Game Engine Black Book: Wolfenstein 3D

How was Wolfenstein 3D made and what were the secrets of its speed? How did id Software manage to turn a machine designed to display static images for word processing and spreadsheet applications into the best gaming platform in the world, capable of running games at seventy frames per seconds? If you have ever asked yourself these questions, Game Engine Black Book is for you. This is an engineering book. You will not find much prose in here (the author’s English is broken anyway.) Instead, this book has only bit of text and plenty of drawings attempting to describe in great detail the Wolfenstein 3D game engine and its hardware, the IBM PC with an Intel 386 CPU and a VGA graphic card. Game Engine Black Book details techniques such as raycasting, compiled scalers, deferred rendition, VGA Mode-Y, linear feedback shift register, fixed point arithmetic, pulse width modulation, runtime generated code, self-modifying code, and many others tricks. Open up to discover the architecture of the software which pioneered the First Person Shooter genre.

《遊戲引擎黑書》是一本工程書籍，專門探討《Wolfenstein 3D》的製作過程和其速度的秘密。id Software如何將一台設計用於顯示文字處理和試算表應用程式的機器，轉變為世界上最佳的遊戲平台，能夠以每秒七十幀的速度運行遊戲？如果你曾經問過自己這些問題，那麼《遊戲引擎黑書》就是為你而寫的。

這本書以工程角度出發，內容中並不多見散文（作者的英文本來就不太流利）。相反，這本書只有少量文字，大量圖示，試圖詳細描述《Wolfenstein 3D》遊戲引擎及其硬體，包括搭載Intel 386 CPU和VGA圖形卡的IBM PC。《遊戲引擎黑書》詳細介紹了射線追蹤、編譯縮放器、延遲渲染、VGA Mode-Y、線性反饋移位寄存器、定點算術、脈寬調製、運行時生成的代碼、自修改代碼等技術和訣竅。打開書本，探索這款開創第一人稱射擊遊戲類型的軟體架構。