Welcome to the eighth edition of the Game Programming Gems series, started by Mark DeLoura in 2000. The first edition was inspired by Andrew Glassner‘s popular Graphics Gems series. Since then, other Gems series have started, including AI Gems and a new series focused on the capabilities of programmable graphics, the ShaderX series. These tomes serve as an opportunity to share our experience and best practices with the rest of the industry.
Many readers think of the Game Programming Gems series as a collection of articles with sections that target specialists. For me, I‘ve read through them as a way to get exposure to the diverse subsystems used to create games and stay abreast of the latest techniques. For example, I may not be a specialist in networking, but reading this section will often enlighten and stimulate connections that I may not have made between areas in which I have expertise and ones in which I do not.
One statement I‘ve heard recently regarding our industry is the idea that we now have all the horsepower we need to create games, so innovations by hardware companies are not needed. I believe this argument is flawed in many ways. First, there are continued advancements in graphical realism in academia, in R&D labs, and in the film industry that have yet to be incorporated into our real-time pipelines. As developers adopt these new features, computational requirements of software will continue to increase. Second, and the more important issue, is that this concept of play isn‘t entirely correct—the very notion of what gaming serves from an anthropological perspective. Play is fundamental, not just to the human condition, but to the sentient condition. We invent interactive experiences on any platform, be it a deck of cards, a set of cardboard cutouts, or a next-gen PC platform with multi-terabyte data and multi-threaded, multi-gigahertz, multi-processor environments. It‘s as natural as the pursuit of food. This play inspires real-world applications and pushes the next generation of platform requirements. It enables affordability of ever-increased computational horsepower in our computing platforms.