[HN Gopher] Quake's 3-D Engine: The Big Picture by Michael Abras...
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Quake's 3-D Engine: The Big Picture by Michael Abrash (2000)
Author : jdmoreira
Score : 92 points
Date : 2020-11-29 20:18 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.bluesnews.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.bluesnews.com)
| kaspar128 wrote:
| Nice read! It reminds me of Jeff Minter's article about the
| "Bathtub-curve" http://minotaurproject.co.uk/blog/?p=452
| 29athrowaway wrote:
| If you are interested in id Tech 3 you may also want to read this
| one: https://fabiensanglard.net/quake3/index.php
| ehvatum wrote:
| "here's the secret to success in just two words: Ship it"
|
| "After you finish the first 90% of a project, you have to finish
| the other 90%."
|
| I feel like this conflict is reconciled today by releasing the
| first 90% and the second 90% as updates.
|
| Notably, QTest was released on February 24, 1996, followed on
| June 22, 1996 by the full Quake release.
| lostgame wrote:
| >> I feel like this conflict is reconciled today by releasing
| the first 90% and the second 90% as updates.
|
| Damn, I feel like you just described everything wrong with the
| game industry in the last 5-10(?) years in one sentence.
| goldcd wrote:
| But the flip-side is we're all used to receiving automatic
| and continuous bug-fixes and even enhancements.
|
| Even the maligned Day-0 mega-patch, is fine if it lets the
| game master ship earlier and fixes the bugs before I can play
| it.
| sushshshsh wrote:
| _Insert obligatory reference to the fast inverse square root
| calculation which, thanks to its ability to more quickly generate
| (1 /x) by using a bit shift with a magic number 0x5F3759DF,
| allowed performant lighting calculations for use in games. This
| number was known for this purpose for long before Quake (shout
| out SGI), but was popularized for the first time there_
| trilinearnz wrote:
| Michael Abrash is an excellent chronicler of technical history.
| Reading through his contributions is always time well spent.
|
| See also https://fabiensanglard.net/ for a more contemporary
| take. His 'Black Books' on Wolfenstein and Doom are directly
| inspired by Abrash.
| kar1181 wrote:
| Oh man - of all my 'nerd crushes' Michael is at the absolute top.
|
| I feel like he hasn't been risen up to the stature of John
| Carmack but if you look at the things he's shipped in his career
| (no less than Quake AND Windows NT) and at the sheer volume of
| content he produced during those halcyon days in the late 80s/90s
| when the PC emerged from dumb as rocks beige business box to
| premier gaming platform, he is a key figure.
|
| I was too young and grew up too remote to have access to his
| writings as they were written but as an older engineer going back
| over his Graphics Black Book, the Zen of Assembly books and his
| Dr Dobbs articles, there's a lot of lessons that you can learn
| that still have a lot of value today.
|
| Actually one of the best lessons - and most easily accessible -
| is in the first chapter of his graphics black book, he talks
| about the human element of optimisation, and that it is critical
| to optimise the right thing. He uses an example of a engineer he
| knew that in the era of early electronic calculators (still
| clunky and and slow, but getting faster all the time) honed his
| slide rule skills to wipe the floor with any desktop calculator
| operator. But he was spitting into the wind, it was clear
| calculators were getting faster and there was no more road with
| slide rules.
|
| Ultimately he wasted effort on a legacy technology rather than
| leveraging what was up and coming.
|
| In many ways this mirrored the PC, in its early days, it was
| slow, dumb and unwieldy, but it was improving at a rate of knots
| and eventually came to dominate.
|
| Both Michael's Black Book and Zen of Assembly are on Github and
| maintained as PDF, Epub and other formats. They aren't terribly
| applicable technologically to computing today but they are very
| readable and contain a lot of general purpose problem solving and
| optimisation tips that are as applicable today as they were then.
|
| https://github.com/jagregory/abrash-black-book
|
| There have been few technical writers emerge that match Michael
| Abrash and it makes me so happy he's still hacking away at
| interesting problems today. Shame he doesn't write as much as he
| did, but I'm sure he's busy trying to usher in the metaverse
| (snowcrash had a big influence on him)!
| kar1181 wrote:
| I forgot to add, Michael did a post-mortem at GDC a year or so
| after shipping and you can access it online still (requires
| Flash though?!)
|
| https://www.gdcvault.com/play/1014236/Quake-A-Post-Mortem-an...
| furyofantares wrote:
| I lucked my way into a lunch with Michael somewhat under 10
| years ago and had a chance to pick his brain, and of course
| express gratitude for his writing which had an influence on me
| when I was younger.
|
| What I found really remarkable, though, was he also picked my
| brain -- a junior programmer with no notable accomplishments,
| working on not very interesting problems. And when I bumped
| into him on a couple occasions after that, he remembered what I
| worked on and would ask how it was going.
| read_if_gay_ wrote:
| > Both Michael's Black Book and Zen of Assembly are on Github
| and maintained as PDF, Epub and other formats
|
| Do you know of a source for Dr Dobbs too? I've found this so
| far [0] but no luck yet with more recent volumes.
|
| [0]: https://archive.org/details/dr_dobbs_journal
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