
Game Engine Black Book Postmortem - janvdberg
http://fabiensanglard.net/Game_Engine_Black_Book_Release/index.php
======
kar1181
I have been reading Fabien's book over the past few nights and it has been
enormous fun.

Programming for most of us has moved a long way from the metal our code
eventually executes on. And it's quite fun to go real low level and understand
at an almost atomic how to make a computer do what you want it to do.

That's why this (and Michael Abrash's earlier Graphics Black Book that served
as inspiration for this)is so much fun. As an kid who grew up playing games on
these machines at that time it all seemed like magic. With quality
documentation and the power of nostalgia you can now fully understand (and
appreciate) what the likes of Carmack achieved in the early 90s on these
machines and now we too can go in and hack around and achieve the same
results.

I hope the book does well and Fabien can do the proposed 486 and Pentium
companion editions.

~~~
retSava
I agree, I hope this does well. Born around the time to be in "suitable age"
when Amos the creator on Amiga, and similar things, where the foshnizzle.

This is a really cool thing with today though - the technical barrier to
creating and publishing physical books (and ebooks too of course) is just so
so low. Making it financially viable and worth it is another thing. I
certainly hope this does well and will buy a physical copy.

~~~
kar1181
Agree, indeed barriers to entry in computing generally is getting lower and
lower all the time. The issue is that computers are so good now that the need
to 'play around with them' is getting less and less. But for those of us that
remember peeking and poking memory addresses and programming by trial and
error can recognise how good we have it today.

~~~
speedplane
Not sure I agree. Entry into computing is definitely getting easier, but it's
decelerating due to a number of factors, namely the slow death of Moore's law
and the huge amount of data you need to crunch to create useful solution. Tech
is improving, but it feels like we're falling off the exponential into
something more linear.

As computer performance improvements decelerate, we're starting to see more
specialization into particular tech verticals. This specialization makes it
harder for people to break into.

For example, it used to be that if you wanted to crunch more data in Excel,
you'd just wait six months for the better intel chip. It was faster and easier
to do that than write custom software. Now the new chips are only marginally
better than the last, and we need to rely on distributed systems linking
dozens or hundreds of computers.

A 10 year old kid in the 1990s could easily create and launch a website from
scratch, which was the state of the art medium at the time. It will be far
more difficult for a 10 year old in the 2010s to grab terabytes of data and
process it easily.

~~~
retSava
But that's moving the goal posts...? It's significantly easier to launch a
website from scratch today, there are even more frameworks with very easy to
follow tutorials and hello world-examples to extend to also make it look good.
One simple one-liner copy for eg bootstrap.

What's changed is that it is today even _possible_ "for a 10 year old in the
2010s to grab terabytes of data and process it". Wait a little while for the
"easy" part :)

~~~
sgift
> It's significantly easier to launch a website from scratch today,

Write HTML, copy to server, press f5/open URL. It doesn't get easier than the
90s in that regard. You didn't even need a framework for that, so ... I'm not
so sure.

~~~
dagw
I think you've really forgotten how hard the copy to server step could be in
the 90s

~~~
sgift
I'm pretty sure I've used a ftp client back then too, which wasn't so hard,
but sure, it's been a while, my memory may be faulty here.

~~~
dagw
I was more thinking about getting an internet connection and a server

~~~
abritinthebay
Sign up with ISP, fill out phone number & info into modem settings, click
connect, wait, use ISPs server space they provided for free to each customer.
Done?

In many ways I find that easier than dealing with cable companies and their
systems.

------
luckyt
It's a bad idea to worry about writing and formatting at the same time, you
get distracted. For me, when writing papers and blog posts, it helps to break
it down into three steps:

1\. First, I write just the ideas I want to convey, in bullet points. I don't
worry too much about the exact phrasing of these ideas, or how they flow
together. If I want to put a diagram, I just sketch a quick concept idea on a
notebook.

2\. Next, I go through and turn all the ideas into readable paragraphs. This
is easy because I know what I'm going to say, I just have to figure out
exactly how I want to say it.

3\. In the last step, I worry about formatting, like making sure the fonts are
consistent, the size and margins on images, etc. This is a purely mechanical
task and it's nice not worrying about it when writing.

------
fatline
I remember I accidentally come to know about Masters of Doom which got me
interested in Game Programming. Googling around I found a number of
interesting articles such as "1500 archers on a 28.8: Network programming in
Age of Empires and beyond", and I eventually stumbled upon Fabien Sanglard's
site. The guy is great and I waited eagerly for the release of his book
(hopefully the first of a long series) :)

------
setzer22
I find the author's experience with latex very similar to my own.

The core parts of LaTeX are very simple to learn, and you get to produce high-
quality documents fairly easily thanks to its sane defaults. However, once you
want to get a bit advanced, all its abstractions leak and it's impossible to
comprehend anything without knowing implementation details.

------
jdmoreira
I’ve been refreshing Fabien’s twitter for years waiting for this book. Just
ordered the physical edition from amazon. Feels good to finally get my hands
on this :)

I already have the wolf3d source code building in dosbox with borland c++ 3.1.
Great fun awaits!

Thanks for finishing it Fabien.

------
drharby
I didnt know fabien was working on this, yet alone writing a book! I def. Need
to picl this one up...in like 3 months...after my projects.

