Flights of fantasy

What Hacker News says

1. atan2Feb 2023
   True. There was another book called "Build your own Flight Sim in C++" by Michael Radtke and Christopher Lampton, but I personally like "Flights of Fantasy" better.
   thread
2. NihilartikelFeb 2022
   When I was a teenager who wanted very much to make videogames and demoscene productions (in the pre-ubiquitous-internet era of Wolfenstein), I had worked up through basic, and pascal, and finally arrived at c++ for speed. The C++ books dealing with graphics were all using really cheesy and slow libraries, totally inappropriate for games.

   The one book that really made everything come together was "Flights of Fantasy" https://www.amazon.com/Flights-Fantasy-Programming-Video-Gam...

   This covered how to write a simple flight simulator in C++ on the hardware of the time. It also gave a really good practical primer on the linear algebra needed for 3d graphics. Inline assembly and a bunch of fun algorithms for quick and dirty approximate math were there too.

   That book, along with the free time and obsession that a 14 year old can muster, was probably what started me on my (in my opinion) successful hacking and optimization trajectory.

   It's a bit dated now that most CPU's have amenities like built in floating point math but not too long ago I was doing embedded audio synthesis on an 8bit AVR micro and Bresenham's line drawing algorithm was just what I needed to efficiently generate saw waves.

   Show morethread
3. NihilartikelAug 2017
   Bresenham's algorithm holds a special place in my memory. Learned about it in Christopher Lampton's "Flights of Fantasy", as a kid and worked through duplicating it in assembly for a little graphics library. Was a great introduction to optimization since it had to be all integer and run well on a 486. Used it most recently to generate 8 bit saw/triangle waves for the an arduino soft-synth, which also rules out floating point and per-sample division. Multiplication also on the tinier MCUS.
   Show morethread
4. sigstoatFeb 2017
   Flights of Fantasy

   https://www.amazon.com/Flights-Fantasy-Programming-Video-Gam...

   thread