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."
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.
By that first line it sounds as if Doom 1 was REVOLUTIONARY (and it was to be honest). However Doom 3 will probably be evolutionary and does not attempt to be revolutionary as Doom 1 was. When you look at it that way, Doom 1 managed to strike the right balance of singleplayer action and increable multiplayer action. Doom 3 simply attempts to return to the days of bloodpumping, 'not sure if the next room will hold some horrible monster that will use up half your ammo' singleplayer action, and four player 'run for your frikin life because someone got the BFG before you' multiplayer action.
Yeah, right. Wolfie 3D was also a seminal moment in PC gaming, and made a *huge* impact on the entire industry. Doom was a major improvement, yes, but Doom couldn't have been made without Wolfenstein 3D. Multiplayer? No, W3D didn't have it, but all this means is that, had Doom not been made, all FPSs on the computer would be single player - maybe.
The development of the FPS on the comp has been linear, not arriving with Doom and being incrementally improved with subsequent iteration. Wolf 3d was the first major FPS (if not first in the first place; anyone remember when Marathon for the Mac was published?). Doom added better graphics and height (stairs!) as well as multiplayer. Duke 3d added shooting on the Y plane and not just X and Z, not to mention weapons that were more interesting than plain miniguns or rocket launchers (shrink ray, land mine, etc.) Quake I, II, UT... each had significant changes in gameplay, graphics, and capabilities - the shift from Quake 2 to 3 was huge, turning what was once a SP genre with a multi addon to a primarily multi game. If *any* game(s) cemented the shift from SP to MP, and help keep PC gaming alive today, I'd say it was UT and/or Q3, *not* Doom.
Condemnant quod non intellegunt.
RtS games? The Sims? Civilization? Heck, SimCity did come out before Doom, after all. Notice the general lack of pure Adventure games on consoles? Notice the difference between computer RPGs and console RPGs?
Maybe I'm biased since I'm one of those rare cases that never got into Doom in the first place, but it wasn't the original first person shooter, and heck, from all I hear it's not the original deathmatch either!
Do you seriously think that if deathmatches had been invented on consoles (and they may well have been--see above link) that they would not be transferred to PC with online and LAN capabilities, quickly becomming more popular than the corresponding console equivalents?
Though yes, I'll agree that Doom deserves credit for popularizing it...the same way FF7 deserves credit for making RPGs more mainstream than niche.
It's a bit much to say that without deathmatch, the PC may be a dead platform. RTS is a genre as equally powerful as FPS (or at least it was back in the late 90's).
Doom was a classic. The reason I jumped to PC gaming. Can't say Doom 3 interests me in the slightest. Too little, too late.
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.
Sure, it was one of the first popular multiplayer deathmatch games for PC, but Doom didn't invent the multiplayer deathmatch idea.
I'm pretty sure that MIDI Maze & Faceball 2000 can claim the FPS multiplayer deathmatch credit for home gaming. It came out in 1987 and you actually used MIDI cables to create a ring network of up to 16 machines. Faceball followed in the same vein for the Game Boy (up to 4 players plus drones) and Game Gear (2 players plus drones). The ST game became quite a cult classic at user group meetings.
LAN parties before LANs! Yee ha. MIDI cables in the 80's. Where there's an FPS deathmatch will, there's a way...
It was the gameplay in general that made DooM so revolutionary, from the 2D map/3D game environment, primitive but effective lighting, and the other evolutions and revolutions in the engine.
Then we have the way that the game was designed artistically - the quality of audio, textures, monster designs was superior to anything on the market.
Then we have the gameplay - not just multiplayer, but with a wide array of weapons including the almighty BFG that all other megaweapons follow meekly after, and the chainsaw for hacking up evil monsters. What's not to like?
But these things have all been done before. DooM3 will carry none of these revolutions - Far Cry has already hit the market before DooM3 and HL2 are even "ready". DooM will have a hard time improving on the state-of-the-art graphics of Far Cry. Physics engine, audio... Will DooM3 even let you drive vehicles as you can in Far Cry? I can't imagine boats or buggies or even the awesome hanglider having a place in DooM3.
