Game Engine Black Book: Wolfenstein 3D

Fabien Sanglard

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

This is one of the best books I have read in years. Reading thought the book you can see Fabien has put so much effort to collect and reverse engineer the magic that was happening behind the scenes. The book covers the miracle of creating Wolf3D (yes it was a miracle). The book covers the hardware and software limitation in that time frame, to give an idea why it was near impossible for Wolf3D to exist. The author has done amazing job in the book layout, and in the information progression gained each chapter. I have had the 1st edition and I can't miss this book when it got even better. tl;dr: How to make a game using high school math.

It is really entertaining to read about how this famous game was created and what were challanges the developers faced with the technology available that time. I also learned new things about programming and old PCs.

Great !