Flights of fantasy
by Christopher Lampton · first published 1993
100% recommend
Why HN recommends it
Teaches readers to build a flight simulator and covers graphics basics such as Bresenham's line algorithm. It serves as an early, accessible introduction to game and graphics programming for beginners and students.
Summarised by Claude from recommending comments
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Flights of Fantasy https://www.amazon.com/Flights-Fantasy-Programming-Video-Gam...
on “Ask HN: What are some books where the reader learns by building one project?” ↗…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…
on “Ask HN: The book that did it for you in math and/or CS?” ↗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…
on “The Beauty of Bresenham's Algorithm” ↗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.
on “Simple Physics-based Flight Simulation with C++” ↗