Slashdot Mirror
Hurt Me Plenty - Remembering Doom
Thanks to TotalGames.net for reprinting a GamesTM article remembering the genius of id Software's seminal PC FPS, Doom. The article starts with the question: "How many of the lodestones of modern gaming do we owe to Doom?", and continues by arguing: "Without Doom conceiving the multiplayer deathmatch, it could be radically touted that the PC today would be an abandoned platform insofar as gaming is concerned." The piece finishes with comments on Doom 3: "While tradition alone will endear Doom 3 to many, the long-anticipated game may yet fail to make the evolving grade it was fundamental in establishing. Let it be said that the gaming world is nothing if not perverse."
Actually, IIRC, it was Star Wars: Dark Forces that first introduced the three dimensional aiming. I remember an ad that ran in some gaming magazines when it was released. It was a simple screenshot showing your crosshairs aiming at a stormtrooper's head. The tag line went something like: We've added a new dimension to gaming.
Xenon, where's my money? -Borno
via Zdaemon its a blast even after all these years Doom is still the king of FPS even after all these years.
Where do you get that? several years, 2 addon packs, and hundreds of player-developed quests and mods later and I still play it today. Not to mention it runs, looks and plays better on PC.
That game is several years old, and the fan community is still developing new and interesting things for it, and begging for more addons from Bethesda. I really doubt that the popularity for the non-expandable console version is as heavy.
Good game all around though, and glad that it's just as successful on console as it is on PC.
I was messing around with downloading old Atari ST games for an emulator recently, and was somewhat surprised to discover some very old first-person shooters.
Infestation, released by Psygnosis in 1990. Completely 3D, with flat-shaded polygons used for the world and for monsters. Seems bloody difficult, though - either that or the version I downloaded is broken, killing the player within a minute or so. From screenshots I've seen, it appears to go indoors as well, in full 3D again.
Castle Master, released by Domark in 1990. Again, completely 3D with flat-shaded polygons. Not really a shooter, more of a puzzle game, but still has that first-person viewpoint. Unlike, say, Doom and Wolfenstein 3D, you can look up and down...
Robocop 3, released by Ocean in 1992. Mainly driving, but I was really impressed to see a first-person shooter mission thing. Fully 3D with flat-shaded polygons (yet again), the enemies are effectively polygon billboards which, while they're very simple, look surprisingly realistic. Complete with Robocop-style green squares locking on to said enemies, and hostages you mustn't shoot. Way better than the film, although that's not difficult.
There's probably a load more games like this. A bit of an evolutionary dead-end, maybe, but id Software didn't pioneer the FPS game. They definitely popularised it, though.
Since few of you are/where Mac gamers. In 1984 Bungie released Marathon. This very very early precusor to Halo, introduced so many things to the FPS genre. Many features on this mac game took years to come out on the PC. 8 person network play. Dynamic lighting. True 3d aiming unlike Quake, (not first implemented in Dark Forces as previously mentioned.) Decent AI in monsters. Fully mod-able from textures, models, maps, sound, storyline, and physics, either by resource haxs or Bungie supplied editors. These games are still being moded and even have been ported to linux/unix with upgraded graphics. 8 player networked games had many modes, from kill the man with the ball, king of the hill, tag, Free-for all, and team versions of all of the above. Any fps player that ever played 1 of the 3 Marathon games will tell you how amazing the storyline and map design was. Marathon featured a very in-depth story that IMHO has not been bettered, with maps that had puzzels or different variables to break up the kill rinse repeat cycle found in so many other early FPS's. Where was Doom compared to all of this?
Bungie gets little respect in its role as a pioneer in FPS's as Pathways into Darkness was released at almost the same time as Wolf 3d.
---In a time of Chimpanzees I was a Monkey.
Ok that should read 1994... not 84 I am a tard. and the true 3d aiming should not read Quake... Mental note no more slashdoting after 2am.
---In a time of Chimpanzees I was a Monkey.
Actually, Doom3 has been *engineered* to run on a PC, then ported to Xbox. Also, Doom3 has one MAJOR advantage (at least for the Slashdot crown) and that is that, unlike Far Cry, it will run on Linux.
Unless they're referring to Wolfenstein 3D, which uses raycasting, this is wrong. Doom doesn't use raycasting, it renders by recursively walking a precalculated binary space partition tree
Simplified (I won't provide a detailed explanation because I don't know it), the BSP tree is, as the name implies, a binary tree that partitions space. The level is partitioned recursively so that the root of the tree is the entire map, each node divides the parent node in two parts, and the leafs are convex subsectors which don't need to be divided further.
Determining what to render is then done by walking the tree recursively, starting from the root. The clever thing here is the occlusion: if the bounding box of a node is outside the field of view, it can be ditched, along with all of its children.
A node can also be ignored, along with its children, if its bounding box is fully occluded by nodes that have already been drawn. Since the child node closest to the camera is drawn first at each branch, close objects are generally drawn before far-away ones, efficiently allowing things out-of-sight to be occluded.
BSP rendering is not only fast but also elegant in its simple algorithmic setup. It has the disadvantage, however, that the tree has to be precalculated. This means walls can't move during the game, as the BSP tree would have to be recalculated continuously. Doom's BSP is two-dimensional, though, so it is still possible for floors and ceilings to move up and down.
Wolfenstein is able to do raycasting efficiently because all walls are aligned to a perpendicular grid; the same technique wouldn't work as well with the arbitrary geometry Doom allows, at least it wasn't possible with 1993's hardware.
And for the record, neither raycasting nor BSP were Carmack's revolutionary ideas, though he might have been the first to use BSP in a game - I'm not sure.
I've seen so many posts get this wrong that I had to step in. The first 3D engine that used all three planes in game play was Ultima Underworld in 1992.