Black Art of 3D Game Programming (1995)

Andre LaMothe, my counterpart writer for Waite Group Press. I wrote “The Black Art of Windows Game Programming” in 1994. Mitch (Waite) loved those “Black Art” titles.

Edits for spelling and year, which I’m still not sure about.

Not to speak ill in any way of your guys’ works, I really enjoy these books for their nostalgic qualities - both LaMothe, yours, as well as a few other ones like the RTS Game Programming (1997?) from one of the AoE developers. I have a physical collection of majority of the “greatest hits” from 90s and early/mid 2000s - mostly Engine/Graphics type stuff. It’s nice to read and see how people solved issues having fewer abstractions and layers than we do now, potentially solving things “on the fly” as it were, not really knowing the One True Way but making things work one step at a time all the same. In hindsight, these books were written at a time where hardware acceleration was taking off, so it adds to the nostalgia somewhat.

The most recent holy grail of a book for me has been Luna’s D3D11 tome. I haven’t kept up since.

Also worth noting is Abrash's Black Book is pretty specialized for the x86 PCs of the 90s. It's not really all that applicable to game programming today, unless you're deliberately doing retro development for 486/pentium class machines w/VGA.

I grew up with this book in elementary school. I remember learning how complicated 3d graphics were at the time and eventually helped me with graphics in university.

Andre LaMothe's prior book, Tricks of the Game Programming Gurus, was literally life changing for me.

I was in my late junior or early senior year of high school when it came out. My stepfather had a 386/20 and then later a 486/33, a Borland C compiler, and a generic 700 page "Learn C" book at home, and I had worked all the way through the book. But I couldn't for the life of me figure how in the world to bridge the gap between the extremely slow, "high res" 16 color graphics libraries that came with the compiler, on the one hand, and what Wolfenstein and Doom were doing, on the other, both of which I was utterly entranced by.

And then I saw LaMothe's book on a random shopping trip to... Software Etc, I think? I'd never seen anything like it. And I knew I had to have it, immediately.

After getting that book, I was diving headlong into relatively fast VGA C programming in mode 13h (320x200x256 color). I spent the afternoons of my senior year of high school writing relatively fast texture mapping routines and trying to get full screen 30+ fps interactive scenes and levels running, which I think I mostly did. I had to write my own paint program, too, for 256 color palettized textures. It was thrilling.

Thanks largely to my time with that book, later when I was introduced to the internet the first week I started a Computer Science program at college, I was primed to dive into all the awesome C open source game libraries and tools (like Allegro and DJGPP) that I found online, and I was making commercial games and working in the guts of the Quake and Quake 2 code bases two short years later. (The book and then the internet were not, however, great for my college career)

I know there are corny parts of the book, and maybe things that weren't as cutting edge as they claimed to be. It doesn't teach you how to actually write actual Doom, of course.

But prior to the widespread roll out of the internet, it's hard to get across just how inaccessible most of the knowledge in the book was, at least for a high school kid like me. It really was like turning on a light switch when I got it. Sometimes something is just at the right place at the right time for someone, and that's what that book was for me.