Slashdot Mirror
From Doom To Dunia — the History of 3D Engines
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."
Why would anybody use an auto-print link for the only link in TFS ?!??1
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?
They list an engine called Voxel, which isn't an engine but a technology. And they list a bunch of games which use the same engine as NovaLogic's Comanche, but it's complete bullshit. Tiberian Sun and Red Alert 2 (for example) didn't use that engine at all, the just used the voxel technology.
Then they list StoneKeep, but StoneKeep didn't even use a 3D engine.
They call Outcast "A popular voxel engine", the engine was used only once. And showed it severe limitations. How can something used only once be popular.
And for some reason they decided to split up some engines into multiple generations (like UnrealEngine) and keep others as a single entry (like LithTech, GameBryo)
And for an history article they surely didn't bother to put everything in chronological order. And for a visual article they sure didn't bother to find the best screenshots to show of the engine.
It's a shame the article doesn't mention Descent. It featured epic 6 degrees of freedom. Enjoyed that game very much *sigh*
One major 3D game not mentioned is - 1990 - Amiga - Corporation
It was released years before Wolfenstein 3D, you could even send a photo of your self to the company and they would digitise it and send you it back to play in the game...
http://hol.abime.net/3092/screenshot
It was incredibly hard but had great atmosphere - the main issue was the controls were impossible to use - It took the PC until about 1994 to get anywhere near the graphics of this game..
People like the FTEQuake folks have integrated Quake1-3 together, which allows you to play any map from Quake 1 through 3, or to incorporate things like shaders into the Quake 1 experience. It's actually kind of neat. Take a look at the screenshots at http://www.fteqw.com/ - it's all I use nowadays when I play FPSes. I'll play some Gears cooperatively with my friends, but nothing yet has beaten the original quake experience for FPS fun.
The euphoria engine looks pretty interesting. I've been doing some work with motion analysis, and so the work they've done on it really impresses me - apparently you can code animations using it without keyframes or motion capture, which is pretty neat (if it works). The tech demo video is here - http://www.naturalmotion.com/euphoria.htm
Robocop 3 (1992) On the amiga:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vYFdgyuv6fU
The missions where varied, some chase bad guy x and run them off the road, others where more 1st person shooting inside buildings.
There was also hunter (1991), not so much a 1st person shooter:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m1PcAlGHXzk
Surely this article should have started with Freescape. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freescape/
IIRC, it was never 3d first-person games that drove hardware development, but space-flight shoot-em ups. Titles like Wing Commander really drove the need for better and better graphics hardware, in fact, Wing Commander was the one that made the 386 chip a necessity and apparently made people upgrade to play it.
What about Stunts?
:(
I played this game for years.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stunts_%28video_game%29
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IhiRjQg1X14&feature=related
I know, I'm old.
Love many, trust a few, do harm to none.
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.
There are a number of technical inaccuracies too.
All that was needed to run Doom was a 386 level PC (in low-detail mode) with a standard VGA videocard capable of rendering texture-mapped environments.
All texture mapping was done in software, which was even true of the Quake 1 and Quake 2 software renderers. So I'm not sure why they're attributing texture-mapping to the VGA hardware.
Other features of the Quake II engine, now known as id Tech 2, included colored lighting effects, and a new game model whereby game code was written in C and loaded from a DLL (Dynamic Link Library) rather than the original QuakeC scripting language. In layman's terms, this allowed for both software and OpenGL renders rather than one or the other, so if you didn't own a Voodoo videocard, you weren't necessarily out of luck.
Here the article is stating that by using native DLLs for game logic in Quake 2 instead of the Quake C used in Quake, Quake 2 could support both hardware and software rendering. The game logic has nothing whatsoever to do with the rendering.
The GoldSRC engine used by HalfLife was described as a "tweaked Quake engine". Tweaked? That's an incredibly massive understatement. Elsewhere I've read that id Software provided the Quake 2 sources to Vavle as part of the licensing, but they had modified the Quake 1 engine so heavily, and improved it so much, that use of Quake 2 source was unnecessary and probably nearly impossible due to so many changes to the Quake 1 architecture.
Otherwise it is an interesting, albeit lightweight, article.
Better known as 318230.
The first real-time 3D engine I ever played or saw was Midwinter for the Amiga. It was released in 1989, 4 years before Doom, and featured flat-shaded polygon rendering in a true 3D environment. I just remember the environment being incredibly huge and immersive, and I spent many hours walking and skiing around desolate white landscapes.
Wikipedia article (which mentions nothing whatsoever about the game's technical aspects);
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midwinter_(video_game)
Screenshot of the 3D environment (Atari ST version):
http://www.mobygames.com/game/atari-st/midwinter/screenshots/gameShotId,362797/
Gamespot seems to be one of the few that actually recognize how groundbreaking this game was:
http://www.gamespot.com/gamespot/features/pc/unsung_heroes/sec2_10.html
Better known as 318230.
It's a shame they didn't talk about the engine used for the Chronicles of Riddick games.
