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From: mjw06513@uxa.cso.uiuc.edu (Mary J Winters)
Newsgroups: comp.graphics
Subject: 3D Animation Source Code Wanted
Keywords: 3D animation C code wireframe
Message-ID: <1990Jan2.224220.4136@ux1.cso.uiuc.edu>
Date: 2 Jan 90 22:42:20 GMT
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Reply-To: mjw06513@uxa.cso.uiuc.edu (Mary J Winters)
Organization: University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
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OK, here's a question I would imagine has been asked before, but I have
only recently discovered this group. I want to write a 3D game, similar to
the arcade game BattleZone. I have some code which produces very nice wire-
frame models with perspective. The only problem is speed: Even on my 386
IBM clone (no fp coprocessor) I can only get about a 1-2 frame per second
animation rate. The same program running on a 386 IBM clone WITH a math
coprocessor does significantly better, on the order of 5-6. Clearly, the
floating point math is bogging things down. Then there are games like 
Flight Simulator, Atari's BattleZone for the IBM, and Arctic Fox which are
all able to perform reasonable 3D perspective views and are VERY FAST (e.g.
Atari's BattleZone runs well on a 4 MHz 8088-based IBM PC). 

I would very much like to learn the techniques used to produce fast 3D
animation of wireframe objects. I assume it is done using only integer
math, with optimization techniques such as multiplication/division replaced
by shifts, lookup tables for trig/transcendental functions, etc. Can anyone
point me toward a good source of information on these and similar topics?
Any information (book titles, anon. ftp sources for code, etc.) would be
greatly appreciated. 

(In case it's important, I'm using Turbo C 2.0 on an IBM clone with a VGA
adapter).

Thanks!