtue signal that you are appreciative of his work without actually showing that appreciation in the only way that matters? (I didn't mean for this argument to become a larger criticism of how people act to new products and services in general; but I guess that's what it has become).
- anonymousab 9y agoNot him but that's my plan, and the paperback is currently unavailable on the non-.com amazon storefronts. I'm guessing it will be up within a few days.
- tpxl 9y agoI don't think the parent is opposed to buying it, he does say "put up for sale". DRM can be a big enough reason to not buy something. I once bought a game, only to realize I need a Games For Windows Live account to play it, then promptly pirated a "DRM free" version and played it without GFWL because I don't want another gaming service.
- reificator 9y agoI can fit every book I own in my jacket pocket, read them whenever I want, wherever I want, annotate them, search them, lookup words in the middle of them, whatever I need to do. Or I can buy a single book that takes up more room than my entire library combined. No thanks. As far as DRM goes, people are going to pirate it, and I'm not. But I also don't want to pay money to get a worse, more limited experience than those who pirate it. If the DRM prevents me from doing things that would be trivial for a pirate, something has gone horribly wrong. Yet that's our standard now.
- reificator 9y agoThis was on HN yesterday, and according to that thread the only ebook option was a DRMed PDF. I'll buy this book in a heartbeat if either of those two acronyms goes away. Ideologically the DRM should go, but practically I'd rather the PDF would go.
- pizza234 9y agoPDF and formats like EPUB are different use cases. Definitely without PDF, audiences would not benefit from the very careful editing that has been done, plus other tools associated to fixed-layout renderers, like freehand drawing. No audience benefits from DRM, but definitely a part of it does from the PDF format.
- Tepix 9y agoMaybe it's more important to have some readers rather than to have a pixel perfect layout. I and others will not read it as a PDF.
- bananaboy 9y agoI can't help but feel that you're in a minority there.
- munificent 9y agoMy book [1] is available in print, Kindle, EPUB, and PDF versions. I sell many more EPUB versions than PDF, and way more Kindle (which is basically EPUB) versions. Most of that likely has to do with visibility — Kindle and Amazon are highly-used storefronts and platforms. But part of it is also I think fewer people actually do want a PDF version. PDF does look much better than EPUB — it has the fonts and layout that I carefully crafted for the print edition. But it's less flexible and responsible to the device you're viewing it on. That quickly takes its toll. A beautiful page layout that you have to keep pinch-zooming and scrolling around on to see everything isn't really "beautiful" when you consider the whole user experience. [1]: http://gameprogrammingpatterns.com/ http://gameprogrammingpatterns.com/
- slazaro 9y agoAm I the only one that jokingly thinks the book title might be just a little bit pretentious? Don't get me wrong, I love what this guy does, I follow him on Twitter, and I have no doubts that the book is great. But the "color" books like the Red Book or the Orange Book have other actual names, and people just gave them the "color" name because they were classic references. It's like this one just presumes that it's as important as the others and has to have a classic name. Disclaimer: This complaint is obviously not serious.
- retox 9y agoI don't know the red or orange books you mentioned, my first thought was that it was a play on 'little black book', a book of dirty secrets and hidden knowledge.
- rrobukef 9y agoThen you need to watch Hackers (again) :).
- jacobparker 9y agoProbably that and a reference to https://www.amazon.ca/Michael-Abrashs-Graphics-Programming-Black/dp/1576101746 https://www.amazon.ca/Michael-Abrashs-Graphics-Programming-B...
- bluedino 9y agoDon't forget about the OpenGL 'red book' - OpenGL Programming Guide And the 'red book' of CD audio, the spec originally was in a red binder.
- ornitorrincos 9y agoplus the opengl shading language is the orange book Interestingly, the vulkan book is also red also: graphics red books are more like anotated standards
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- setzer22 9y agoI find the author's experience with latex very similar to my own. The core parts of LaTeX are very simple to learn, and you get to produce high-quality documents fairly easily thanks to its sane defaults. However, once you want to get a bit advanced, all its abstractions leak and it's impossible to comprehend anything without knowing implementation details.
- jdmoreira 9y agoI’ve been refreshing Fabien’s twitter for years waiting for this book. Just ordered the physical edition from amazon. Feels good to finally get my hands on this :) I already have the wolf3d source code building in dosbox with borland c++ 3.1. Great fun awaits! Thanks for finishing it Fabien.
- luckyt 9y agoIt's a bad idea to worry about writing and formatting at the same time, you get distracted. For me, when writing papers and blog posts, it helps to break it down into three steps: 1. First, I write just the ideas I want to convey, in bullet points. I don't worry too much about the exact phrasing of these ideas, or how they flow together. If I want to put a diagram, I just sketch a quick concept idea on a notebook. 2. Next, I go through and turn all the ideas into readable paragraphs. This is easy because I know what I'm going to say, I just have to figure out exactly how I want to say it. 3. In the last step, I worry about formatting, like making sure the fonts are consistent, the size and margins on images, etc. This is a purely mechanical task and it's nice not worrying about it when writing.
- drharby 9y agoI didnt know fabien was working on this, yet alone writing a book! I def. Need to picl this one up...in like 3 months...after my projects.
- Posibyte 9y agoI'm in that same boat. Reading the title wasn't very interesting, but then I saw Fabien's name and I knew I was in for a very wonderful treat. Hey Fabien, if you read this, you're super cool and you write amazing articles.
- samwestdev 9y agoI'd love a Kindle version.