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Is this book still applicable? Anybody have some other good computer graphics textbooks to recommend?


If you want to make a game in 2023 you should just use an off the shelf game engine. If you want to understand how older 3D games were made then this will help. If you are writing a game in DOSBox with an old C compiler then it would be useful. Some of the book will deal with issues that machines of the time had and no longer exist so you probably would need to discount those for modern machines even if you wanted to write a software renderer.

Examples of the stuff that doesn't apply today are

* Graphics using VGA

* fixed point math for speed

* input output routines under DOS (keyboard, joystick, mouse)

* Sound under DOS

* Networking under DOS (null-modem)

* DOS interrupts

* 32bit stuff

* 80387 floating point

The parts of the book that discuss the maths are quite good.


While none of that stuff is relevant to modern PCs, I used most of it when making a responsive GUI for a microcontroller application.


What if you want to learn how to build your own off-the-shelf game engine?


It doesn't really cover the things that are used in game engines.


Like others have said, it's more common to use an existing game engine these days, but if you want to do it yourself, the modern version that I think comes closest is Lengyel's Foundation of Game Engine Development series [0]. To me this series looks to be a rewrite and extension of his earlier book "Mathematics for 3D Game Programming and Computer Graphics".

The first book covers the mathematics needed, the second is on Rendering and is when it starts to get into real graphics applications. Third and Fourth are slated to be Models/Materials and Physics respectively, but neither have been released yet.

[0] https://foundationsofgameenginedev.com/


Nice! Thank you! Honestly, I am more into graphics programming than game Dev itself. As in, I want to do all the nitty gritty math by hand!




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