I'm sick of people saying that Doom was a 2d game. It was a 3d game.
It had limitations, but still every object had 3 coordinates.
"Illusion of 3D" my ass. Every 3d game is "an illusion of 3d".
Where's the fun? In the 90s I enjoyed Doom, Quake series, DN3D, Unreal, and so on, but the *quality* of the gameplay diminished. Many single player FPS these days are just a series of corridors and rooms bolted on to each other with a terribly linear path as compared to even Doom, where many levels were almost puzzle-like in construction. Many people bemoan Doom's gameplay as "find-the-key", but at least that's a real *goal* and encourages exploration, unlike the linear gameplay of many modern FPS. That or ones that appear "open" yet are just a series of radar checkpoints ("go this direction, do X, now go this direction, do Y") which is just as bad.
I still play Doom on a very regular basis; the amount of quality fanmade maps keep it fresh and even the originals are interesting and challenging enough to replay over and over. Modern games like Crysis and Far Cry, and even games like Half-Life 2 (hell, even the original Half-Life was pretty dull) just bore me to tears in comparison.
Plus we just have a glut of FPS these days. A new one comes out every week or two -- seriously, isn't it time to slow down and make original, fresh, interesting games? Oh no, we can't do that, that'd be *risky!* Life is risk, game companies. Take some. In other words, stop concentrating on making an FPS that looks 5+% more shiny than the last one and do something interesting.
AC because every single modern gamer that has been raised to believe that the horrible state of gaming today is not only acceptable but actually PREFERRED will mod me down.
Lithtech has always been on the short end of the popularity stick. You grandmother can name Doom, your mom can mention Counter-Strike and your little brother can mention FarCry. Now ask the same group if they know about Shogo or NOLF.
Where is descent 1 / descent 2 they where true 3d and you could fly upside down, side to side have rooms on top rooms and more.
Enough said in the subject.
I wonder what engines were used in Operation Flashpoint and Armed Assault games. They seem to be missing from the list.
--Coder
IIRC, Descent was one of the first real 3D games - although not an FPS. I didn't see it in the article, does anyone knows which engine it used?
Where is that guy who'd die defending what I had to say when I need him?
The one thing I missed most from all the old software rendered games is how distinctive their visuals are. When everything shifted to hardware the look of 3d games became very uniform, only to slowly differentiate with improving art and tech as time went on. The new programmable hardware again allows more freedom in rendering approaches, and now the top end engines are effectively all specialized shader pipelines. After 5-10 years of very homogenous looking games it's a most welcome change.
Ever notice how there was never one part of the map overlapping another? At any point there was always only ever the floor and the ceiling - at various levels, and able to raise/lower (lifts/doors anyone?). In that important sense it was 2D; a 2D map 'extruded' as a special case into 3D - not an arbitrary collection of 3D geometry. Oh and the sprites, they were bill-boarded 2D also.
Not so stupid, depending one what you mean.
The article does not says about Cube and Cube-2 engines: an open source engine, on which Sauerbraten is based: http://www.sauerbraten.org/ Engine itself is really great and extremely simple. Check it out and go play some games.
All the games people are mentioning which haven't been described in the article are reminding me of a couple of others.
There's Flight Simulator, for one. I had the very first version back on the PCjr. Sierra Online even published a 3D helicopter simulator at some point.
I'd say racing games are an important subset of 3D gaming which have been completely overlooked. There are a good number of driving games which have been completely overlooked. Stunts, Stunt Driver, Test Drive 3, the Need for Speed series. I'm sure there are others, but I'd say these were the more popular. There was that game Viper Racing game which featured vehicle damage, one of the first I recall doing so. If I remember correctly the developers originally had the intention offering a wide variety of cars, but because of limitations on time or budget the game ended up featuring only the Dodge Viper. Some people have actually kept the game alive, improving graphics and adding new cars. I notice the article has a photo of what seems to be WipEout but doesn't mention it at all.
Then there were a number of games which seem to have been inspired by early notions of virtual reality. There was this one game which involved making this triangular shaped object jump from platform to platform, climbing up these towering structures. If I remember correctly it might have even predated Wolfenstein and the rest, but I can't recall much else about the game.
I mean, if we're going to talk about the history of 3D PC gaming I would expect the list to be more extensive. This article reads like something a 22 year old wrote, working from what he's read about online and quick Wikipedia consultations. So much for thorough research and editing.
---
3D Shooter Feed @ Feed Distiller
Do you know what are the engines driving Need For Speed games? The main three I am interested in are 5,6 and 7 (Porsche Unleashed, High Stakes and Underground).
Just because it was on the Mac doesn't mean it wasn't a great series of games.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marathon_Trilogy
Lots of innovations made there by the Bungie folks before they were bought up my Microsoft and ported Halo from the Mac to XBox.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bungie_Software
Halo was introduced at MacWorld expo in 1999
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6eZ2yvWl9nQ
But the print dialog box pop-up was annoying! Should posted both links (regular and print).
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
Tm
Support TBI Research: http://www.raisinhope.org
[citation needed]