DooM3 will sell well, of course, because of the hype, and because of the brand name. But I think it has become too little, too late. Fary Cry does all of the "revolutionary" things that DooM3 has been claiming it will do for years. And DooM3 has one handicap that Far Cry doesn't... DooM3 has been engineered to run on XBox, with all the weaknesses of the underpowered console pedigree to carry like a chain around its neck.
I am government man, come from the government. The government has sent me. -- G.I.R.
If it doesn't "make the grade", it will be because engine technology is no longer important. A large part of Doom's success was due to the fact that there was really nothing else like it at the time; this won't be true of Doom 3. id's content department is nothing to sneeze at, but they've been outdone before (Unreal Tournament vs Quake 3, for instance), and they won't be leagues ahead of everyone else like they were with, say, 3D models in Quake.
Back in the 1995, the Usenet group boulder.general had some bozo who kept asking who the "Administrator" of this Usenet Group was (for those that don't know, there is none!) ... so a couple of us kept speaking up and jacking him around by saying we were ... but then (in typical Uselessnet fashion), there was a a big discussion about how come WE were the administrators, and how it should be decided ... it was all light-hearted.
We talked about settling with Rock Paper Scissors (aka RoShamBo) ... but we decided the best way was a DOOM deathmatch ... and thanx to Google, I actually found a web page that documents the DOOM Deathmatch to determine who is the Administrator of boulder.general ;-)
I also found a Usenet thread courtesy of Google Groups Note that we played on Pentium 90 MHz machine - was pretty state-of-the-art back then! ;-)
Hulk SMASH Celiac Disease
via Zdaemon its a blast even after all these years Doom is still the king of FPS even after all these years.
Doom was not first computer game. Doom was not first FPS. Doom was not first multiplayer game.
That's not the point.
When Doom was released everyone realized obvious things:
- you need fast video card (it was _before_ 3D accelerators!!!), after change from low-end VGA into high-end VGA you could clearly see why it's better
- you need sound card! before doom sound card was just "bonus" for rich players, but can you imagine playing doom without sound? if yes, then you don't know doom at all
- you need fast CPU _only_ for game, and there is no limit - just faster means more fps
Doom was game which started "hardware run".
Maybe you haven't noticed, but there is huge set of missions, graphics, sounds, etc... for Doom. It never happen before Doom. No game had so much contrib stuff. I had whole CD-ROM of that. Whole game was just few MB, CD-ROM had more than 600MB data. It's like 200 CD-ROMs of Civ3 missions.
Thanks to Doom players community changed. Players are important now. There is hardware made only for games (not just joysticks!), mission editor is stardard, there is always downloadable stuff for each popular game, there are servers working only as game servers, there is whole industry around. Was it really same before Doom? Compare budget of standard Atari game from 80s with any game today. And Doom was just milestone.
Early versions of Doom (Up to 1.6) you could enter the three commands below
Machine #1 : doom -devparm -nodes 3 -left
Machine #2 : doom -devparm -nodes 3
Machine #3 : doom -devparm -nodes 3 -right
and you'd have your main machine as the front screen, and the other two showing the left and right side, for a 270 degree wrap around mode
I actually got it working one night at a LAN, but couldn't 'unlock' my play style enough to use it effectivly.
Now you have video cards like the Matrox Parhelia-512 that do the same thing onboard, a mere 11 years later.
Wolfenstein wasn't the first of this genre either, I can remember playing Minotaur (Sorry no screenshots) on the Acorn Archimedes back in the late 1980's. Okay it wasn't nearly as advanced as Wolfenstein, but it was revolutionary at the time.
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.
While I certainly enjoyed Doom more, didn't Castle Woolfenstein pre-date Doom by about a year or so?
My mom always said, "Jim, you're 1 in a million." Given the current population, there are 7000 of me. God help us all!
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.
Even earlier - as far back as 1971 Maze Wars
I remember playing this on a mac in the late '80s.