BSP revisited

I stumbled upon an article featuring a review of the code of the Doom engine. I wish someone had written something like this years ago ...

One of the classes during the undergraduate days required that students deliver a short presentation on some piece of technology they had found interesting. I was interested in computer graphics and games. I was especially fascinated by Doom -- a friend had introduced me to the shareware version of the game and I got my first taste of addiction when I found myself sitting up late one night trying to get past a level without being killed by balls of flame spat out by ugly imps lurking behind closed doors. When Id Software released Quake, I also discovered BSP trees. An article in the now-extinct Dr. Dobb's Journal and articles written by Michael Abrash about working at Id Software (the "Ramblings in Realtime" series) had me hooked. Abrash also made studying computer graphics more exciting. He restored the joy of making the simple things work while the textbooks offered Bresenham's algorithm in a dry academic tone. When I found a copy of Michael Abrash's Graphics Programming Black Book (now out of print, but the PDFs are legally available online) in the bookstore, I did not hesitate in snagging a copy and reading the chapters over and over. Since I was not destined to approach the eerie smartness of Jon Carmack, some of things Abrash wrote about did not immediately make sense. Admittedly, I would have had to "get my feet wet" in code before I could appreciate them or even understand more of the items in Jon Carmack's .project and .plan files in the days when finger was used to support a form of micro-blogging. I also remember

My presentation was an experiment in fonts and slide styles, which made a label like avant garde more appropriate than educational. Since it was all meant more for a grade than for sharing knowledge (although a few classmates were interested in the idea and noted that my enthusiasm for it was evident), nothing more came out of it, although I continued to follow Id (even after Abrash quit) for years and also continued reading articles about game programming. I just never became a competent game programmer.