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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 ;)
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
- 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.
>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
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 ___________________________________
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.
... here. (Boy, that was slashdotted fast.)
Stupid job ads, weird spam, occasional insight at
Or, if you're into this free software thing, you might want to check out Verse. It's not quite there yet, but we do have a nice trick or two that ActiveWorlds can't match... If you have a DiVX-codec and bandwidth to burn, check out our showreel. It's pretty nifty.
main(O){10<putchar(4^--O?77-(15&5128 >>4*O):10)&&main(2+O);}