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From Doom To Dunia — the History of 3D Engines

Posted by Soulskill on from the looking-forward-to-tech-5 dept.

notthatwillsmith writes "It's difficult to think of a single category of application that's driven the pace of desktop hardware development further and faster than first-person shooters. Maximum PC examined the evolution of FPS engines, looking back at the key technologies that brought games from the early sprite-based days of Doom to the fully 3D-rendered African Savannah as rendered by Far Cry 2's Dunia engine. It's truly amazing how far the state of the art has moved in the last 16 years."

6 of 117 comments (clear)

  1. Wolfenstein 3D? by sprins · · Score: 3, Insightful

    I miss Wolfenstein 3D (the original game) in the list. AFAIK that was the 1st 3D FPS some time before DOOM. I understand that "From DOOM to Dunia" alliterates better, but to disregard Wolfenstein 3D alltogether?

    1. Re:Wolfenstein 3D? by Vectronic · · Score: 3, Insightful

      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolfenstein_3D_engine

      With 9 games to it's credit, it's probably more worthy than some others that were mentioned.

    2. Re:Wolfenstein 3D? by Chaos+Incarnate · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Then by that logic, neither was Doom.

      --
      Benford's Corollary to Clarke's Law: "Any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced."
  2. Forgotten game: Descent by SurfMan · · Score: 5, Insightful

    It's a shame the article doesn't mention Descent. It featured epic 6 degrees of freedom. Enjoyed that game very much *sigh*

  3. The Dark Engine by sapphire+wyvern · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Shame they didn't mention the Dark Engine, which was used for Thief, Thief II, and System Shock II, and basically drove the creation of the 3d stealth game as it now exists. Since Thief II and System Shock II are frequent visitors to "Best PC Game Ever" listings, the engine behind them seems notable. The switch to Unreal II for Thief III killed the ability to have large maps, which is one of the major shortfalls of that installment compared to the earlier games in the series. The same applies for the legendarily disappointing Deus Ex II.

  4. Re:Where's Descent? by Chris+Burke · · Score: 3, Insightful

    The portal rendering engine used by Descent has been rumored to be a simple extension of the Doom engine

    Whoa, that would surprise me (not that it's impossible). Going from a raycasting engine which allows essentially arbitrary 2D geometry but very limited geometry in the 3rd dimension, to a texture mapping engine that is restricted to deformed rectangular prisms but allows them to be oriented arbitrarily wrt the world axes isn't a simple extension of any sort. Hell, the enemies were fully 3d texture mapped without any restrictions (but a low poly count of course). That's basically ripping up the innermost guts of the engine and replacing it with something very different. Completely new data structures, and a completely new rendering algorithm... at that point, what of the old engine would you even be using?

    --

    The enemies of Democracy are