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3D First-Person Games, So Far
Gernot Ziegler writes: "One of my professors (Stefan Gustavsson) has written
a good summary that explains the history & technical background/innovations that Doom, Quake & Unreal brought with them when they were released.
Check it out." It's a pdf file. Gustavsson ends with a list of hopeful questions about where such games can go, after nearly a decade of running and violence. What I'd really like to see is a goal-free 3D world like the Snowcrash Metaverse, but it will take games to get there ;)
Yeah, imagine how much more user-friendly df -k would be if it had a graphical progress bar :)
Carmack wrote about it in his OpenGL vs Direct3D essay. I don't undersatnd the technical details, but basicly with D3D you need to make predictions about the speed of the hardware. With many games, the frame rate doesn't change significantly with a hardware upgrade. There are apparantly some ways around this if you're clever, and newer verisions of direct3d may not have this limit.
He Claims there were no multiplayer games which let several players interact across a network...
Pretty much true - most multiuplayer games were 2 player only since most games were designed to be connected head to head with a Null Modem cable...
But Midi Maze IIRC allowed up to 16 players connected via midi cables to run around a maze and shoot each other, in the days before doom was even a twinkle in John Carmack's Eye.....
This sounds a lot like MUDs... It's amazing how much "social" things mean; even with muds that are not specifically chat-oriented, the main attraction really appears to be the community. (and having been a mud-admin for 10 years I have seen it... even though have been semi-retired for past 3 years or so).
However, MUDs never developed to fully interconnected 'mega-games', nor did most succesful worlds 'kill' others. Probably because it was and is very easy to set up your own mud. Then again, companies might have more interest in getting multiple games interconnected, bundled, syndicated if you will.
I like paying taxes. With them I buy civilization -- Oliver Wendell Holmes
It's an excellent game, just seeing the outdoor engine alone is reason enough to try the demo, even if you're not into military squad combat sims.
The statement about the DOOM file format being "more or less officially documented" is mentioned in several books and web sites that attempt to (re-)write the history of 3D games, but this is wrong. When DOOM was released, the WAD file format was not documented at all. It is only with the release of DOOM II that we got two useful pieces of information from John Carmack: a list of new LINEDEF types used in Doom II, and the source code for the BSP compiler in Objective-C. Several people (including myself) had decoded the WAD file format and written their own BSP compilers in the meantime, but the release of id's code allowed the developers of DOOM editors to compare different algorithms and to improve their editors.
I was a contributor to the "Unofficial Doom Specs" and the main author of DEU (Doom Editing Utilities). From December 1993 to April/May 1994, I spent a large amount of time reverse-engineering the WAD file format until I got the first working editor. To the credit of id Software, I must add that several things changed after the release of DOOM II: the unofficial level editors that were initially frowned upon (maybe not by John Carmack, but at least by Jay Wilbur, the biz guy) were allowed and even encouraged.
When Quake was released (first the QTest1 demo, then the full game), the same things happened, but a bit faster: initially, no information was released about the PAK file format, so I cooperated with Olivier Montannuy and others to write the "Unofficial Quake Specs". But soon after the game was released, John Carmack provided more information about the game, which allowed several good editors to be developed in a relatively short time. The usage of Quake-C allowed a lot of modifications without having to modify the executable, so that was another nice move.
-Raphaël
You're probably thinking of Quake, which could use all the weird modes, 320x240 being one of them. Doom was definately regular VGA 320x200. Doom did not have square pixels.
Now, if we could just get Linux programmers to stop doing that, and instead to throw a pretty splash screen over the dirty background stuff, Linuxusership would increase exponentially.
But no...hackers love their scrolling gibberish...
Got Rhinos?
Does nobody else remember Battlezone? 3D wireframe tank game, first-person perspective. I think it's from the early 1980s.
There were probably others too... I've heard of old arcade games that used vector-based graphics to do wire-frame 3D, with a special CRT that had a programmable electron gun instead of the common raster/scanning one. Maybe the battlezone I played was a C64 port of an arcade version?
In any event, the wire-frame games impressed me at the time. I had written optimized asm line-drawing code and could see that those capabilities for just drawing all the lines for a 3D wire-frame scene in real-time were barely within the reach of a 1MHz CPU. The fact that they could do that, plus the 3d perspective calculations and gameworld stuffs, was really quite something.
actually, i downloaded the demo just to make sure :)
The "cyberspace" idea wasn't born from CS, it was born from certain sci-fi writers' ignorance of the way networks actually work. (William Gibson did not even write Neuromancer on a computer, and he is reportedly rather computer-illiterate to this day). It's just much more efficient and intuitive to get the information that most of us want in a document format instead of than in an environmental format.
maybe one of these days this idea will have a point, but other than the coolness factor it's really nothing to dream of right now. I mean, would you rather Code Red attacked a machine, or your brain? Why walk up to a bookshelf and pull a "virtual" book from it when you can click, type a few things, and it's just as fast without all the overhead?
He doesnt say that doom was the first 3dshooter. And if you read the whole article instead of glimpsing through the first line youd realize that its about multiplayer games, not 3dshoters.
Read the article
It isn't a game without some sort of goal.
Ken Silverman's build engine (used in duke nukem 3d) was fairly easy to create maps for. You draw the room outlines in a 2d, overhead view, then go into a 3d view (almost as if you're in the game) and give the room height & textures.
IIRC, the keyboard commands are a bit cryptic, but once you get used to that (or print them out) it's pretty easy to use.
that would certainly be a step backwards in realism!
nah what'd be the point?
i could live a little longer in this prison
"What I'd really like to see is a goal-free 3D world like the Snowcrash Metaverse, but it will take games to get there ;)"
How about going outside and experiencing the real world(tm), Stupid fuck.
Sounds really nice - one way around the whole ops descrimating against evils would be the ability to have people of extreme karma ranges to approach under a 'white-flag-of-truce' where their actions are limited untill the operator or 'lord' shall we say deems them temporary inhabitence. Or a Total Karma vs. Local Karma balances as an additional feature.
.. think ill write these down and get some a few more programmers other than myself :)
.ph0x
Just yet a few more ideas
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ps -aux | grep mind
Might it have been Stellar Seven? It was a vaguely Battlezone-esque game for the Apple II and C-64. Heck, by that criteria, the old vector arcade game, Tail Gunner, counts, and it was out in the late 70's if memory serves...
Dunno man, haven't played them. Go talk to the professor :) maybe he needs to go back to the class that spoke about "scope" in writing.
It is still in development, but it looks like it has a lot of potential. It uses the Crystal Space 3d engine, so the graphics are actually good.
Heh. That's probably just an artifact introduced by the rather interesting border between neck and upper chest. I'd have Eskil, my colleague who actually did the modelling (as well as pretty much designed Verse) answer that himself, but he's in LA for SIGGRAPH 2001, so he can't. ;^)
main(O){10<putchar(4^--O?77-(15&5128 >>4*O):10)&&main(2+O);}
I thought that Half-Life used a modified Quake engine, not a modified Quake 2 engine...
Imagine the possibilities for being this professor. You could charge the University for a killer server, T3 lines all around, AND copies of Q3A for yourself and your graduate students. Some people were born lucky.
I'm an Angry Clam. You would be angry too if you were a ball of snot in a shell.
I predict Verse will make it before anyone else. It features noodity :P
***JUMP PAD ACTIVATION INITIATION START***
***TRANSPORT WHEN READY***
Commander Keen was an earlier hit from ID.
But the console platform games available at the time walked all over it, in graphics and (usually) in gameplay.
But what about all the other interesting interactions you can have with a graphically-rich, fully realized world? In Thief, violence was actually discouraged, and it depended on an object-rich game world. What about games that rely on physics (nevermind Trespasser, it had other problems), or on tactical situations that aren't violent in nature?
I guess I'm just a little bit disappointed in our industry's inability to think outside the "shooter" genre when it comes to 3D multiplayer games.
Hmmm... you may be right, all those old games have messed up my mind ;)
This sig is intentionally left blank
And just what would be the point of playing this game? To relax yourself so you can go to bed and sleep faster? Play for 5 minutes, get bored, go to bed, fall asleep.
Football has a goal, soccar has a goal, paintball has a goal, war has a goal, MOST people's lives contain goals, schooling has a goal. A good computer game is escapist in some way or challenging. If there is no point to the game, there is no challenge. All you are after, it seems, is a cheesy new version of IRC. IRC with avatar graphics so you can make yourself out to look like a "cool" 6 foot tall muscleman or wizard and "impress" your online chat friends.
Even a GOOD game of D&D has a goal or goals. It isn't pointless with no end to it.
Hell, what I want is a more emmersion, more realism, and better addon-hardware to make it so (better yet affordable 3d goggles and gloves and feedback). I would like to see "scary", atmospheric, adrenaline-pumping games that let you escape into it for a few hours diversion. If you want a good story to go with it, make the whole thing story/plot-based (ala Realms of the Haunting) but with good FPS 3D and heart-stopping suprises and foes.
We were surprised at Wolf3D mods, but we knew it was going to happen with DOOM. I worked with some of the Wolf3D map editor guys before DOOM was even released, but they didn't wind up making the popular level editors.
The editor and utility source code was released quite early, but it was all for NeXT workstations in Objective-C, so it had to wait for someone to rewrite it for more conventional systems.
John Carmack
i'm one of the original modders. if you ever see the jerk-off gun (machine gun) for wolfenstein3d, know that I made it.
The games themselves will only become a part of the social experience you're buying, you'll be able to wander around the "waiting rooms" with your avatar and talk to people. Exciting.
... is the cool part of the internet being able to use IRC, or being able to create your own, personal piece of cyberspace with which others around the world can interact?
Let's see
THAT is the cool part about the Snow Crash metaverse. As soon as that feature is available in one of these goal-free universes, you'll see something much more exciting than people chatting.
"And like that
There is a new commander of a base of the French Foreign Legion, and the captain is showing him around all the buildings. After he has made the rounds the commander looks at the captain and says, "Wait a minute. You haven't shown me that small blue building over there. What's that used for?"
The captain says, "Well sir, you see that there are no women around. Whenever the men feel the need of a woman, they go there and use the camel."
"Enough!" says the commander in disgust.
Well, two weeks later, the commander himself starts to feel in need of a woman. He goes to the captain and says, "Tell me something, Captain." Lowering his voice and glancing around, he asks, "Is the camel free anytime soon?"
The captain says, "Well, let me see." He opens up his book. "Why, yes, sir, the camel is free tomorrow afternoon at two o'clock."
The commander says, "Put me down for two o'clock then."
So the next day at two o'clock the commander goes to the little blue building and opens the door. There inside he finds the cutest camel he's ever seen. Right next to the camel is a little step stool, so he closes the door behind him and puts the step stool directly behind the camel. He stands on the stool, drops his pants, and begins to have sex with the camel. A minute later the captain walks in.
"Ahem, begging your pardon, sir," says the captain, "but wouldn't it be wiser to ride the camel into town and find a woman like all the other men?"
they are not playable as a game but you can walk thru some of the most incredible buildings, both real and development.
