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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 ;)
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.....
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
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.
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 predict Verse will make it before anyone else. It features noodity :P
***JUMP PAD ACTIVATION INITIATION START***
***TRANSPORT WHEN READY***
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
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
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 ?
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.
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.
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..
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?
--------
Bleah! Heh heh heh... BLEAH BLEAH!!! Ha ha ha ha...
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!!!
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
I find the prominent Adam's Apple on that ``woman'' rather, er, disturbing...
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.
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.
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?
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
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.
Oops. The number I quoted is for a column in the middle of a room. 26 is right.
- 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.
... 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
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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 ___________________________________
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?
Its been around for at least 4-5 years already.
I thought we were boycotting Adobe!
You're using her as bait, Master!
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.
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.
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 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
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
Yeah, it's quite a cool game but there's a major bug in the respawning code which kinda sucks.
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.
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."
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!
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.
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...
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...)
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
is to see who can drive the most traffic to a random PDF on the professor's website.
A+ for a slashdotting.
--
E_NOSIG
>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?
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"
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
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.