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Flights of Fantasy: Programming 3d Video Games in C++/Book and Disk
This book/disk program is a guide which shows the reader how to develop and produce commerical quality, real-time, 3-D animations. Using Borland C++ compiler and BASM assembler as a programming platform, this is for intermediate level programmers interested in producing 3-D games.
- GenresProgramming
556 pages, Paperback
First published March 1, 1993
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
February 5, 2022
Ok, this book is only for people who enjoy learning how stuff works under the hood. Programming in openGL you'll never find the problems you are dealing with here, so you can say that the content is outdated.
That said, I really enjoyed the book. I skiped a lot of content, as an example, the sound part, it does not explain how the soundblaster worked back in the days, but how to use a library that comes with the book source. So there is nothing you can learn from that.
Other thing is that where the book explains how to implement a drawing algorithm, specially the one that takes care of which object appears behind which object, it shows the "Painters Algorithm", and the z-buffer algorithm(which is used in modern render engines) says that it doesn't make sense to explain it because there is no computer that can handle the amount of memory that you need to implement that (the most powerful computer back in the days was the 486DX2 at 66MHz with 4MB of memory).
Another thing, the book uses quads to render the 3D world, while in modern times everyone is using triangles. You can not use any of the code of the book, but the explanations were enough to create a old school software renderer myself(not without some bugs).
The book is amazing as a piece of history, but you need to have some knowledge in order to enjoy it. If you already have some experience with openGL, let's say, you already readed and implement the code that is the book "Learn OpenGL - Graphics programming" from Joey de Vries, and you want to know how games were done before openGL, this book will show you that.
I loved it.
That said, I really enjoyed the book. I skiped a lot of content, as an example, the sound part, it does not explain how the soundblaster worked back in the days, but how to use a library that comes with the book source. So there is nothing you can learn from that.
Other thing is that where the book explains how to implement a drawing algorithm, specially the one that takes care of which object appears behind which object, it shows the "Painters Algorithm", and the z-buffer algorithm(which is used in modern render engines) says that it doesn't make sense to explain it because there is no computer that can handle the amount of memory that you need to implement that (the most powerful computer back in the days was the 486DX2 at 66MHz with 4MB of memory).
Another thing, the book uses quads to render the 3D world, while in modern times everyone is using triangles. You can not use any of the code of the book, but the explanations were enough to create a old school software renderer myself(not without some bugs).
The book is amazing as a piece of history, but you need to have some knowledge in order to enjoy it. If you already have some experience with openGL, let's say, you already readed and implement the code that is the book "Learn OpenGL - Graphics programming" from Joey de Vries, and you want to know how games were done before openGL, this book will show you that.
I loved it.
March 1, 2018
A re-read of one of my favorite programming books of my youth.
The author did a stellar job of explaining so many key concepts - it was also a nice bit of nostalgia to read my old marginalia again :)
The author did a stellar job of explaining so many key concepts - it was also a nice bit of nostalgia to read my old marginalia again :)
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews