Game Engine Black Book: Wolfenstein 3D Paperback – September 5, 2017

I've long been a fan of Fabien's work over on his website (google his name, Amazon doesn't allow external links...), and have been eagerly awaiting this book since he first announced he was going to write it three years ago. Wolfenstein was the first 3D game I ever played, way back on my parents' 586 clone and it's fantastic to see the internals of how it all worked laid out so clearly and concisely. I've made a couple of attempts at deciphering the original Id source code, but wound up stymied trying to piece it together - code dealing with the vagaries of raw VGA graphics, 16-bit memory models, inline assembly, and low-level audio programming was just a little too much for me to bite off. Now armed with this guide, I feel like I have a handle on how it all worked.The book is also beautiful - all too often, books on game engines and graphics programming are all in black and white, or at best have a handful of pages of color plates that you have to flip back and forth to. Not this book, which abounds in full color diagrams and screenshots.I'm so glad that this project made its way into print. Hopefully there will be more entries in the series in the years to come

A great resource but riddled with typos even in the 2nd edition. I believe English is not the author's first language. It could have used more eyes in editing, not only in proofreading but also in simplifying some clunky run-on sentences. Appendix G, a transcript of a John Carmack interview, is so rough and inaccurate that it appears nobody looked at it before publishing. Hopefully the 3rd edition will bring the book up to the level of polish it deserves.

I really enjoyed this book. I have a vivid memory of first seeing Wolfenstein 3D at a "computer show" (remember those?) in 1992 when I was only 11 and quickly buying the shareware disks. This game, Doom, and the Quakes were a big part of what got me excited as a kid about programming and the endless possibilities computers offered.So it is extremely satisfying to finally understand the intricacies, hacks, and genius behind the Wolf3D engine. I admittedly never attempted to read the source prior to this book, but a big reason for that (beyond lack of time) was that so much context is necessary to make sense of the code. Fabien's book provides a huge amount of necessary context for understanding both what the engine is doing and more importantly, WHY it is doing it. The book explains DOS memory limitations, the insane complexity of VGA graphics programming, and fixed point computations (which were necessary due to lack of floating point units), among many other things. Without all this background, the source code would not make much sense at all. As John Carmack has said about this book, it is a great piece of software archeology.I came away from this book with all the more appreciation for the brilliance of the hacks that were used to get the game running at a reasonable framerate on the 386'es (and even 286'es!) of the early '90s. For example, Sanglard explains how Wolf3D draws walls one column at a time: the engine actually dynamically generates assembly routines that shrink or expand a wall texture to an exact number of vertical pixels (the height of the wall on the screen). Each of these routines contains only the assembly instructions necessary for this wall height and no loops.It's really cool to read about this stuff and renews my enthusiasm for programming, finding creating solutions, and trying to make machines do what seems impossible. Though I wouldn't recommend this book for someone who isn't a programmer, Sanglard takes his role as software archaeologist seriously and provides tons of asides and anecdotes about the history of computing, the personalities behind id Software, and little details about things like map design. For example, he includes an architectural diagram of the house the team worked in. This is pointless from a technical perspective, but I greatly enjoyed all of these details. The book is also full of full-color (and large!) screenshots and illustrations.My only criticism of this book is that it is a bit rough around the edges, particularly with regard to typos, of which there are many. In a way this adds to the book's charm, however. It isn't trying to be super polished, and you can tell that it was (lovingly) laid out and organized by one person, the author. It reads more like a hacker manifesto than a textbook, and I love it for that.

Awesome book! I purchased this thinking it would only cover the implementation details of Wolf3D; but it has so much more interesting information. It really combines Hardware, Team, and Software. Hardware -- a great review of the state and limitations of development during the 386/DOS era. Team -- history of early id Software, a nice companion to Masters of Doom. Software -- the technical details of the Wolfenstein 3D game engine.The best parts of the book are the author's technical explanations. Topics like floating and fixed point operations, VGA banking, raycasting, and others are presented in the most amazingly intuitive ways. Seriously, great. I could have saved soooo much frustration if I had been able to read this book when I was younger.

Note: The book proclaims that it's an "engineering" book, NOT a human relations book, people interested in the higher story of Wolfenstein, Doom, etc., should read "Masters Of Doom: How two guys created an empire and transformed pop culture"Bought this unsure of what to expect, but very pleasantly surprised. While the book is best appreciated with some knowledge of Computer Science (basic architectures, C Programming), it's still a treat for most. I'm yet to find time to finish it, but have so far LOVED the tone and coverage of the book (technologies, programming techniques, assembly language hacks, tricks with hardware standards, and so on) - a technical look at the game engine's creation (and the game's creation as a whole, covering handmade tools and file formats). This book is a perfect addition to your collection, to sit between the likes of "Game Engine Architecture" by Jason Gregory, and "Principles of Computer Hardware" by Alan Clements. Now the actual game dates back to 1992, and requires some significant emulation, virtualization or trickery to compile correctly, but the techniques, challenges and trade-offs can still be compared to their modern parallels in game programming and real-time software, so this book can still provide some interesting thought processes and techniques to approach problems.Friendly, funny, witty and above all, technical yet still accessible, this is a very interesting read, and I hope to find more like it. On a side note, the author's website (which I read articles from years before and never made the connection) features a look at Doom 3 BFG edition's source, and other titles, techniques and issues.

While the research and knowledge required to write the book are impressive, the presentation is not.The book looks like some high school homework poorly written and composed in MS Word. Small simple diagrams are stretched to full page width, leaving big empty gaps when the images can not fit in the current page. The way it is structured feels unbalanced, going in depth on some topics while barely scratching the surface of others. Sometimes I felt it was just randomly jumping between topics. The meaning of some sentences was hard to grasp, and the text was plagued with typos.Feels like the first draft, before being sent to the editor for review, of what could be a great book. Too bad for the current price tag (£32.59).If the text went through some proper editing by a professional technical publisher it would easily be a 4 or 5 star book, but in its current shape only the recognition of the effort to shed light on an obscure and hard to understand engine pushed the rating above 1 star.

A well written book that clearly represents a lot of painstaking research. The way some of the more interesting points are illustrated is a nice touch. A couple of typographical errors and one or two places I wanted a bit more detail, but overall very enjoyable and hits the right balance between covering the detail in depth without simply listing all the code! Unashamedly technical which is what I was after.

If you want a book that goes into the details of VGA memory bank layouts, memory register use, extended memory via DOS extenders and the inner workings of using the Disney sound card in the name of killing digital Nazis, then this books for you.

As a newbie games developer, this was an excellent read. It won’t teach you how to program modern games, but provides valuable insights and foundations on modern games engines. When Wolf was written, PCs were business machines. Id employed many tricks and secrets to make the Wolf game engine what it was, and the author provides illumination on all of these secrets.