~~~
Posibyte
I'm in that same boat. Reading the title wasn't very interesting, but then I
saw Fabien's name and I knew I was in for a very wonderful treat.

Hey Fabien, if you read this, you're super cool and you write amazing
articles.

------
unkown-unknowns
Would love to read this book. Any chance of a DRM-free ePub edition being made
and put up for sale?

~~~
gortok
Why not buy the paperback edition?

He put years into making this book, you want to read it ("love"), but you
won't buy it because he wants to protect his labor of love? (Not interested in
arguments why DRM is ineffectual as it has no bearing on this).

Buy the paperback. I just did. If you would really and truly "love" to read
it, then buy it.

But really, is the DRM just an excuse? A reason not to part with $32 dollars?
A way to virtue signal that you are appreciative of his work without actually
showing that appreciation in the only way that matters?

(I didn't mean for this argument to become a larger criticism of how people
act to new products and services in general; but I guess that's what it has
become).

~~~
criddell
As we all know, a DRM free version is available (or will be soon) from _ahem_
other sources. I personally don't have any ethical problems with buying a
paper copy then downloading the DRM free version.

It would be nice though to be able to buy it in an unrestricted format in the
first place.

I sometimes wonder if DRM is more successful at turning potential thieves into
customers or turning away potential customers.

~~~
kar1181
He gets nearly no money from the dead tree version (4%) and about 35% from the
eBook.

I hate drm but I want to put money into things I want more of. So I held my
nose and paid for the eBook. I hope drm free emerges later though.

Source
[https://twitter.com/fabynou/status/905856105003155457](https://twitter.com/fabynou/status/905856105003155457)
and
[https://twitter.com/fabynou/status/905857276174413824](https://twitter.com/fabynou/status/905857276174413824)

~~~
wolfgke
> I hate drm but I want to put money into things I want more of.

So you seriously want more of DRM? Buying something despite DRM gives the
market a clear signal that DRM is not so bad after all.

~~~
criddell
It's not clear cut. You have to decide if you want to support the author or
avoid DRM. In this case, it's hard to do both.

I dislike DRM as well, but as long as I could easily remove it I was okay with
it.

I've bought a lot of ebooks from Amazon for my Kindle. Now that their most
recent DRM scheme (KFX) has been uncracked for a long time, I'm having second
thoughts about ebooks.

~~~
wolfgke
> It's not clear cut. You have to decide if you want to support the author or
> avoid DRM. In this case, it's hard to do both.

Tell the author that you despise DRM. And as soon as a DRM-free version
appears, buy. This sends a clear signal to the market.

On the other hand: As long as the author only sells a DRM-tainted electronic
version, he gives a clear signal to the world that he abhors customers who are
against DRM. Why should I give him _my_ money then (or more money than
necessary)?

------
reificator
This was on HN yesterday, and according to that thread the only ebook option
was a DRMed PDF.

I'll buy this book in a heartbeat if either of those two acronyms goes away.
Ideologically the DRM should go, but practically I'd rather the PDF would go.

~~~
pizza234
PDF and formats like EPUB are different use cases.

Definitely without PDF, audiences would not benefit from the very careful
editing that has been done, plus other tools associated to fixed-layout
renderers, like freehand drawing.

No audience benefits from DRM, but definitely a part of it does from the PDF
format.

~~~
Tepix
Maybe it's more important to have some readers rather than to have a pixel
perfect layout. I and others will not read it as a PDF.

~~~
dkersten
On the other hand, I read a lot of things as PDF. I basically read: paper,
kindle and PDF, roughly in equal measure.

I typically prefer kindle (which I read on a kindle paperwhite and
occasionally on iPad, although I prefer PDF here), but if I'm reading on
laptop or desktop, I prefer PDF. When possible, I like to have both Kindle and
PDF formatted books, so that I can read whatever I prefer for the device I'm
currently using.

But, besides all of that, if I can only choose a single of those formats, I
would choose PDF.

~~~
Tepix
I would read PDF if large (13+ inches) eink readers weren't so expensive...

------
slazaro
Am I the only one that jokingly thinks the book title might be just a little
bit pretentious? Don't get me wrong, I love what this guy does, I follow him
on Twitter, and I have no doubts that the book is great.

But the "color" books like the Red Book or the Orange Book have other actual
names, and people just gave them the "color" name because they were classic
references. It's like this one just presumes that it's as important as the
others and has to have a classic name.

Disclaimer: This complaint is obviously not serious.

~~~
retox
I don't know the red or orange books you mentioned, my first thought was that
it was a play on 'little black book', a book of dirty secrets and hidden
knowledge.

~~~
jacobparker
Probably that and a reference to [https://www.amazon.ca/Michael-Abrashs-
Graphics-Programming-B...](https://www.amazon.ca/Michael-Abrashs-Graphics-
Programming-Black/dp/1576101746)

~~~
bluedino
Don't forget about the OpenGL 'red book' \- OpenGL Programming Guide

And the 'red book' of CD audio, the spec originally was in a red binder.

~~~
ornitorrincos
plus the opengl shading language is the orange book

Interestingly, the vulkan book is also red

also: graphics red books are more like anotated standards

------
samwestdev
I'd love a Kindle version.

