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HandmadeCon 2016 - History of Software Texture Mapping in Games

Molly Rocket · 14.8K views · 2017-09-25 · 1:22:13

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Overview

A HandmadeCon 2016 panel where Chris Hecker, John Miles, Sean Barrett and Chris Green give an oral history of software texture mapping in 90s games.

On Hacker News

HN recommends it for first-hand accounts of how early 3D games like Doom worked within tight hardware limits.

Recommended by 2 HN people across 2 months · HN mentions 2021–2022

Topics

Game programming & enginesComputer graphics & renderingGame history & retro gaming
Search by tags
texture mappingsoftware renderingdoomgame historygraphics programming

What people said

rasz · 2021-12 · Recommendation

From the horses mouths (minus Abrash/Carmack) 'HandmadeCon 2016 - History of Software Texture Mapping in Games' [VIDEO] Wolfenstein and Doom are 100% correct because Carmack 'cheated' by deciding to never look down/up or draw slopes :-) so whole game is drawn with 'lines of constant Z'. Or as they put it Chris Hecker (Microsoft/Maxis/etc): that's a classic Carmack thing which is like Fuck those general problems, Im gonna solve this other problem perfectly John Miles (ORIGIN/Miles Design/etc): Its all about not doing the math, we were still at a point in time when you won by not doing the math

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cma · 2021-11 · Recommendation

Some interesting related stuff in this talk: HandmadeCon 2016 - History of Software Texture Mapping in Games [VIDEO] I think they say at one point it went from 14 to 8 instructions, and then the Duke Nukem guy (Ken Silverman) got it down to around 4. Quake would do something where it only issued a divide every 8 pixels or something, and then only interpolate when inbetween and the out of order execution on pentium pro (I think?) would let it all work out.

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corysama · 2022-04 · Reference

Garret’s buddies at HandmadeCon gathered a group of devs from different games who all wrote some of the first software rasterization 3D games. The general theme was “We had no idea what we were doing. There were no references!” [VIDEO]

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Sources

Video by Molly Rocket, played through YouTube.

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