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
Keep an eye out for Planetside. It sounds like exactly what you're asking for.
Any game that can give you nightmares is a Great game.
As 3D maps go, Video games such as Bards Tale used 3D type maps for moving around a city. Not true 3D but boxes, but then, these are older games. Even thinking, I think there were some older C64/Apple demos that used Wolf type 3D maps, but I cant think of any at the moment.
Wolfenstien 3D wasnt the first, but was the most popular. People were building upto realastic games for quite some time.
Some games I think they forgot about, Heretic, Hexen, Duke Nukem 3D, SkyNet, Blood Series, SIN, Solider of Fortune, KingPin, Shadow Warrior, RedNeck Rampage, and TRIBES! Hell, even new titles like Max Payne and upcoming DN4E are leaps above Q3A.
A real history on FPS games, should include 8bit computers and consoles. I think it would be cool for a list of games, dates, and engines they used. Even a quick blurb on what the developers/programmers were thinking when they came out with the games.
Ahh, I'm too old... I remember playing Ball Blazer!
I'm writing this as I read, and finding several more mistakes, but it seems to get more accurate as the chronology progresses.
"The Sims"?!?!? No, it isn't multi-player. No, it isn't 3D, no it isn't a shoot-em-up. No, it is neither FP nor S. No, it sorta has RTS-like features, but we don't describe them, only hint that those are the cool things about Sims that, I guess, would be neat in a FPS.
I am for the complete Trantorization of Earth.
What I'd really like to see is a goal-free 3D world like the Snowcrash
Real life is already goal-free. Part of the allure of games is that they have goals. A goal-free virtual universe would at best be a novelty and a fad for a few moments.
--- -- - -
Give me LIBERTY, or give me a check.
Nope, the Adobe boycott was last week. We're mad at Microsoft again this week.
Yes, I played doom and quake back in the day, but Starsiege Tribes was the first game that I was truly addicted to. Squad based warfare engines had been attempted, but non of them captured such a strong following of players as Tribes did.
There also seems to be some 'cheating' going on. Doom was hardly the first multi-player network game, but yes, if you narrow your scope to 'extremely popular multi-player games from the early '90s that accept LAN-based networking,' then yes, Doom is your main example. But doesn't this defeat the purpose of looking at things historically? If you're limiting your scope to the games you've already picked out, why bother claiming they were revolutionary at all? Why not just look at each game from the standpoint of its influence, rather than its advancements?
Also, one day I'd like to see an overview of the history of FPSs that includes the old Mindscape game, The Colony. It was before Wolfenstein 3D. It was before Ultima Underworld. And it deserves credit, darn it!
The nice thing about goal-lessness is that you can define your own goals. Of course you can also do this with goal-based games (complete as fast as possible, play with one hand behind the back etc... I remember playing Mario Bros on the NES with keeping the 'right' and 'run' buttons pressed... we didn't get far, but it was fun alright), but when goal-lessness is part of the game design, it usually works better.
If you like not having your goals handed to you by someone else, that is.
Max Payne eat your heart out, Bullet time was out first for AHL(Action Half Life). Soon to be included in multiplayer ahl.telefragged.com
We had a wonderful school map in the duke nukem 3d engine. only 2 levels, and we had it all linked by teleporters. It was great fun on open days though :)
I woner if it is still arround..
Koolt. Hälsa Eskil från Anders som var med i SUGA och gick på Mediagymnasiet =)
Maze Wars, and it's Atari ST clone Midi Maze were multiplayer.
Boobies never hurt anyone. - Sherry Glaser.
I agree completely. All the Marathons had something I never saw in DOOM/Quake/Unreal: a plotline. (And they play reasonably on a 25 MHz 68040.) The environment was more 3D than DOOM, though it used sprites for monsters. I am still playing Marathon scenarios.
Constitutionally Correct
Hmm I wonder what battles you have been in. Don't you fear the dreaded Opel/Bedford blitz? I am a tanker, but only because that is what my skills suit me for. Infantry are THE decisive element as one cannot take towns without them. Just like the real World War II (and some other wars since), players are learning that combined arms is what wins. If tanks attack without infantry for close-in fighting/sneaking and planes for precision attack/recon, ambushes occur and tanks burn. At the beginning of WWII I think the ratio of armored personnel to non-armor in armor/mech units was something like 2:5. By the end it was 1:10, because tanks were just too darn vulnerable to infantry. As a tanker I utterly fear the trucks with their infantry. They move so darn fast that I can't bring the MG to bear before they're gone. Then the infantry get into everything just like roaches, turning flags into enemy right and left. Before you know it I am a lone tank because no one can spawn in to support me, and I am not long for that game world. Right now it's free form so people are not keen on being trucks and infantry altough the better players do not hesitate to do so. Mostly it's because it's boring to walk between towns and frustrating to be a defenseless truck. However once points are being given for missions which will generally speaking mean taking or defending towns, expect infantry to assume their rightful place.
________________________________________ History Must Not Fall Into The Wrong Hands ___________________________________
Easy for you to say. Some of us still get the intellectual equivalent of a slurpee brain freeze trying to get all the way through Abrash's Black Book.
Jeez, who does this guy think he is? John Romero or something?
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Bleah! Heh heh heh... BLEAH BLEAH!!! Ha ha ha ha...
God it must be nice to be John Carmack. All you gotta do is post and it automatically gets modded up. Not that the post wasn't informative or anything. I guess I'm just mad because I don't get karma for being a local celebrity.
I Browse at +4 Flamebait
Open Source Sysadmin
yes!!
i used to play that on a 286 in glorious 16 colours.
wouldn't you know it...carmack did that one too.
I've seen some inane comments, but this has to take the cake.
Isnt the point of a game to provide you with challenges and a goal? I know that's why I play games. A good example is Max Payne. It has excellent game mechanics, and a phenomenal story. And I was riveted to it for a week while I worked my way through the various levels. Very linear, and very much plot driven. And also great fun.
Every single person has a non linear forst person adventure, with no preset story that they can participate in every day. It's called life. Go live it if you want to work through something non linear. For me though, I want my games to entertain me. And in the case of FPS games, I cant see one being entertaining in a single player environment without an engaging and interesting storyline.
yeah, I wouldn't have thought so either, but there I am playing the SIMS and screwing up my midterms. That little bastard just WONT stop lighting the gd stove on fire...wtf...stop pissing yourself! ahhhhh, see
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Mercenary on the C64 (1985) was a 3d wandering about type game. Although it did not have textures, but on a 1MHz 6510 what do you expect?
I've tried reading people's comments on the "goal-less" game, and I don't see any that address this type of game. Does anyone remember the "birdman" section of Airwings 64? I'm not even sure I got the name right. At any rate, the game was about flying different things, planes, 'copters, hangliders, etc. The part I most enjoyed was "birdman", where you didn't have to do anything or go anywhere, you just flew around, took your time, explored the great scenery. I wonder all the time why games don't explore this more. We've got technology to creat incredibly detailed and realistic environments, and we run through them nonstop like headless chickens. I don't know if it's meditative or what, but playing Birdman was a totally joyful experience for me. Looking at ICO's new trailers, there's one where right at the beginning the character is falling next to a huge waterfall. The scope of the environment is totally engrossing. We can make and have made spaces that are simply worth exploring. I've become really bored with 3D gaming over the last couple of years, something I never expected to happen. I know some games like this would hook me again.
Active worlds gets a mention but hasn't taken off because it has no use. I have helped write a Snowcrash universe (Cyberterm for those who care and remember), commercialised it with dotcom funding and tried marketting and selling it. The simple problem is that as nice as the idea is, there is no commercial use for it yet. Our world had autonomous AI, avatars, persistance, dispersed over multiple servers etc. etc. but we have been unable to find a commercial use. It is just like the Snowcrash or Neuromancer world (without the jacks) but what use is it really? Come on guys, karma this up, I want to know what use such a world has!!!
So this is the kind of "factual" research a professor is capable of? Jesus Christ.
Girls do have a 3D game!
webcams.
SWEET MERCIFUL FUCK, IT'S JOHN CARMACK.
What's funny is that just earlier today, I was having a discussion about you and Wolfenstein 3D with a friend of mine.
I am truly not worthy. My mind is blown.
So what's so MULTIPLAYER about The Sims, or Black and White, other than the fact that both companies have made some noise about how they're going to do some sort of online thing, too? For that matter, what's "first person" about either of those games?
Starsiege: Tribes was multiplayer only and came out six months before Unreal Tournament or Quake 3 Arena.
Just a minor correction... Tribes was out for almost a year before UT and Q3 came around. Unreal Tournament and Quake 3 came out in December '99. I bought Tribes back in February '99, and it had been out for about a month then.
As someone who has played games since before the 2600 and been making games professionally for ten years, it drives me nuts to see such rubbish in print.
This guy needs to do some real research. The pdf is too painful to read through.
The Doom and Quake freaks are determined to rewrite history.
Video game history has a long and rich history if you take the time to study it in detail.
Also (and this is backed up by Blizzard's Bill Roper in that one Gamespy Top 50 that was posted here) Wing Commander also sold a huge number of the then-current 386 systems.
This article is barely academic, it's more of a mishmash "here are some games that were important or I think are cool." The text he throws to justify including The Sims and Black and White show that. ("It isn't really a multiplayer game..." etc.)
It reminds me of the paper I wrote for an A-life class, http://www.alienbill.com/vgames/alife.html, where I use the flimsiest excuse to argue why 2600 Battlezone is batter than Robot Tank. I then tried to show Classic Video Games as containing simple examples of A-life, which was pushing it. (I think that paper brought me from a solid A to a B+)
SO YOU'RE GOING TO DIE: The Comic for Dealing with Death
Well, that's probably what most people think.
Doom is far more well known than Wolf3D because it was far more popular,
and it came at a time when "ordinary" were beginning to get computers.
On the other hand you could claim that the first FPS was one of those Dungeon Games... (Which ever was first, I don't know)
Even the original Battlezone was FPS in a sense though, yes you were acting as a tankdriver and not running as a person. How about CastleMaster?
Didn't the original Ultima have some FPS in it too, when you went down in the dungeons?
So where did it _really_ begin?
I find the prominent Adam's Apple on that ``woman'' rather, er, disturbing...
I'd like to see games with more violence. The reality of war should even be more apparent. Afterall, we're all killers in training for when we go loco at school, right? I say we create a game called "Nam" where your goal is go and kill as many "Charlies" as possible. You should also be able to made prisoner and be shot in the head while kneeling as well. For SFX, how about flying bone shards that do damage when somebody gets nailed with a shotgun?
This is neither goal free nor 3-D, but this is both interesting and a response to a question posed by many people.
Also, we're already linking to random university professor's random pages.
The Geology Explorer is an educational game intended to teach the concepts and principles of Physical Geology.
Slashdot is jumping the shark. I'm just driving the boat.
