Re: a book or tutorial

["Mark Collins" <me@thisisnurgle.org.uk>]

----- Original Message -----
From: Mads Bondo Dydensborg <madsdyd@challenge.dk>
To: <linuxgames@sunsite.dk>
Sent: Sunday, March 25, 2001 11:51 AM
Subject: Re: a book or tutorial



> I wasted about $100 on this book. Only about the last 10 chapters and a
> couple of others are interessting. The rest is like Foley and van Dam
> applied to old intel CPU's and obsolete VGA hardware - which are sort of
> neat, but also sort of a waste of time.

Ahhh, yet another case of 'there's hardware acceleration, so I don't need to
optimize my code'. Such a shame. This attitude *really* pisses me off. Not
only are there people in the world without the latest graphics cards, but if
you look at the advances in graphics over the last 5 years, you'll see that
very little progress has really been made.

Why?

Because instead of adding the functionality of the accelerated cards to
their engines, people are re-writing the engines from scratch, and ignoring
their previous work. The problem with this? Let's take Quake for example. On
a 486DX4/100, it could run full screen in 640x480 no problem, with no
acceleration. What about Quake 2? I could just about run it fullscreen in
320x240 on the same box. What major advances in the graphics were there? Not
alot. Now think about Quake III. To be honest, curved surfaces don't really
add that much, and the required jump in power to run the game just isn't
worth it. I'm pretty sure that Quake III could have been implemented on the
Quake engine, and the curved surfaces added as an optional extra.

The GPBB gives advise on how to optimize the code efficiently and squeeze
every ounce of performance out of your apps so you don't need to rely on the
latest graphics hardware to achieve decent results. If you're coding for the
x86 architecture, it'll never be obselete. (And I don't care about Linux
running on a Mac, an Amiga, or a fscking PalmIII).

End of Rant.

Nurgle.

The Infamous Mark 'Nurgle' Collins
Lead Author - 'Linux Game Programming' (ISBN: 0-7615-3255-2)
WWW: http://www.thisisnurgle.org.uk Mobile: +44 7761 774 152
Email: me@thisisnurgle.org.uk  Spam: spam@thisisnurgle.org.uk



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