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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."
To avoid having the reader click through the quite annoying normal article split across a million pages.
It's probably an edgy statement about the longevity of dead tree media.
Conscience is the inner voice which warns us that someone may be looking.
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
hunter was truly awesome. I mentioned corporation as it was the 1st 3D game i played (excluding Dungeon Master / Bloodwych which are not really 3D)
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.
I for one applaud the editor for using the print link. It saves me from having to click through probably 5-10 pages. I wish all editors would follow suit.
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.
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.
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.
I believe the blame lies in the, umm how should I best call it, a sort of like "geologically active" field of science - I mean everybody is trying to create a perfect 3D renderer and perfect all they have, before they can settle in and start writing good stories. I truly believe this is one of the show-stoppers for developing good games. Look at it - just about every developer starts by actually REINVENTING the wheel here - make their own engine, and THEN build some game on top of it, while the engine actually gets more exposure. This is in our nature - we are divided between being storytellers and fantasts and on the other side being pragmatic scientists and mathematicians. In the old days the resources were so limited and the possibilities so inviting, many people created wonderful stories that captivated the gamers with their imaginary worlds, although executed on a much moderate plane of presentation. Today, it is like peeping through the keyhole into a world of ACTUAL possibilities - the hardware is so powerful, it just tickles all gaming studios to try and top the previous level of enslaving the machine - BEFORE they actually start thinking about storytelling. Think about it - you said it yourself - the hardware some years back, especially the hardware renderers - allowed for quite little innovation - it was all textures and polygons, and not many at that - few could break free of that prison, and even fewer tried, so almost every game looked the same. Of course I am generalizing, it is always possible to be creative using whatever resources at disposition, but let us consider the majority here - and they did not innovate much because everyone just saw those same polygons and that same DirectX. Nobody did voxels anymore for one - because we were past that "era" and the new era was all about hardware pipelines, but those were immature. When we finally be getting freedom that true and mature raytracers will give us, along with good particle simulators and what not - maybe the creative potential will be inspired forth again. Until then, the new platform of creativity today may well be Adobe Flash platform - the 90s repeat themselves all over - not enough power to simulate reality but enough power to captivate gamers with good stories with useful execution.
Descent was a First Person Shooter. The perspective was first person, and you shot things.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
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
[citation needed]