Miscellaneous Technical Articles

I've written a number of articles for Game Developer Magazine over the years, and this is the place where you'll find the ones that don't get their own page.

All of these articles are in PDF format, for better or for worse.

I will try to get newer versions of the PDFs up at some point, since these have some font problems.

todo: lots more work to do on this page

Perspective Texture Mapping

This is my epic perspective texture mapping series. I guess it's a bit out of date now that 3D hardware is everywhere, but I think the discrete math in the articles is still very interesting, and I'm still a stickler for fill conventions and resampling rules. I still don't know of any hardware that does their fill conventions exactly right, especially given the extra information in the gradients.txt file in the sample code, and the fact that there's a bug even in that analysis having to do with exact perspective gradients (hint: a perspective warp can change the rounding modifier inside the triangle).

• Perspective Texture Mapping, Part 1: Foundations - Apr/May 95
• Perspective Texture Mapping, Part 2: Rasterization - Jun/Jul 95
• Perspective Texture Mapping, Part 3: Endpoints and Mapping - Aug/Sep 95
• Perspective Texture Mapping, Part 4: Approximations - Dec/Jan 96
• Perspective Texture Mapping, Part 5: It's About Time - Apr/May 96
• Perspective Texture Mapping Sample Code

Compilers

These two articles aren't really reviews, even though I discuss the results of using a number of different Macintosh and PC compilers. In reality, they're tutorials on how compilers [fail to] optimize your code, and what you can do about it.

• Compilers: Still Not So Hot - Jun/Jul 96
• More Compiler Results, and What To Do About It - Aug/Sep 96

Memory Bandwidth

This article discusses how the access pattern your application uses can have a decided affect on its performance.

• Memory Miscellanea - Oct/Nov 95

Floating Point

To cover some of the wacky floating point tricks the perspective texture mapping articles use, I needed to discuss the floating point unit in some detail.

• Let's Get to the (Floating) Point - Feb/Mar 96

Blasts From the Past

• A Whirlwind Tour of WinG - Sep 94
  My very first article for Game Developer. You've gotta love that screenshot of WinDoom running on top of Excel.
• Changing The Rules For Transparent BLTs - Feb 95
  This was the first article for my column.