I seem to recall playing an EGA 3D game called "The Catacomb's Abyss" long before wolfenstein... of course I could be wrong ;)
Portals on the other hand are much better for this lofty goal. The way a portal works is rather simple. Take to concave subspaces (say two cubes) that share a face. That shared face is a portal from one subspace to the other. Now from within one cube, all you have to draw are the 6 faces. if you notice that the portal face is visible then you know you have to draw the subspace that the portal is connected too. This is great because you don't need a full data set to start drawing. you only need to know which cell you are in to begin with. moving from one cell to the next is simply a matter of going through the portal. To stream this, you start in your home cell and every time you hit a portal that you don't have a cell for, your computer can download the geometry of the new cell as well as the web addresses of any portals that it points to.
The only problem I can see with portals right now is how to build the cells properly. Right now lots of games use BSP trees to build a whole bunch of concave subspaces (the cells) and use the tree to determine what face of each cell is touching another. Another problem is that as your data set gets bigger, your cell's volume drops to the point where you have more cells than polys to begin with and you're stuck with large data set again.
You can't use an infite data set to build a bsp and it would take several ages of the universe to build an optimized one. If someone can come up with a method of building cells easily while making them contain a decent amount of detail(ie make them large and just ignore detail geometry inside of them), we'd have snowcrash in no time. That and 3d interfaces aren't that fast. Imagine walking from slashdot to google!
All a coder really wants, are fast cars, fast women and fast algorithms.
I don't see how anything that ran on SPARCstations could be seen as "consumer-level."
The author makes another error when he claims that Doom was easy to mod as the "file format was more or less officially documented".
Actually, I don't think id realized people would even want to mod the game. They certainly didn't go out of their way to make it easy. The unofficial doom wad file spec was the result of someone hacking the wad file format. id never released it, to my knowledge.
Thanks to that, and some user-created editors, Doom mods became popular.
Marathon Tempus Irae is without question the most original, most creative, most engaging FPS scenario ever created. The artwork was phenominal, especially considering that the marathon engine is only 2.5D. One haven't lived until they've blown away Pfhor in an exsquisitely decorated 16th century italian chapel to the tune of chanting monks.
Reminds me of an oldergame, Autoduel which had extremely large maps, and had freedom of movement.
Don't click that link! It goes to goatse.cx!
Got Rhinos?
Tomb Raider was the hardware "killer application", not Quake.
I have to disagree, although it depends on how you define "killer application". Tomb Raider might have reached more people, but Quake has driven hardware development since day 1.
I happened to be in sales (earning my wings) in the early days of 3d accelerators, and without a doubt the selling point for the new 3dfx cards (the original Voodoo) was Tomb Raider (it was the stock demo for anyone selling 3dfx cards): It was the reason 3d acceleration took off in the first place, and the rest is history.
I remember when Quake first came out: At the time I was a big fan of Duke3d, and the Quake technology demo came out. Personally I thought it looked like crap, but over time (and with the hardware) it developed into something visually amazing.
I've started playing OF and like it. There's a learning curve - i find myself frustrated and back playing Unreal Tournament after a few short missions. Would be nice to have a way to save the game multiple times like in Half-life. OF is slow if you like blowing things to peices like in UT and Quake.
What's the online version like? Haven't played multiplayer yet 'cuz I need a clan(?) URL. Any good URLs to test on?
BTW - Operation Flashpoint hasn't been released in the US yet. Had to buy mine from a UK ripper on ebay. The promo film is what sold me. Fscking rocks!
Remember children - there are no stupid questions, just stupid people.
Seems like some old pinball games and Assembly-type demos were using mode X long before Doom came out.
You obviously haven't watched the engine demos of Halo, if you had, you would know why it merits a place in a game discussion.
While I think Doom had an edge on single-player playability over Marathon, Marathon did enough things better than Doom to at least make it an equal (looking up & down, rooms sharing the same space, secondary weapon triggers, interesting story line, more inspired level design, swimming, much stronger quake-like multiplayer).
There is also no mention of Myth/Myth II, the single greatest RTS game ever created (and probably will remain so for quite some time). Bungie did what game designers thought was impossible: namely create an RTS game with realistic physics/terrain with an interface that allows you to control many troops with pinpoint accuracy. Sadly the level of skill that the early players have reached makes it tough for new people to learn it.
Throw Oni into the mix and you can see that Bungie was a visionary company who's interest was bringing cutting-edge NEW ideas to market. Nothing in their games is derivative except for the most general of concepts.
For those too lazy to read the whole thing, here's the funny part, where he tries to guess where all this virtual reality whizbang-stuff is headed in the future...
That's a lot of time sitting on your ass. I can only hope we've solved the swampbutt problem by then. :-)
Power to the Peaceful
the question is if you really need a fully fledged cad-program for your gaming needs, if you need a program to quickly and efficiently draw up 3d structures, I don't think there is anything that will compare to Form*z when it comes to speed and ease of use. It is also reasonably compatible with other programs, and works perfectly with Maya...
my only sig is of the SIG SG551 variety
Definetly the most amazing game i have played!
When i was a little kid i remember thinking the coolest game would be one where u could be playing a kind of flight sim game where u blow away some choppers take a few hits, eject and now find yourself a foot soldier. Operation flashpoint has made that dream a reality. I find games today focus toooo much on graphics and not enough on game play. Flashpoint doesn't have the best graphics but the game play is soo realistic and the engine supports the biggest maps i have seen. I don't want matrix moves and i could care less if the hallway im walking down has fog all around. I want realistic game play with large out door maps. I thought tribes 2 was going to make this a reality but like most games these days the 3d engine has sooo much potential but no good mods. Anyways i was suprised to see flashpoint not mentioned in the article. That game has more innovation from standard 3rd person shooters than any i have seen and it doesn't make sense for it to not be mentioned in this article.
if there wasnt a karma cap, what would carmacks karma be on? how many fist pr0st goatse.cx posts could he make?
Oops. The number I quoted is for a column in the middle of a room. 26 is right.
Perhaps the professor should have checked into the history of a series of 3D games called Wing Commander. Every damn version of that game required an upgrade for reasonable performance...and it was doing 3D well before Wolf3D (ok, it was cheating because the backgrounds for space are simple, but it is a noteworthy game in 3D gaming).
I agree; Marathon introduced some interesting technology to FPSs. It had a number of things before any others in the shooter genre: advanced physics, a moddable engine, an engaging plot, even real-time voice communication in multiplayer games (and no, I don't mean the old shouting-across-the-hall technology).
Interesting though that the author mentioned Halo will only be availbale for the XBox. His ignorance there disturbs me, being a Bungie fan, especially since Bunge has repeatedly stated otherwise.
"Leave the strategizing to those of us with planet-sized brains." -Tycho
Beside the obvious factual problems (starting with DOOM?), the grammar makes my brain hurt.
- There was a simple maze/combat game, whose name I don't quite recall (I'm thinking it was MazeWars) which offered a first-person perspective mode. Web searches turn up references to games of similar description on Sun workstations and Xerox Altos, which suggests an eaven earlier date than 1989.
- Spectre, which was released a few years later for the PC under the name Spectre VR, was a wire-frame tank simulation, but you played it from the first-person perspective: as if you were sitting in the tank itself. The Mac version was released in late 1991 or early 1992.
While DOOM may have popularized the FPS genre, it was nowhere near originating it.I will say, however, the DOOM, and Wolfenstein before it, were the first games to produce anything like a sense of real motion on non-workstation class hardware (I'd seen nausea inducing games on SGI workstations back in 1991, but most PCs and Macs couldn't render quickly, or smoothly, enough to fool the eye). I'm still impressed with what DOOM could do on a lowly 40MHz 386.
Thief - The Dark project (by Looking Glass) is a rather nice twist on FPS ... except that it's
not much of a S.
... or, at least, the first 3D game I remember playing over and over and over again: Death Maze 5000 for the TRS-80 Model I. I believe this was around 1980-82.
...
(I'll bet there were 3D-like games even before the TRS-80.)
There was also Asylum I and II -- both 3D (they weren't actually 3D, but the hallways had a 3D perspective). All the games were (more or less) real-time, too: you move through the maze using the arrow keys. Every time you moved, your perspective changed. You could pretty quickly locate doors and stretches of long hallways.
Remember, too, that the TRS-80 Model I's had really, really limited graphics: black and white and (IIRC) approximately 127 by 48. Later, you were able to buy a high-res upgrade (not sure if it was available for the Model I, but I remember the Model III/IV had the option).
And here I'll veer off-topic slightly, but I think it's interesting to mention that these early games (and I remember a 3D maze game for the Commodore Pet, too) were amazingly addictive despite limited graphics. I wouldn't be surprised if the Timex Sinclair had some sort of 3D game. I'm sure the Apple II had 'em -- as did the Atari 400/800 and the TI 99/4a.
What I distinctly remember -- and this was a long, long time ago -- was sitting with my buddies playing Asylum and wishing for better graphics and colors. We all thought it would never happen. (We were maybe 14, 15, at the time.) We figured games like Death Maze and Asylum were flukes. That they'd never catch on. We also figured the Infocom games -- Zork I and Deadline and Suspect -- would be the games that, over time, would last.
Really, really off-topic, but I remember this, too: does anyone recall the old-time Infocom game packaging? How they'd include all sorts of neat floor plans, maps, keychains, buttons and badges. Those old Infocom games were really a trip: each package was different and had all kinds of cool stuff.
*sigh*
Anyway, flash forward twenty years. Quake 3, Tribes 2, Counterstrike.
Little did we know
"There were ray-cast games on the Atari 800: WayOut, Capture the Flag; and the 68000-based Atari ST: MIDI Maze (AKA "Kill a Happy Face"). This last game allowed eight machines to be networked together using MIDI ports, for a full Doom-style "deathmatch" in 1987."
Google's cache of the Siggraph article.
Tastes Like Chicken
One for the floating cube and one enclosing "cube" for each face. Granted, the enclosing cubes aren't really cubes anymore, they're actually truncated pyramids (frustrums). An interesting property of this arrangement is that the set of enclosing cubes forms a larger cube. In fact, if you didn't want to allow player ships to occupy the interior of the center cube you could delete it, texture the opposing faces of the enclosing frustrums and only use 6 cubes total. People did this in order to reduce the number of cubes required.
Moderation in everything, including moderation.
I don't see a graphical progress bar being worth the effort. On the other hand, if you could play Frogger while linux booted....
Right... make it a dating universe :-)
karma capped
>It (DOOM) was designed by talented people with good skills and academic degrees in
>computer science.
None of us had degrees in computer science. Romero, Adrian, and I don't have any degrees at all, and Kevin's is in political science.
>It even had a simple but multithreaded "operating system" of its own to handle asynchronous
>updates of graphics and playing sound while performing the game simulation.
No. We made the startup sequence busy and techie in a sort of imitation of the NeXT workstations we were using at the time, but there was no multithreading going on. The sound was done with interrupt driven processing, which doesn't qualify.
With the source code open for years, this should have been easy to check.
>a resolution of only 320x240
320x200
I would take issue with some of the other vague statements made later on, but they aren't pointed enough to debate.
John Carmack
You are thinking of Catacomb 3D or Catacomb Abyss from Softdisk. They both used a reduced version of the Wolf3D engine.
