Game Engine Black Book: Wolfenstein 3D

Fabien Sanglard

Aug 2017 · Software Wizards

About this ebook

How was Wolfenstein 3D made and what were the secrets of its speed? How did id Software manage to turn a machine designed to display static images for word processing and spreadsheet applications into the best gaming platform in the world, capable of running games  at seventy frames per seconds? If you have ever asked yourself these questions, Game Engine Black Book is for you.

This is an engineering book. You will not find much prose in here (the author’s English is broken anyway.) Instead, this book has only bit of text and plenty of drawings attempting to describe in great detail the Wolfenstein 3D game engine and its hardware, the IBM PC with an Intel 386 CPU and a VGA graphic card.

Game Engine Black Book details techniques such as raycasting, compiled scalers, deferred rendition, VGA Mode-Y, linear feedback shift register, fixed point arithmetic, pulse width modulation, runtime generated code, self-modifying code, and many others tricks. Open up to discover the architecture of the software which pioneered the First Person Shooter genre. 

Ratings and reviews

Lots of insights and behind-the-scenes tech notes, but I was left wanting more technical details than were provided; there were a lot of holes.

great nostalgia trip. Lots of info on how programmers worked with such limited resources. Wolf3D, the first FPS for a ton of people, was groundbreaking at the time and the book provides a great indepth view of the many methods utilized to create that experience

Great technical and nostalgic walkthrough not only across Wolf3D code, but also the early 90s and the old DOS gaming days