Michael Abrash's Black Book For Download

Decado writes "I found out from gamasutra that Michael Abrash and Dr.Dobbs Journal have made Abrash's now out of print "Graphics Programming Black Book" available for free download here. Written at about the time he was finished on Quake it was one of the most readable and informative books on graphics programming. Abrash begins each chapter with a real life anecdote to the problem he is solving and you can't help but think he is a cool guy. Though fairly dated now it is still a great read and his approach to optimisation still holds true today."

Comments

Re:Bresenham's algorithm in a nutshell.

[ConceptJunkie]

There's a similar algorithm by Wu (IIRC) for drawing anti-aliased lines. You figure out how far you are from the 'true' line and use that as a ratio between source and target colors for your pixel and ( 1 - that ) for the source and target colors of the next pixel up. Once you get further than 1/2 pixel from the line offset by a pixel and start over.

There's a similar one for circles. I implemented them both for Windows and they are sweet and elegant. The Wu paper is on SIGGRAPH, but you need to pay for it. I found a short summary on an ftp site somewhere. E-mail me if you are interested and I can dig up the doc (it's a little too long to post here).

Rick

Since the site seems to be Slashdotted already

[StarDrifter]

A portion of the book (the DDJ articles relating to Quake) was already available online:

http://www.bluesnews.com/abrash/

Sweeeet.

[Flying Headless Goku]

I have a treasured old copy of "Zen of Graphics Programming", which was the book that introduced me to such beauties as Bresenham's algorithm and dirty rectangle animation. This guy will get your enthusiasm up for graphics the way Knuth teaches a love of elegant, efficient data structures and algorithms.

Somehow, I never got around to buying the Black Book, though. I read his articles on the Quake engine though, and they're as relevant today as they were the day they were printed (not that low-level engine design is relevant to a huge audience, but at the least it's a good workout for your brain). Definitely worth the bother to download and read.

Let's try not to all download at the same time, ok? They'll still be there a month from now. They really should have put up a clear notice giving permission to make mirrors; demand is sure to be as crushing as the shipping accident that decapitated me.
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