abrash-black-book VS Celeste

Michael Abrash's Graphic Programming Black Book

[Michael Abrash's Black Graphics Programming Black Book from 1997 is a fantastic book I wish I had back then. It is available for free on GitHub. I read it maybe in 2015 and I thought it was fantastic even if it is dated now. It goes through the evolution of PC hardware (CPU and graphics cards in particular) from the very first IBM PC to the mid-90's pentiums, and the last chapter or two are about the author's work on Quake.

Also available in eReader formats: https://github.com/jagregory/abrash-black-book/releases

Also look at the source for original Quake (https://github.com/id-Software/Quake), one of the last pure software-rasterizing AAA 3D PC games. Michael Abrash's Graphics Programming Black Book (https://github.com/jagregory/abrash-black-book) explains many of the critical parts of the rendering pipeline.

By the way, quake.exe for DOS was 404,480 bytes.

It's also THICK. I have my copy of the 5th edition right here, and it's about 3 inches from cover to cover. Thicker than Introduction to Algorithms and thicker than the Graphics Programming Black Book.

Read Michael Abrash's Graphics Programming Black Book for the story of how the original Quake came to life. You'll get an appreciation for John Carmack's ability to thoroughly research widely varying solutions to a problem, quickly create production-quality implementations of the promising ones, and even more quickly abandon the dead ends. The result is this almost boring, seemingly linear progression toward a final product that seems obvious in hindsight, yet it represents a leap forward the way Quake did in the mid-1990s compared to other FPSes at the time. I don't know many other public stories of individual engineers who can span both the very cutting edge of research and the practicalities of shipping real commercial software.

https://github.com/jagregory/abrash-black-book

The Abrash black book is on github!

Go through Michael Abrash's Graphics Programming Black Book to see how it used to be on PC world.

Aha, found it! They opened sourced the C# version https://github.com/NoelFB/Celeste/tree/master/Source/PICO-8

forget TDD when you make a game, you want fast iteration time at all cost, gameplay is king, if you can't nail it fast enough, you'll make a bad game that is not fun

it's all about the feeling

Celeste's player class: https://github.com/NoelFB/Celeste/blob/master/Source/Player/...

https://store.steampowered.com/app/504230/Celeste/

check this out! both the readme and maddy's article that's linked towards the bottom, as well as the player.cs source code that is included. might be some decent resources

Keep in mind, the Celeste player controller is one single file of 5400+ lines of code.

So Celeste devs are shit at planning and have very poor code https://github.com/NoelFB/Celeste/blob/master/Source/Player/Player.cs

Celeste's source code is available in github :D https://github.com/NoelFB/Celeste It's a LOT of code, but some stuff in there helped me out creating momentum mechanics for a project recently.

Look at Celeste's Player.cs. Incredible games can (and often do) ship with messy code. Also read the readme where they discuss how they both agree and disagrees with criticism their massive file's received (look up the thread in this sub for a lot of it).

They dropped the controller script for Celeste. 5400 lines of tuning and refining to get everything right. https://github.com/NoelFB/Celeste

There's actually a README now, that does say it's probably messier than it should be and includes more cutscene logic than it should.