Game Engine Black Book: Wolfenstein 3D v2.1

It would have been easy for id to coast on their success, but instead they made the audacious decision to throw away everything they had built and start from scratch. Game Engine Black Book: Doom is the story of how they did it.

This is a book about history and engineering. Don’t expect much prose (the author’s English has improved since the first book but is still broken). Instead you will find inside extensive descriptions and drawings to better understand all the challenges id Software had to overcome. 

From the hardware -- the Intel 486 CPU, the Motorola 68040 CPU, and the NeXT workstations -- to the game engine’s revolutionary design, open up to learn how DOOM changed the gaming industry and became a legend among video games.

New to the Third Edition

This third edition offers the same comprehensive coverage of game engine architecture provided by previous editions, along with updated coverage of:

This book is intended to serve as an introductory text, but it also offers the experienced game programmer a useful perspective on aspects of game development technology with which they may not have deep experience. As always, copious references and citations are provided in this edition, making it an excellent jumping off point for those who wish to dig deeper into any particular aspect of the game development process.

Key Features

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. 

The available average good books on AutoCAD are horribly containing 2-3 thousands of pages for main text, with dozens of pages, only for their contents. All these mess is full of unnecessary details of even very simpler commands, which user can easily learn intuitively. Even after the bulk of pages they skip some really useful commands, which could otherwise boost the productivity of end user. 

While this reference guide is intended to provide a compact guide of AutoCAD to a wide range of working CAD professionals and students, ranging from engineering streams (architectural, civil, mechanical, electrical, etc.) to non-technical streams. We are relying heavily on the AutoCAD’s user friendly interface while writing the reference guide, as after entering the command alias in AutoCAD, it,  itself, tells ‘n asks for minimum ‘n necessary details through command line. So, practically, there is no need of written procedural details.

As this reference guide book is complimentary with the ‘AutoCAD-Advanced’ and ‘AutoCAD-Professional’ courses of ‘4Dimensions’, most commands given in this guide need at least one time lab training on real projects by an experienced tutor/professional. Each command, once mastered, doesn’t need the whole procedure to be remembered exactly (as different versions may have different procedures).

Content Development Team

4 Dimensions