3D Game Engine Design

What Hacker News says

1. mathgladiatorJul 2010
   I learned many concepts by spending years designing, building, redesigning, and rebuilding many... many... many... times. Then I got this book:

   3D game engine design: a practical approach to real-time computer graphics By David H. Eberly

   and my universe was changed forever. Pick a project that you think is worth it and go through the pains of building something that you think is beautiful. This is how you become a good programmer because your art will drive you.

   Keep in mind, to become a professional is to put away the art brushes and grab a shovel because most of the problems professionals deal with are not programming related but rather drama-driven-bullshit.

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2. cynical_germanApr 2025
   Oh my... Are you serious? I'm almost triggered by this. A book about algorithms or data structures from 20 years ago has nothing more to teach? 3D game engine design from 20 years ago has nothing more to teach? No point in looking at the source code of Quake, reading k&r, and Knuth's TAOCP Volume 1 was published in 1968 so it's obviously irrelevant garbage!

   I could spurr into an essay of what kind of lack of understanding you just portrayed about the world, but I won't.... I won't...

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3. psykoticJun 2012
   Indeed. Having been in the game industry for close to a decade now (apropos of this thread, my first job was at Epic Games as an engine programmer working on UE2 and UE3), I can't say I personally learned a lot from Gregory's book (outside of some tidbits on character animation, where the book is especially strong), but I can say that it's the best book on the subject I've read.

   An older book like Eberly's 3D Game Engine Design was more a loosely knit compendium of theory and algorithms. Eberly's more recent 3D Game Engine Architecture is closer to Gregory's in intent. Unfortunately, it's more a reflection of the idiosyncrasies of the author and his personal code base than an investigation of game engines as developed and used in the industry.

   I've also heard good things about Mike McShaffry's Game Coding Complete. McShaffry is a game industry veteran, so he knows what he's talking about. However, it seems to be targeted at rank beginners, so a lot of the material might not be very useful to you.

   Below that tier, of course, you have an endless array of how-to books written by incompetents. The worst is the "here's my shitty homebrewed codebase" variety.

   For rendering in games, you'll need a separate book. Real-Time Rendering is the canonical reference. The first and second editions were my favorites. The third edition added a lot of information on recent techniques but at the expense of reading too much like an annotated bibliography, skating from topic to topic while rarely going into enough detail to be useful and often listing several alternative solutions to a given problem without comparing their relative merits and trade-offs. The first editions flowed more like textbooks and were thus better suited as introductions. Some of that might be hindsight bias on my part; I'm curious what others think who first learned the subject from the third edition.

   I also want to give a shout-out to Christer Ericson's Real-Time Collision Detection book. It's full of clear explanations and practical, hard-earned knowledge that you can't get anywhere else. Plus, the accompanying code is robust and well written, a far cry from the usual crap that either straight-up doesn't work or is inextricably entangled with a massive code base (I'm looking at you, Eberly!).

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