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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."
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.
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
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.
A large part of Doom's success was due to the fact that there was really nothing else like it at the time.
I just finished playing both Doom I and Doom II through Doom Legacy, and I want to say -- there still isn't anything like Doom I.
Doom I is brilliantly balanced.
Its interesting, its scary, and it encourages brains, not mindless shooting. [Mindless shooting will get you through Doom I, but tactics will make the job a lot easier.]
The lighting is superb, the level designs are smart, the hidden areas well done.[0]. 10 years later, its still a hell of a good game.
Quake doesn't have it, Half-Life doesn't have it, and even Doom II doesn't have it, but there's something about Doom that makes it worth replaying.
I wish there were more games like Doom I.
[0] Compare this to Doom II, which had a tendency to throw monsters at you in large groups just to increase "difficulty". Even with the double-barrel shotgun, secret Wolfenstein levels, and elder sign, I still prefer Doom I.
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.
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.
Wrong. There are two "games" that helped cement the multiplayer culture, and you're wrong on both counts. One came before UT and Q3 and one was developed concurrently.
First of all, Quake was an evolution in multiplayer gaming. the community-supported Quakeworld was a revolution. It is one of the earliest multiplayer games to feature client-side prediction, and the experience was fluid even on 32-player internet servers...something that would bring a Quake server to it's knees.
Combine this with incredibly popular free mods and total conversions like Team Fortress that revolutionized gameplay, and you had a multiplayer platform that eclipsed even the popularity of Quake II at it's peak.
Half-Life is the second game on the list, not because the original HL multiplayer was anything special, but because it served as a platform for...
Counterstrike.
I know a lot of you bag on this game, but you just don't seem to understand how popular it is. The game is not even at it's peak anymore, and there are still over 100 THOUSAND active players at peak during the week. That's more players than every other current multiplayer FPS COMBINED.
Why?
It was free, well polished, and adapted gameplay styles from other genres. No rocket launchers plus the equipment purchase system made for a fresh look, and people ate it up.
Man is the animal that laughs.
And occasionally whores for Karma.