This guy's a professor?? I've seen better written essays from high school kids. His facts are full of mistakes and missing info, plus his writing style is terrible. I'm really curious to find out what school is he from?
As with some of the items mentioned above, you could also have other things granted as special commands. And different regions(channels) controled by what would be the equiv to ops.
Ever wanted to see someone really get kicked from a channel? Watch in wonder as your local region owner grabs the troublemaker by the collar and boots him/her out of a bar.
Just some thoughts for the future.
ph0x
---
ps -aux | grep mind
``No it does not, in fact it specificly says "...it was done in an immersive first-persion perspective. Doom was not the first game to do this, but it was the first game to do it well."''
:)
Well, then it's a subjective issue; I still think Wolf3D did it -well-.
"Wolfenstein 3D did not have textured celings or floors."
It didn't? Dang...I seem to remember differently. It has, after all, been ten years since I played it.
Cybertown is a goal-free universe. It has quite a few nifty features, but didn't actually work all that well last time I checked (2 years ago on a PII-233 :). www.cybertown.com
yep, halflife and worldcraft is a breeze. We created a map of our office. Never got to implementing the small yelping dog that would bite at your legs on entering the boss's office though.
Imagine a FPS with all features the community wants and desires, like dynamic realistic environment, distance based fog, complex particle effects, high-resolution multilayered textures, detailed and fluid playermodels, surround sound, flexible and learning AI, demanding tactics and stategy, an extensive SDK, optimized netprotocols, cheater-proof code.
Imagine now that the players would be colorful clowns, running around in wonderful circus environments, using weapons like rubber-hammer, cake-shooter, water-pistol that knock out but not kill the other clowns, the knocked out one sitting on the floor for 5 seconds with stars rotating above his head. Parents would laugh about the game, find it even amusing, not being shocked about it or roll their eyes in disgust or confussion.
Would this game be popular ? Would this game fill thousands of servers worldwide ? How much is violence part of the gaming thrill ?
Obviousman is obviously not obvious enough
TechTV's Extended Play was reporting on an intresting game, Neverwinter Nights, that allows dungeon master's on the Net to setup and control a game, thus making it limitless. I imagine a game of this nature played in the first person. Brings new meaning to online communities.
It's consensus among the circle of people I know that GLQuake was the 3D hardware acceleration killer app.
"Historical revisionism"? Indeed.
Not only that, but it featured dynamic lighting (with dithering), decals on the walls, 3D objects, a plot (which the Doom types still don't have in 2001), sloped, variable-height floors ... none of which id even managed to get into DooM. Oo yeh, ahead of its time ...
-- Arm yourself when the Frog God smiles.
Hey, I had a "first person 3D" game for a 16K RAM TRS-80 Color Computer way back in the early 80s. Of course it didn't live up to Wolf 3D's graphics, but Wolf isn't nearly as good as Doom, either. BTW, the secret to killing whatever big nasty that lay at the end of Dungeons of Daggorath was to drop everything you were carrying except your sword and then flail away it the monster. They monsters would put picking up things on the ground ahead of fighting on their priority list.
It was a very thin history, like you'd see on a gaming news site run by someone in high school. He took a simple, superficial look at a certain type of game, but ignored everything else, especially the flight simulators (which date back to 1980 or so on the Apple II, speaking simply in terms of home computer hardware).
I'm starting to get annoyed by the movement of academics into the game "field." Now they can state the obvious, but it carries more weight because they're professors.
Who gave this guy his Ph.D? I can even write more coherantly than him, and it is rumored that I am an idiot. I bet he got his degree from the same place I took my TV/VCR Repair courses. Yah for academia!
Actually the sequel to Descent, Descent II was already retrofitted with some hardware 3D support
(for lesser cards like Virge, but later also for Monster)
The acceleration for Virge was before Quake I. I don't know if the acceleration for Monster was pre or post GLQuake. (I think before, but am not 100% sure)
Interestingly enough, the engine never checked for overlaps, so third party developers did some interesting things in the name of the fourth dimension ;-)
I'm not sure, but I think Lazy Matrix UT did it first.
Heretic or hexen maybe?
Please give your mod points to others, Im at the cap. They will appreciate it more
There is a goal-free game created by the guys who made MYST for the Mac called Cosmic Osmo and The Worlds Beyond the Mackerel. It's hard to find but still lots of fun.
Is this what you mean? http://www.sgi.com/archives/software/games/flights ims/
All it takes is is few minutes reading the document itself.
NetTrek too. Not an FPS, but did have 2d graphics, which is more complicated than something played "on a text terminal".
I think the author also used the word "entusiastically" (or similar), which is a quibble except that professors are expected to spellcheck things they put out for public inspection.
On July 1st-7th the National Federation of the Blind (NFB) held its annual conference. On the NFB tradeshow floor, Zform presented the latest version of its technology prototype. The game lets two players explore several virtual 3D environments populated by some interesting creatures. Zform's specially designed Audio User Interface (AUI) provides blind-accessiblity. This prototype uses the Quake engine for graphics, providing a solid graphical experience that attracted many players with sight at the conference. The game's networking allowed two players, regardless of sight, to play together. Our engineering team was proud to see how much sighted and blind attendees enjoyed playing the prototype. Attendees were generous in their praise and gave valuable suggestions on how to improve the prototype further. We'll be beta testing some Zform games in the coming months. If you are interested in being a beta-tester for Zform Games, join our newsletter.
There is also one feature of Marathon that no other game has ever reproduced (to my knowledge). The ability to design a map with any number of rooms sharing the exact same space. No, I'm not talking about one above the other (that's easy), but actually sharing the exact same 3d location.
Expecting the game industry to produce the Metaverse is like expecting Vince McMahon to produce Shakespeare in the Park--or like expecting Saddam Hussein to produce Tuck and Patty.
/.-ers will understand:
How can I explain the desperately venal internal industry reality to all you wide-eyed gamers with visions of super-frags dancing in your heads...
The game industry is to cyberpunk's vision of virtual life as Britney Spears is to The Beatles. Sorry, can't get there from here.
As for ActiveWorlds, Cybertown et al, pulEEZE. Might as well try to build warp drive out of toothpicks. Well-meaning but dead-end.
It *is* coming folks, but it takes more than T&L shaders, particle explosions, volumetric fog, antigrav breasts and steroid-pumped pecs. And it *certainly* takes more than the EQ/Ultima/Asheron/WWII's of the world have to offer.
It takes soul and artistry--and an understanding of human nature that goes beyond Pavlov and reinforcement schedules. You won't find that at EA/M$/The-Q. Nor at Hasbro/Saddam/The-Ferengi. Nor at Vivendi/Havas/The-Borg, which apparently just locked the entire Dynamix staff out of their offices and closed shop without the courtesy of advance notice, and without even letting employees clear their desks out.
Sure, their velvet Elvis's are painted with state-of-the-art brushes on the most expensive canvas money can buy propped on solid-gold easels, but they are still velvet Elvis's, and they will never be the Mona Lisa, no matter how many times they do an M & L.
Maybe I can put it in a way even
Expecting Tomorrow from the game industry is like expecting Linux from Microsoft.
Flout 'em and scout 'em,
and scout 'em and flout 'em;
Thought is free. - Shakespeare [The Tempest]
We figured games like Death Maze and Asylum were flukes. That they'd never catch on. We also figured the Infocom games -- Zork I and Deadline and Suspect -- would be the games that, over time, would last.
They were. I don't see any entire communities dedicated to keeping Death Maze and Asylum alive.
The good stuff endures. Unfortunately, it's been years since there was any "good stuff" available commercially in the interactive-fiction world.
At some point, that's likely to change.
Dahlmann tightly grips the knife, which he may have no idea how to use, and steps out into the plain.
> What I'd really like to see is a goal-free 3D
Sorry, I played Furcadia. While (cartoonishly) Isometric and not 3D at all, it's just a bunch of peeps sitting around on poofy throw pillows talking about how much they like each other.
Never did see any Omaha: The Cat Dancer type activities...
I am for the complete Trantorization of Earth.
If the women go there, the rest of the world will follow. Market a non-goal 3d virtual world to people who aren't playing Quake, not to the people who are.
First of all, no mention of Marathon. Didn't that game pioneer the ability to look up and down, rather than just side to side?
Secondly, Bungie has said (repeatedly) that Halo will be coming for the Mac--after the MSFT purchase, Bungie stood on the stage at a Macworld and declared that Halo was still planned for the Mac. It sure as hell had better be.
--
$tar -xvf
You've hit upon a cumbersome problem in computer software. Computer screens and user interfaces are (almost) all designed for 2 dimensions. It's incredibly difficult to add a third dimension. Some good engines have been around for a while to draw 3-d and move around it. But creating a user interface to allow you to modify the world is tricky. For now all 3-d design must be done with a 2-d interface (even a 3-d input device is rendered 2-d on the screen). The best example is CAD software. Traditionally you draw in 2-d, then render into 3. But that's cumbersome software with a decent learning curve. I have yet to see a *good* user interface for drawing a 3-d world that's relatively simple to use. If anyone knows of any, I'd love to see them...
Developers: We can use your help.
I was pleased to see he at least mentioned Descent (but what does he mean by "the gaming environment was even more restricted than that of Doom"?) which offered true 3D environments ages before Quake claimed to be the first to do so.
Descent did offer true 3D environments, but I think it's mistaken to argue that it's in Quake's technology class. My understanding is that Descent was heavily dependent on "1 room with tunnels" architecture, which was the limitation they were able to exploit to make 3D possible on a very low-end system. Quake was the first engine that offered true 3D with relatively few geometry limitations (obviously, certain geometry worked better than other geometry).
I think it's arguable whether DOOM or Descent was more limiting. Descent was true 3D, but you couldn't do "real" architecture. Doom could do relatively real places, but was limited to 2.5D maps (i.e., you had height, but no room-over-rooms) and 2D sprites.
This is not to knock on Descent, by the way, which was and is a great game and a solid technological achievement.
Tomb Raider was the hardware "killer application", not Quake.
I have to disagree, although it depends on how you define "killer application". Tomb Raider might have reached more people, but Quake has driven hardware development since day 1. Tomb Raider has never been about pushing the boundaries of hardware acceleration (they want mass-market appeal), but Quake engines have consistently pushed it.
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
I could be wrong but Everquest is pretty close to the snowcrash metaverse..it is basically a meeting place with a complex game built in.
-Never believe in the end of something great, send it to sub-committee for further study!!! - ME
Hasn't DirectX 7 and 8 surpassed the abilities of OpenGL? I was fairly sure the only way to get some of the features offered with hardware T&L was through vendor specific extensions, and even then some of the abilities to manage the swapping of textures to and from card memory were not available.
I know OpenGL is a nice cross platform API and may even be simpler, but I think DirectX is keeping pace with hardware a lot better than OpenGL.
(braces for flames but hopes for constructive criticism)...
Fear: When you see B8 00 4C CD 21 and know what it means
I know we all have our doubts about the historical relevance of this article, but I've got one massive issue with this.
