December 10, 2018

Game Engine Black Book DOOM

The Game Engine Black Book: DOOM is now available for purchase. It is being released exactly 25 years after DOOM.zip was first published on the University of Wisconsin FTP server in December 1993. You can get it at the following locations:



- Amazon (USA, France, UK, and many more).

- Google Books (here with no DRM).

- Gift what you want here, High-Res PDF is here.



From November 2017 to November 2018, it took one year to complete. Both John Carmack and Dave Taylor kindly wrote forewords. The result is 427 pages, full color, to describe in great detail the PCs of the era (Intel 80486, VESA Local BUS, Dos Extenders, Watcom Compiler, ...), the NeXT hardware (and especially the NeXTStation TurboColor), the engine, and the console ports to the Jaguar, Sega 32X, Super Nintendo, Sony Playstation, 3DO, and Sega Saturn.



I wish the paper version could have been priced lower. A black and white version would have been cheaper ($39.00) but given the many screenshots and drawings, readability would have suffered. I tried to look around but all printers gave me roughly the same price for a 400+ pages full color book. If anybody has an idea to lower the price I will listen carefully.



Errata

If you find any errors, please report them on the Game Engine Black Book: DOOM errata sheet.



Pricing

I was transparent about the Game Engine Black Book: Wolfenstein 3D's pricing and I want to do the same for DOOM's Black Book. Here are all the numbers. When I upload the PDF on Amazon, a minimal price is automatically calculated. In the case of the DOOM, Amazon sets the minimal price at $51.35.



There is a slider which authors can use in order to add their "share" on top of Amazon price. I have added $3.88 which Amazon also takes a cut on. The result is $1.59 royalty and $0.77 profit per book sold.



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