by azharcs on 1/9/11, 6:15 PM with 4 comments
by maximilianburke on 1/9/11, 7:33 PM
Because the book is essentially a series of collected magazine articles the section on Quake development will have one chapter that reads "hey, this is what we're going to do!" followed by "well, that didn't work, but this does!". One important aspect of post-mortems and development journals that I find is frequently missing is a detailed look at what didn't work technically and why, which it has in spades.
edit: The book is also available as a free download: http://www.drdobbs.com/high-performance-computing/184404919
by chipsy on 1/9/11, 10:09 PM
The mid-90's is the era that saw a broad transition in game programming from at-the-metal, low-level coding towards more algorithmically driven approaches, since the hardware had become beefy enough to allow the kinds of large datasets where algorithms matter more than constant factors. Abrash notes it himself - his VGA/DOS knowledge became meaningless within the span of 2 years.
One thing that is overlooked in all the emphasis on 3D rendering is that real-time strategy also developed in the same era as the first-person shooter. This isn't just because of mice, but because it was now feasible to do fast real-time pathfinding in games. Earlier, similar attempts at the genre suffer from playing sluggishly or avoiding any pathfinding.
Another 90's genre that came about because of hardware improvements is music games: CDs and memory for sample playback made it possible to play back high-quality audio tracks.