If it were written by a professor seeking to gain some credibility with this, I highly doubt he would use the phrase, "... I'm not saying the game is going to be crap..." That seems like something a 7th grader would write.
Just my 2 cents.
Of that whole Ksh compliance bit between the microsoftie and the creator of KSH.....
;)
Hehe
I once started sketching out a simulation of a solar car racing game. You had to know enough about the science behind it to put together a working car, then race it, then collect money and buy more parts, etc... Just like many racing games, but with a huge educational element.
www.HearMySoulSpeak.com
This discussion seems to leave out a lot of interesting or important games and focus on just some popular 1st person shooters. There are many multiplayer 3d flying or space simulation games from the early Spasim ( http://www.geocities.com/jim_bowery/spasim.html ) through to today's Air War and World War 2 Online efforts. Shouldn't many real time strategy games be considered 3d multiplayer games, Homeworld for example. None of the 3d multiplayer role-playing games are discussed, even though they have much of the "different modes of interaction than firing big guns at everything" that the article wishes for (hacking everything with a sword, for example).
Even in the 1st person shooter area, it fails to discuss my favorites Rainbow 6 and Rogue Spear. Playing these is not at all like playing Quake with a different colored shirt, as the article suggests. The feel is very different; it is more like a hunting game, where you are both the predator and the prey (I won my most tense and exciting game by firing one (1) well placed shot) with no health packs or body armour that you can pick up to fix yourself.
The article is an interesting discussion of how id software has sold a lot of hardware upgrades; but it seems short on discussing new or different directions for 3d multiplayer games.
I think some form violence will be the main mode of interaction in most 3d multiplayer games for some time to come. Otherwise, why do you need the graphics? I can play an economic game like Railroad Tychoon in 2d just as easily as 3d. As for creating some sense of community; why do you need to generate complex 3d graphics for that when you have something better: language. Imagine how confusing and bandwidth intensive Slashdot would be if it were a 3d multiplayer non-goal oriented environment.
Right you are. And ActiveWorlds demonstrates that making your software "goal-free" reduces your "game" to a glorified chat room.
It's funny how writers like Stephenson and Greg Egan manage to grossly underestimate the difficultly of modeling physical reality. The best supercomputers in existence have to strain to model relatively simple events. You may balk at my referring to an atomic explosion as a "simple event", but it pales in comparison to the problem of determining the meteorological impact of that famous Chinese buttefly. Even if we take shortcuts (Stepenson suggests ignoring the inability two objects to occupy that same space), it will be a fair number of Moore cycles before we have a serious implementation of the Metaverse.
William Gibson got it right in Neuromancer when he assumed that the human ability to fill in the details would be a necessary part of an VR application.
Crappy article! Wolfenstein 3d? Marathon on Mac!!!
What lame article taht was.
marathon made Doom look as primitive as "Bible Hangman" or "Color Pong"
Marathon BSP could do angled floors and walls and ceilings.
And doom is preceded by Wolfenstein 3d for mac, Apple II gs, pc, NeXT, etc long before they finished Doom.
Wolfenstein 3d elped them make money to write Doom.
and Unreal Tournament on Mac and Halo "beta" on Mac are revolutionary in 3d technology.
This lame submitted article was written by a true newbie with little to no research or memory.
Yes I read the article anyways.
The good folks who did Warbirds have been developing World War II Online ( http://www.wwiionline.com ).
There will be goals in the sense of successfully performing missions, being able to control campaigns by being able to post missions for others, etc. but you can pretty much wander around and drive/fly continuously from west France to Belgium- until the Me109s find you....
If you try this game please note the stringent hardware requirements and that it's a bit buggy/laggy due to the absolutely breathtaking scope of what they're doing.
________________________________________ History Must Not Fall Into The Wrong Hands ___________________________________
There was a networked flight sim that ran on SGI boxes before that too. I first saw it back in 1986. It had flat-shaded polygons and you used the mouse to fly, but damn, back then it was the coolest thing. Can't remember the name though :(
Hey guys, the open source development model is the best there is isn't it? So what is stopping all you guys who want a "no goal" universe from simply getting together and DOING it?
Did this guy do any research? Or did he just start rattling whatever popped into his head that he remembered from the good ol' days as a grad student? Why ignore flight simulators - they had simplistic graphics, sure, but they first-person perspective and did 3D graphics. What about 3D first-person space sims, like Elite? And, of course, Wolf3D, which he completely omits.
This guy is a complete moron when it comes to the history of 3D FPS games. What's his PhD in, geology?
I'd love to see a first-person sports game built on an Unreal-type engine. Think of football, basketball, or soccer like that. It would REQUIRE a lot of folks to play but it would be way cool. It would be less fun for, say, the offensive lineman but hey it'd be true-to-life.
lowest average userid in any >4 post thread ever. Yes, even since when all the userids were that low.
but anyways, you forgot the multiplayer aspect. AFAIK that Mazegame wasn't multiplayer-able, as was Spectre (or was it? i think i have a copy somewhere, but multiplayer games on 1 pc were scarce. Networked multiplayer games were very scarce, especially on the "all-on-my-own" Mac's)
Bottom line: DOOM\Wolfenstein was probably the first 3D FPS multiplayer game for PC/Mac.
but as always, just my 2c...
This sig is intentionally left blank
Tribes was also a leap in terms of team based gameplay and its support for a large number of internet players. IMO, it should also have been covered in the article.
"But other than that the article was pretty much factually correct." ... from your perspective!
Some friends of mine did the same with our residential high school back in the old Doom days (lots of levels). We honored cool people with neat monsters and nice weapons in their rooms, uncool people were stupid monsters. The RA's were the big boss type monsters that one had to kill to move on. Quite seditious, now that I think about it. I wonder what some of the people riled up about school shootings would have thought.
(C) Kaki Sain, 2011. By reading this, you have illegally copied my property to your brain.
The future is now.
You should take a look at Red Faction. The game is already out for Playstation2, but a demo is out for PC aswell. It allows true random carnage to the worlds geometry, and it is something to behold. The most impressive part is how rocks collapse when the last support is blasted away.
The game itself looks and feels a bit like Half-Life, except it takes place on Mars, with the movie Total Recall as an obvious inspiration.
A witty
I believe you are referring to Ken's Labyrinth which was created before Wolf3D. For some reason tho, it didn't have the same impact as Wolf3D. (Probably that fact that Apogee was cool and Epic Megagames was not.)
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
If you could do any rectangular prism, all you would need is 1 for the top, one for the bottom, and one each for the four center sides:
_______
I |_| I
I |_| I
I_|_|_I
That's a top view of the center section - the top and bottom are single slabs. I hope Slashdot's fucking lameness filter doesn't reject this now that I've uglified it.
Network gaming with graphics goes back considerably further than the article suggests; in the mid-1970s the Plato system hosted a number of multiplayer games that exploited the downloadable "graphics font" capabilities of its monochrome terminals. Can't think of any first person POV examples, though.
The Xerox Alto also had a number of multiplayer games on its bitmapped monochrome display, including at least one first person POV shooter: mazewar.
I decided that behaving ethically was the most nihilistic thing I could do. - Paul Pavel
Its been around for at least 4-5 years already.
I thought we were boycotting Adobe!
You're using her as bait, Master!
Oh, and what about the networked 16-player Battletech Center that first opened in Chicago in 1990? 3D, 16 players, networked and built on modded consumer hardware (Macs and Amigas).
Tastes Like Chicken
There is an Open GL Version of Doom available, it is called "Doom Legacy" and available here.
It has impressive features like Chase cam (you see your player from behind) along with split-screen to deathmatch with a friend on the same computer.
Trolling using another account since 2005.
Just because something's in a PDF-file doesn't make it gospel. That "article" without references, is an inaccurate, piece of fluff with hardly any insight at all, and everyone here knows it.
Sheesh
A witty
Ah yes. Worldforge. The assholes who think they've patented the idea of a computer generated 3d world in which people are represented by avatars. Real cool buncha folks.
Metaverse? HAH! The metaverse is for SISSIES. You keep your little foofoo avatar playground Timmy. I want a DELIVERATOR so I can deliver pizza's in 20 minutes or less in *style*. That or I get whacked by the mob.
You can just make a map for Quake. I tried it once, to model my (now old) school. I got bored of adding classroom after classroom, though :)
It is tricky, though, because I don't know what shape the Quake model is, but his eyes are in the wrong place relative to his size or something; everything looked a bit disproportionate, however I scaled things.
Actually, Ken Thompson wrote a 3D game called Space Travel in the late '60s. Space Travel. It might not be the earliest 3D game but it must be close.
I think his statement about Counterstrike being released in 2000 is misleading. It was released as a separate product in 2000, but it was played for far longer than that as a public beta- I think the original public beta release was in early '99? Maybe even earlier. Also, I don't think Rainbow 6 and CS have much in common besides theme. The gameplay is very different.
why was this post given a 1?
The difference that a virtual world has from the real world is its malleability, the fact that creative possibilities are not restricted by physics and the economics thereof. The possibility of creating and then inhabiting just about any type of environment - dwelling in landscapes of pure imagination - is very compelling to me.
That was great, I was like 8 when my uncle gave me a three pack of those games for my Apple IIgs (special Woz edition). That was great, I think I mostly just played with the doodads from the other two games.
Definitely got you more into it, and gave you a better feel for it, since there where NO graphics.
man I wish text games....wait no...no I don't.
http://monkeyserver.com --- weeeeee
I play Quake...Heck, I even try to help develop it. But I would love to see a game without goals.
I recently became interested in Dungeons & Dragons(r), and I noticed in the Dungeon Master's Guide that a bad DM leads his players around by the nose to the goal. Unfortunately, this is what almost every game designer does. Any game that doesn't put a ring in the player's nose tends to be branded as a puzzle game, aimed at those "more brainy."
I would absolutely love to see a game that didn't have a goal, even if it was proclaimed "pointless" by the gamers' tabloids.
What's this Submit thingy do?
Well if we're going to use visceral intensity as a benchmark, I have to say that Croteam's Serious Sam made a huge leap in that. That game keeps my adrenaline pounding from the moment I start to the moment I stop.
Sure Doom popularized this, and was inredibly good at pumping adrenaline. But I don't think it really advanced the genre along. It was very fun, and I played an incredible amount of doom 2 LAN (which I thought was superior to doom 1 lan, but that's just me). But single player doom left me wanting something more. Sadly, most of the games that came out afterwards were pale "me-tos" rather than expanding the scope of FPS games like marathon did.
skye
there is also a very old 3d shooter from bungie, released in 1993, i believe. it was available only for macintosh. i think it has quite an interesting story line (well, it was the predecessor to the great marathon series). want to see screen shots? http://www.bungie.com/bin/slideshow_newsite.pl?dir =products/pid/screens&slide=2
bye
Yep, as far as I remember, it was.
What I'd really like to see is a goal-free 3D world like the Snowcrash Metaverse, but it will take games to get there ;)
Maybe it will take games to get there, but it will probably take some time. While you are waiting, perhaps you could try this game instead?
*** Where are we going? And what's with this handbasket?
WARNING:
.pdf file. However, if you want to print or save the article, go for the .pdf file, it's a much better option.
