abrash-black-book VS VoxelSpace

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.

This uses the "Voxel Space algorithm" used in 1992s Comanche to get a faux 3d terrain. Based on the code from here with some optimizations to get a reasonable FPS.

Reminds me of this: https://github.com/s-macke/VoxelSpace

Another implementation to play around with here; this one's not DOS but web based though.

I'm reminded of the render algorithm in Comanche, the 1992 video game [0]. I find it remarkably ingenious, and it certainly felt incredible at the time.

[0] https://github.com/s-macke/VoxelSpace

The heightmap I've been manipulating may also be familiar to you, but not for the same reason, because it's terrain data of Mt. Fuji. I'm thinking of heightmap files instead of infinite noise, mixing the perks of ray-based rendering insights with a manageable early-'90s-style aesthetic and conventional level design. An erosion simulation could be preprocessed with a seamless OOB margin in that context too.

I wrote a voxel space implementation in Rust some time ago using SFML, and now am trying to move it to WGPU in order to learn how GPUs work better and perhaps solve a horizontal lines glitch I've got.

Recently, I’ve been getting into voxel rendering, and I’ve been thinking of a way of extending the voxel space algorithm. https://github.com/s-macke/VoxelSpace