HandmadeCon 2016 - History of Software Texture Mapping in Games

Some interesting related stuff in this talk: HandmadeCon 2016 - History of Software Texture Mapping in Games link to this 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.

From the horses mouths (minus Abrash/Carmack) 'HandmadeCon 2016 - History of Software Texture Mapping in Games' link to this 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

…be part of Nintendo or Id software or some other era-appropriate team figuring out how to make the early big 3D games like Mario 64 or its contemporaries on the PSX. Of course you can bust out an SDK and try it out but it probably won't be the same. Those teams built up that kind of tacit knowledge like in this video about software texture mapping link to this video…

- it didnt, at least not Intel x86 MHz - doom doesnt operate on pixels, it operates on constant-z planes (lines), you can scale linearly inside those (cheap 2D operation). How Carmack did it? He cheated by deciding to never look down/up or draw slopes :) 'HandmadeCon 2016 - History of Software Texture Mapping in Games' link to this video 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

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!” link to this video