:-)
The above comment is wrong, the site is NOT slashdotted [yet]. Thanks for providing the Google text link, though - thereby relieving the server of serving the
Now back to our regularly scheduled karmawhoring activities
Alex T-B
St Andrews
I'm enjoying the game a great deal myself, Funcom has got a lot of the problems worked out but it was a pain to install. I don't know why they don't post this info on their website, my best guess is they only want the smartest people playing. Anyway, the patch program is all kinds of broken, this is how to install it:
Make sure that the Anarchy Online install directory is completely clean, there can't be any files in there before install.
Install the game but don't actually run it.
Download and install the most recent patch manually.
Now you can run it, the autopatch should work fine now.
Hope you can get it to work, as I said I think it's a pretty good game.
Short shrift to CTF as an example of team-based online games, for when deathmatch gets boring after 30 minutes?
Add-ons becoming a big feature of Quake 2 rather than Quake ("a room for spectators"?!?!?)
I am for the complete Trantorization of Earth.
As others have pointed out, this study ignores the incredible designs of warren spector. But it also ignores the insanely obsessive and incredible technological advances brought by Bungie. The marathon series was FPS taken to the level of an art form.
They used portal based map rendering (which draws only what you can see) which would be fantastic if adapted to "real" 3d engines. They had a cohesive story with imaginative characters a near psychopathic obsession with the number 7. They included speech over internet/modem/lan from their first game. That was an industry first! Never before did you opponent actually talk with you. Type, maybe, but talk? never. All this from a tiny company that made mac games in their basement.
Now, I understand the whole doom "culture" that exists on the web today. Especially after the ridiculous hype from columbine. But it wasn't a very revolutionary game, especially considering the ignorance of the aforementioned ultima underworld. it was barely a step up from Wolf 3d (which, when you get down to it, was really really repetitive and boring after the first chapter).
When he discusses where we are going with it he is going somewhere.. but its his grasp of the history (which seems like he just skimmed some "classic gaming" sites for) which is a tad flawed. Of course, I think that was already pointed out by a celebrity already.
skye
Didn't Faceball come out before Wolfenstein 3D?
If so, that would be the first first-person shooter.
Remember "Bring 'em on"? *sigh
I remeber games for mac SE that were networked via apple-talk . Net Trek was one and this maze game with a shoe was another... Long before doom and the 1990s..
/Aram
Wolfenstein 3D & Spear of Destiny were the first games I ever played which could really hold me out of bed at night. Those were the days! If I'm not mistaken Wolf3D was the first big hit from idSoftware. :-)
I still have the game ready-to-run on my 80486DX2. As long as those machines keep running, I'll have the software. My kid sister is now still playing those games. She doesn't play Quake or Half-Life, she's playing Spear of Destiny. Soon she will move on to Doom. You'll see... These games never die, they only age
StarTrek.org Free Webmail
Actually, I thought it up myself about 8 years ago as a .sig for my participation in an Objectivist mailing list. Didn't participate more than a couple of months as some of the participants were rather clueless about certain things. (Objectivist certainty gave them a false sense of certitude in non-philosophical areas, a dangerous thing.)
I am for the complete Trantorization of Earth.
Ah, okay, I see. After Origin cancelled UX and UO2, and everyone left, and Lord British burned all the design documentation in effigy, I made the reasonable assumption that there was just nothing left for them to work on.
What I'd really like to see is a goal-free 3D world like the Snowcrash Metaverse, but it will take games to get there
This is definately one thing that has never been, "build it and they will come." Multiple people have tried building 3D worlds and they end up sucking. The main problem is that if a game is goal free, what's the point of being there? The coolness factor wears off in time, and users go back to communicating to people using a single window rather than a full screen environment.
The most likely way something anywhere near the Metaverse will originate will be through the current massive online games. As these game companies expand their product lines, multiple games are going to join into a single multipurpose game engine. The games themselves will only become a part of the social experience you're buying, you'll be able to wander around the "waiting rooms" with your avatar and talk to people. Exciting.
So in conclusing, the beginnings of the Metaverse are already here. Sign up for your EQ account today and get in on the ground floor, I suspect Verant will be providing what you're looking for in 5 years.
Ok I'll bow to the greater knowledge of TRS-80 and PDP fans, but one incredibly playable first person game (note the title does NOT say "first person shooter") released somewhere around 1981-1982 what 3D Monster Maze on the Sinclair ZX81. It was followed by 3D Asteroids by the same company which _was_ a shooter, although I could never get the hang of it. I think the ZX81's graphics were just a little bit too clunky for something as detailed as 3D Asteroids needed to be. But 3D Monster Maze always misses out on these discussions, and was the first first-person game I ever played! Download an emulator and play it today!
if it was fskd it wouldn't have taken so long to download :^)
I used to have a cool sig, back when I cared
Nope, he is swedish...
"Wolfenstein 3D did not have textured celings or floors."
:)
It didn't? Dang...I seem to remember differently. It has, after all, been ten years since I played it.
You're half right. Wolf3D: Spears of Destiny had floor textures, IIRC.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
This seems to be a fairly prevalent mentality amongst 3d gamers and other techies, but it's not a very insightful comment to make. You would most definitely not like to see a Metaverse anytime soon, because there isn't anything you could do with one. All games are goal-driven, at least in some sense. Separating the time-tested design strategy of "Now You Do This" from the still relatively nascent "Look, Pretty Scenery!" takes away all the entertainment value from 3d environments.
People don't remember that Stephenson's Metaverse was supposed to be lightyears ahead of current technology, not just in terms of the graphical representations of objects and people, but in the input methods. Stephenson never actually explained how Hiro and his cohorts interfaced with the Metaverse and controlled their avatars, other than commenting that it was a relatively difficult thing to do. Until navigation and communication in 3d can be brought to a level that's nearly as natural to us as moving around and talking to people in the real world, 3d isn't going to be good for anything except for goal-based games.
Ha ha. He did the 3D graphics modeling, mmkay? And we're not suicidal, I'm still alive.
main(O){10<putchar(4^--O?77-(15&5128 >>4*O):10)&&main(2+O);}
Thanks for the clueful posts. Are you involved in any of the various projects trying to make this a reality? Give me an email, I'd love to chat about it.
Eric
Can your IM do this?
He misses the following:
- colony - continuouss 3d first person shooter for DOS - released around 1986 or 1987 or 1988 - no texturing
- Using quake, doom, unreal, etc. to generate 3d visualations of architectural designs for buildings by architects in order to show cliennts what the building looks like. (great idea!)
- Using quake, doom, etc to model real life buildings for emergency response training or pre-mission training. I remember seeing that the US military was using this to train for hostage rescue operations at a US embassy.
Having seen someone build things using Autocad, the 3d fps editors are much much better for less precise 3d modeling.
Might as well bring it down a bit more then....
Igor Presnyakov stole my hat
The first decent multiplater FPS was Doom. pure and simple. I lived for Wolf3D (because my computer couldn't run Doom at any decent rate) and SoD.
But why did I upgrade? To get to play Doom. (and X-wing, which was far better than Descent, which was only good if you played really cool dance music at the same time as playing).
I would just like to add, I happily played the demo of Tomb Raider, but I have never owned a full version....yech 3rd Person Shoot em ups are a down grade from 1st person, why they got popular is beyond me...are people that obsessed with seeing Lara's arse, or was it just the thrill of shooting dogs ala Wolf3d?
I wonder.
CounterStrike = 0ldSch00L game + new design. Its been a while since I last played games so I have not tried CounterStrike yet... but looking at it reminds me of Rainbow6 and ActionQuake.. CounterStrike was described as being "the new light on the horizon" in the PDF. I thought Rainbow6 deserved the credit so here it is... (it even came with a voiceComms add-on for teamplay..)
it would be possible to create something like that on a local area network. The only real limitation to making it global would be bandwidth. I mean it would just be a really really huge game level, with only a small part of it visibly at once. It wouldn't surprise me to see something like that in two or three years. Imagine being able to let 'your piece' do your aguring in the chat room over which level to play! Where do I sign up??
Maskirovka
Anyone used Active Worlds? When Circle of Fire Studios bought it, apparantly they were obsessed with Snow Crash. (and it IS a great book!) They made an attempt to make an RPG out of it in the COFMeta world (lovingly known as Metatropolis) but it never really happened. Now Meta is just a rotton chunk of hard drive that about 1 person a day visits (if that much)
Actually the big history of Metatropolis is a lob more involved than that, but this would require being off topic or something...
-J
"Software is like sex; it's better when it's free." -Linus Torvalds
Ultima Underworld was out a month before Wolfensteinstein 3D.
Although he left out System Shock, I was pleased to see he at least mentioned Descent (but what does he mean by "the gaming environment was even more restricted than that of Doom"?) which offered true 3D environments ages before Quake claimed to be the first to do so.
Tomb Raider was the hardware "killer application", not Quake.
System Shock, Duke Nukem 3D, Magic Carpet, and Dark Forces were single player hits before Unreal and Half-Life hit the market.
Starsiege: Tribes was multiplayer only and came out six months before Unreal Tournament or Quake 3 Arena.
Rainbow Six beat Counter-strike to the punch for coop play and realism.
But other than that the article was pretty much factually correct.
The technical and aesthetic portion of game development has certainly exploded over the past several years but what I see as still sorely lacking is good writing talent behind the games. I for one am wondering why it is so rare to find a game with some quality script behind it and associated actor talent.
I personally don't think I've seen a truly immersive virtual reality fps since Star Wars Dark Forces.. All that we have these days are poorly translated pieces of junk that offer great eye candy but very little time and talent spent on the story and characters.
Maybe I just haven't found the right game in awhile.. I admittedly only buy maybe 4-6 games a year, tops.
I find it irritating though to read reviews that give a game high marks and I go buy it and am bored to tears (PS2 Extermination)
--
$ chown -R us:us yourbase
Reading a bit further you would see that writes that dooms was not the first. Merly the first to do FPS well. That is another discussion though..
it seems like the "run from room to room" and "shoot stuff" motif has been done to death. a successful FPS needs a good nitch that it alone holds (until it's copied to death in the following months).
Max Payne is a great example: simple controls, basic story, but Bullet-Time kicks butt.
maybe we need new concepts instead of new technology?
_f
Surely Thief, by the defunct Looking Glass Studios, was worth a mention in the single-player experience. It's extremely tightly-driven by the story and extraordinarily immersive -- a phenomenon due much more to its amazing sound engine than to its mediocre renderer. Not only is it beside the point to kill the enemies, but depending on the difficulty setting you're actually not allowed to in most cases. Which is just as well because Garrett, the viewpoint character, is not very handy with a sword and can't afford all that much ammunition for his bow. Thief has no multiplayer capability at all, so the fan mission builders not only have to be adept at design but must be skilled storytellers too. For all that, there have been fan missions built that rival the quality of those in the original story. If you haven't played this game yet, you must check it out -- an its sequel too.
And the brethren went away edified.
Taking out one tree for example with one burst of cannon fire, or a whole building with a rocket or a Hellfire missile is a skill well worth practicing, in my 'umble opinion...
Tim
Apart from the multitude of grammatical and spelling errors, the document makes the interesting (and heretofore unconsidered) critical point that Black & White and the Sims are first-person shooters.
And as far as I'm aware, no one at id Software had any 4-year degree of any kind at the time Doom was released.
When someone criticizes the concept of academic tenure, the author of this document is exactly what they're talking about.
Hi John,
I submitted this as a story to Slashdot hoping you would comment, but they rejected it. :) And I hate to bug you with an e-mail.
But I was wondering what you thought of this technique that was written about in the LA Times. It sounds extremely interesting, particularly if it could be used for realistic rendering of skin. Too complex for a real-time game, e.g., DOOM?
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
If you're going to count Ultima as FPS (my experience being limited to II and IV), it seems that Wizardry was on the same level of sophistication--but that was more of a "wander around the maze, then switch into turn-based fighting" (not that there's anything wrong with that).
Come to think of it, though, there was a coin-op a LONG time ago that was an FPS featuring an innovation that if you rotated the joystick you would turn 90 degrees.
Does it seem strange that a "history" of 3D FPS not include games like "Wolfenstien" or even earlier?
No, you're wrong. "Spear of Destiny" (singular) most certainly did not have textured ceilings or floors.
Free Hans!
Yeah, it's quite a cool game but there's a major bug in the respawning code which kinda sucks.
A great semi-goal free game is Shinmu(sp?) for the Dreamcast. For the first few "weeks" of the game you are essentialy left to your own devices. Will you spend it training for fighting? buying stuff to play the lottery? feeding the kitten? playing the slot machine? getting roughed up by drunk sailors and hit on by drunk classmates? It's up to you.
TechTVs History of the First-Person Shooter
Blue's News FPS Guide and History
First Person Shooters
MediaPipes History of the First Person Shooter
3D Action Planets History of the FPS Shooter.
Also, here's a link to Spasism that claims to be the first First-Person Shooter 3D multiplayer networked game, circa 1974!.
If anything, you could say Doom was the first game to show that the PC could now be considered a serious games playing machine.
liB
There are several goal free "worlds" out there already. Some of the best are:h eronscall/default.asp
EverQuest - Http://www.everquest.com
Asheron's Call - http://www.http://www.microsoft.com/games/zone/as
Ultima Online - http://www.uo.com
And many, many more . . .
Of course, Ultima Oline is only pseudo-3D as I speak, and I am very dissatisfied with what has happened to that game over the years. Goal-less metauniverses are interesting, not only from a gaming point of view, but from an anthropologic standpoint as well. People in the games tend to exemplify the same characteristics as "real" human masses do. Even the sensless crimes are reflected in our games. You name the character trait, and I am willing to bet that it has a reflection in a persistant-state game (what was formerly called a metauniverse).
Man is born free; and everywhere he is in chains.
How about raising the stakes a little. Maybe electric shock, or registering yourself so that every time you get fragged, someone shows up at your door and punches you in the face! Only hardcore gamers would play then, thereby centeralizing, if not eliminating it. Can I sign up my ex and use her account?
Let's face that enabling wholesale environmental damage is a massive pain to the geometry. You'd need failure models with some randomization, and you'd need to recalculate things on the fly that map preparation tools now do off-line because things don't change. However, I think there are cheats possible to reduce the numbers somewhat- precompute a few failures in the the vicinity, throw some dust, and compute more while the dust is settling and the weapons recycle, perhaps. At some point near stasis is reached, and you can just fractalize the remaining rock and debris.
I want to be able to take a rocket launcher and reduce a building to rubble in Doom3/Quake4. I want a scored frag when the roof goes in on a sniper. Screw the personal combat and call in the firepower. Small arms are for people who can't afford artillery or CAS. Flatten trees and flora for fun, oh yeah.
-dB
"It if was easy to do, we'd find someone cheaper than you to do it."
Half-life didn't use the Quake2 engine like the article says. According to the Half-Life FAQ:
What Is Half-Life's Game Engine
Valve originally licensed the source for Quake engine from id Software and they began working on that code around October of 1996. Between October of 1996 till the time they finished Half-Life in October of 1998, they modified, removed, and created about 70% of their Half-Life coding. Not only did they got license for the Quake engine, but also got Quake II engine too.
IMO, every game since Quakeworld, using client-side prediction, suffers from a complete lack of realism as things warp around.
Quake, as much as you had to have a good connection if not broadband, was much more realistic. I'd like to see modern FPS games have Quake-like network code, at least as an option.
I am for the complete Trantorization of Earth.
There was this game a long time ago by Bethesda called Daggerfall, that had a very large universe that had no real goals what-so-ever. The world was incredibly large (we're talking about wandering outdoors for hours between towns, and none was randomly generated!) The NPCs and town members were all created in such a detailed manner (with agendas and what not) and it still had the best "real-world" type experience I have ever seen. It was online, without being online.
I still remember being branded a criminal, riding on my horse to a town which ports it's fort gates up at night. I remember getting off my horse, looking around, scaling the wall... listening for guards, sneaking up behind them, knocking them out, and then climbing down into the town from the fort walls, and breaking into a house to find a bed to sleep at night. Now that was incredible.
It's a shame the 3D engine sucked... but they are making a new one with a new engine, that is going to be incredible. Daggerfall took over three years to make, and this one seems to be taking longer! I can't wait!
Point me to sourceforge!!! I'll contribute.
Doom, the beginning?
Ehhhh, that isn't the first FPS, or even the first wildly popular FPS. There's a little game called Wolf 3D, see? It wasn't some archaic thing, every nerd at that time got it and played it.
I am for the complete Trantorization of Earth.
Anyone play 911????
First "inovation" I've seen in FPSs in ages.
how soon until it finds the home market?
I agree, a goal free universe would rock. But the thing is, people are so used to violence in games that it would take a MAJOR company releasing a MAJOR kick ass game to even get people to take a second look at it. IMHO.
... here. (Boy, that was slashdotted fast.)
Stupid job ads, weird spam, occasional insight at
1. The article states that DOOM was the first 3D first-person shooter.
No, Id's previous work, Wolfenstein 3D, was the first real 3D "you may get motion sickness playing this game" shooter. Also, he ignores games in non-FPS genres that really pushed the 3D envelope from that period, such as Falcon 3.0.
2. "[DOOM] was designed by talented people with good skills and academic degrees in computer science."
John Carmack has a CS degree? News to me -- I thought he dropped out of college.
3. "It was the first 3D game to have textures on everything on the screen, and that made a huge difference for the atmosphere and the mood of the game."
See Wolfenstein 3D.
Well, there's probably more, but that's what I see in the first section. Anyone spot others?
This paper would have benefitted from some sort of peer review...
Once you get to the upper difficulty levels of the game (particularly the 00 Agent level) It's much more about accomplishing the objectives assigned you than killing everyone you see. Most of the time, you must avoid confrontation at all costs, and/or kill without making noise i.e. with your fists. This makes it very exciting and challenging, although only once; once you compelte a level, you don't ususally play it over and over (unlike diablo :)). This franchise is the essentially the ONLY fps game I enjoy, due to this more cerebral nature.
Of course, it includes "football" and the other variations, such as ctf for multiplayer, so it's not *that* different from what's come before.
jaz
Death to Argument by Slogan!! (This post twice-encrypted with ROT-13. Replies not using same will be ignored)
I don't want to play a game where I have to go to work and make money to feed my family :)
The Sims is selling quite well though :)
One day a boy comes home from school and says, "dad i need to know the meaning of hypothetically and realisticly for school." So the father replies, "go ask your mother if she would sleep with a man for 1 million dollars." so the little boy go's and asks and sure enough she says yes. his dad says ok now go ask your sister if she would sleep with a man for a million dollars. so he does and sure enough she says yes. so the father says, you see son hypothetically we are sittig on 2 million dollars but realisticly we are living with a couple of whores."
Maybe it's just a problem with my system, but the soundtrack in your divx demo was VERY annoying. A loud burst of static interrupted the dialog about once a second.
hell yeah! whatever happened to that game?
network games in that were legendary.
skye
A goal-free virtual universe would at best be a novelty and a fad for a few moments.
Is what he said about Direct3D not being as scaliable as OpenGL true? and if so, why so. Is it because in OpenGL any hardware vendor can implement their own extensions to OpenGL and directX the apis are totatly controlled by MS? Or is there a more technical reason that has to do with the way that the API works. I've read a lot about both APIs but haven't actually programmed with them. If anyone knows the answer I'd like to know
He probably left it out kuz it's such a lame piece of nerd shit.
Any other /.ers notice this? Any chance of 3D-ifying it? From there it'll only be a matter of time before technology catches up (things like realistic facial expressions, VoN, and full gesture recognition)
I am disrespectful to dirt! Can you see that I am serious?!
Are you nuts?
AO = CRAP
Not one person I know who bought this game still plays it.
get halflife. go to countermap.counter-strike.net and get worldcraft and wally. you'll be mapping in ten minutes. it's really not very hard at all.
What I'd like to see is an easier way to make use of the 3-D engines for things like office/home walkthroughs and the like. I've looked into this in the past, but never found anything that was all that easy to use. We're currently building a home (well, a builder is) (well, they haven't finished the sewers yet, so they're not actually *building* our house yet, anyway), and the 3-D home design software we bought to help us visualize the interior of the home is, well, cumbersome. And the walkthroughs are horrible.
Why can't I find a quake/doom/whatever engine with a simple Visio-like front-end, so I can program in a whole house? Or office building? Or my neighborhood? (that'd look great on the web page...)
Origin is a wholy-owned subsidiary of Electronic Arts (EA.) Another EA division is making the Snow Crash game. They just happen to be located in the same building as the Origin folks. All that Origin is responsible for these days (AFAIK) is Ultima Online.
Nothing for 6-digit uids?
Of course, an alternate theory is that we, at heart, are a destructive bunch. The goal of Diablo wasn't to kill your fellow players, yet it happened nonetheless.
Lastly, as someone once said "The reason movies don't depict realistic situations is because people don't go to the movies to see what they could see outside their window every day." Same applies to games, I would think -- I don't want to play a game where I have to go to work and make money to feed my family. :)
www.HearMySoulSpeak.com
A good point, there were a number of first-person games for the Apple II, II+, IIc, IIe; many predate his history.
--- Will in Seattle - What are you doing to fight the War?
A couple comments:
I remember at least one 3-D game for the C-64, can't remember the name but it was a futuristic tank game with all of the objects made of vectors. No texture mapping, but it was 3-D, as was a Star Wars game made somewhat later that was similar to the old Star Wars arcade.
Also, does anyone remember Wishbringer? It was one of the Infocom text adventures that came with a glow in the dark plastic pebble that represented the Wishbringer stone from the game. What was so neat about this was that it was not your typical greenish yellow glow, it was electric blue instead. Okay, just my tuppence.
This is a great game, yet it receives no mention
My other sig is extremely clever...
Don't quote me, but it's my understanding SOD was a game-engine sequal (used the same engine) to Wolf 3D, and that there was one game prior to Wolf 3D, but was that the same company again?
These broke the mold from the static 3D where you would move square-by-square, jumping 10 feet at a time ala AD&D and the game would draw the hallway in front of you.
I am for the complete Trantorization of Earth.
is to see who can drive the most traffic to a random PDF on the professor's website.
A+ for a slashdotting.
--
E_NOSIG
Wolf3D came out my senior year of HS. Freshman year of college my friend was playing this very similar game, but with crappy CGA/EGA graphics. Instead of seeing a gun that would shoot, it showed a hand (of a wizard) from which fireballs would shoot out.
YOu'd run around these dungeons, scrolling just like Doom did (except for 4/16 color graphics). I think you had to collect different color keys to open different color doors, or something.
Do you know what game this was?
There's nothing left at Origin. How could they possibly have the resources to do this correctly?
By Lucasfilm. Groovy fractal graphics.
What I would like to see is a way to interlink computers with 3D worlds in a similar way to the web. Any person who wants could run a server, with whatever restrictions they want (such as limiting who could build (possibly just to themselves) and how much) and whatever content they want. The equivalent of a link would be a door or similar portal. You could wander the web visually, picking up whatever objects (games, files, docs, etc) that suited you, examining them in place (no download that way) and the like. As long as the graphics primitives were stored on the client, then all you would have to download in the arrangement of the primitives and the locations of various people and objects. Your system would then render the images, and you could interact appropriately.
Of course, it would really suck if your connection dropped, and your avatar were doomed to wander the web with 404 (the number of the iBeast?) tattood to its forehead.
-jeff
-- Two men say they're Jesus. One of them must be wrong. - Dire Straits
>The main problem is that if a game is goal free, what's the point of being there?
So why do people play sim-style or MMPRGP games then? Both really don't have "goals" aside from the ones the players impose on themselves (collect phat loot, maximize my city income & size, level up, etc)
i.e You don't / can't win these style of games, because they intentional don't have any conditions to "win"
Any examples of games with absolutely 100% no goals?
A husband, tired of his wife asking him how she looks, buys her a full length mIirror. This does little to help, as now she just stands in front of the mirror, looking at herself, asking him how she looks. One day, fresh out of the shower, She is yet again in front of the mirror, now complaining that her breasts are too small. Uncharacteristically, the husband comes up with a suggestion. "If you want your breasts to grow, then every day take a piece of toilet paper, and rub it between your breasts for a few seconds." Willing to try anything, the wife fetches a piece of toilet paper, and stands in front of the mirror, rubbing it between her breasts. "How long will this take?" she asks. "They'll grow larger over a period of years," he replies. The wife stops. "Why do you think rubbing a piece of toilet paper between my breasts every day will make my breasts grow over the years?" The husband shrugs. "Why not, it worked for your ass, didn't it?"
This guy also fails to mention that the original Team Fortress was a Quake mod, and then Team Fortress Classic was immensely popular throughout it's release with Half-Life.
be realistic
> THe very first first-person game I ever played was a Fp version of Pac-Man. It was all vecter lines and it ran on an IBM PC/XT with a GCA card. That was about six years before DOOM came out.
:-(
... )
Hey! I remember that too. I can't remember what it was called though
Ever play Sopwith? Shamus was cool too. (Never did the dang thing mapped out. That reminds me, time to finish off GemStone Warrior some day
I couldn't decide who to reply to, so this is to everyone else who commented.
HE'S A PROFESSOR, NOT A GAMER. DA-YAM, give the man a break.
~LoudMusic
No sig for you. YOU GET NO SIG!
and a much more fun mode called deathmatch
Euh... Honestly, we had much more fun in cooperative mode than in deathmatch. Walking around in the darkness, trying to find the last monster... You see something move, you shoot, he shoots, you look at the person on the other side of the room, shout "woops, sorry!" and continue your quest for the last monster.
I tried a game of counterstrike last month and honestly it sucked. People waiting in pre-located spots, waiting for something to move and shoot it with their sniper-gun. Well that's great fun. Not.
Edwin
bash$
Agreed!
Now when you open a game box you think yourself lucky just to find a Playable Game inside of it!
Max Payne was an exception though. it came with a cool mousepad. Gameplay was great too.
My wife works at Origin Austin. According to her, another division in the company (actually an EA division) is working on a Snowcrash based MMORPG. FWIW, YMMV.
I would love to play it, bought it on the day it was possible to buy it.
I have tried it on two computers, one win98+static ip and one win2k+dhcp. It don't work on either of them.
No patches helps.
:-(
Quick thought, definately not air tight:
...
.. if we can invent any kind of ball, on any kind of field, with any kind of rules, why don't we see new sports being invented weekly? Certainly that would be more interesting? I say no; I think Q3 and UT are the 'equipment and vanue' to play Deathmatch (or arena, or ctf, or what have you). Sure, other games are sure to come along with their own unique and new concepts, but these online games are only as good as their popularity, community, and support (read: variety in competition), so it's likewise important that we dont try and re-invent the sport with every new game lest we drive off the community into more fractions that it already is. (And I should know .. I stuck around Quake 1 TF for 4 years, simply because nobody could 'copy' the game well enough using the current crop of games.) I think it's time to admit that videogames can easily have a playability of over 5 years .. while many people switch and update for the eyecandy, the real gamers value the subtle details like the physics and gameplay, and arn't neccessarily drooling for a whole new way of playing.
I thought it was interesting hearing him compare the current Q3 and UT type games as being basically the same. He says "the current state of 3D gaming is like a world where no one invented anything but football, and the only difference is what color jersey you wear [paraphrase]"
That maybe so, but football has been around for ages, and people still play it. Everyone knows the rules, and has a general idea of how to play with other people, etc
Nobody wants to learn a Whole New Game or Whole New Sport (especially after dropping 70 bucks for it), so I liken the online deathmatch community to the sports world
"Old man yells at systemd"
There already IS a goal-free 3D world implemented.
It's called Real Life, features astonishing graphics and sound and is freely accessible for anyone just by entering that big blue room with that hovering nuclear fire ball thingy.
I think that the article author is speaking of a more open-ended 3D FPS environment as opposed to one that is truly goal-less. However, considering the possibilities it may not be a totally useless goal.
The open-ended environment model has been tried in terms of cyber-haunts for people to run around in avatars and chat it up. Yet, there is the whole Snow Crash possibility of a true 3D internet multiverse model that could make gaming, interacting and trading files very interesting and with the spread of larger bandwidth options might actually breath some life into the wheezing sickness of the new economy.
Still, I believe the first step will have to be to establish open ended story driven 3D FPS style games like an expanded version of Half-Life with a professional writing staff from perhaps a traditional playwright or script writing background.
The immersive qualities of the FPS have been overshadowed by the twitch driven instant gratification qualities of the arena environment that has dominated its base. The story has a good point. They could be so much more.
ACK
The Descent engine allowed you to use '5d space'.
I got addicted to Hardwar (playing contstantly) for that exact reason. It was one of the few games (Descent like), 3d environment, where you basically fly around, trade stuff if you want, or just go after people to make money and survive; but the basic point of the game is basically how long can you survive in this harsh world? Pretty awesome if you ask me.. there IS supposedly some plot (I've never played long enough to get anywhere). Its one life only, but seems like you don't have to follow any plot (be a good guy, bad guy, whatever). Its fun to just watch the other NPCs play too (over a hundred NPC's atleast flying around, playing the entire game with you). http://www.softwarerefinery.com
Marathon also brought in the concept of more than one firing mode (rather wierd, when you consider it was for a one button mouse system, originally), and I believe they were the first that I know of to handle 8 player games. And yes, the sound support was amazing, but much of that could be attributed to the Mac more than the game, although the voice communication stuff was a nice concept that didn't take off in other games 'till years later.
I'm also suprised that Duke 3d was left out. Although it was released just before Quake (but after the Quake demo), it had two features that weren't in the other games of the time -- single player plot (Quake was okay once through, but then only useful if you were on a LAN). The other feature was toys. Duke had 'em. Most other games, you had ammo, weapons, armour, keys and health. Duke let you collect up things to play with. [Like the HoloDuke distraction sitting in the field of pipe bombs]. Other side benefits were 8 player support, and people could drop out [but not enter] as needed.
There's no mention of id's earlier work with Wolf3D, which of course, paved the way for Doom and Doom II. [Most people you'll find are thinking about Doom II when they mention Doom].
He also doesn't go into the failings of Quake -- QuakeWorld was spawned because they realized that it was simply too bandwidth intensive, and you needed better connectivity than a modem, as it was so latency dependant. [Yes, it didn't mess up everyone else, but you got screwed]. It did, however, support 16 players concurrently [although most people were running alternate IP stacks in the good ol' DOS days, and so, Springfield at Nite [Clan No Homers], would only accept 8 connections via IP, and the remaining 8 would have to be through IPX. [Which was nice, as it'd mean an assured 8 slots of those of us local people].
blah...I'm going off on a tangent....
Well, you get the idea...it's a nice starting point for a history, but he left off way too much.
[I know I'm leaving off a few things, as there were games I never played, but was just told about... um...the first game that left bullet scars in the world [ie, walls poxed, etc.], and otherwise let you interact with objects....wish I could remember what it was called].
Build it, and they will come^Hplain.
What makes this game different is (along with the developers actually polling users about their preferences and building them into the game) the amount of attention they are paying to non-gamers. Current discussion threads have centered around making the universe more interesting to females (who typically are a bit more mature and tire of the repetitive womp-rat hunting to gain experience), and others who want a more robust universe to navigate.
There are entire skill trees and abilities planned for dancing, weaving, makeovers (hair coloration/clothing disguise), house building/layout, mining, merchant abilites (owning a store, trading stocks, industrial espionage), politics (mayor of your city/county/planets/galaxy), etc.
As soon as these games hit a certain critical mass, they'll start defining the future of the Net -- where users can move, and dance, and react, and display realistic facial animations. I'm hooked already.
-Hell hath no fury like that of a woman scorned for
i'm sorry but whatever games do to your brain
it's not as bad as 30 years working at a dead-end job with no hope for the future but retirement
and death
The more hostile comments are an indication that some people read the text with totally wrong expectations. An updated version will be posted on the referred web site tomorrow. Some minor errors were corrected (thanks for the comments on this), but most notably a disclaimer was added to put it back into context.
I do have a PhD in computer graphics, but please note that not everything I write for my students on every subject is necessarily of top-notch research quality. This was just a brief and shallow introduction to a subject where I felt resonably confident to speak in a local context, aimed at people with little or no previous experience. When I want international attention, I stick to my areas of scientific expertise. This was a very much less ambitious text, meant for a local audience of 100 students, written in a very short time to document one lecture in one of the many courses I taught last year.
The student responsible for the posting only meant well, but I would not have recommended this article for Slashdot fame without some editing, like the editing I just performed. As I said, the link will point to an updated version tomorrow.
Thanks to those who commented, pointed out some errors and had constructive criticism. To the others, well, I guess the article just wasn't for you. I won't try to please everyone.
Stefan Gustavson