From Doom To Dunia — the History of 3D Engines 117
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."
Wolfenstein 3D? (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?
Forgotten game: Descent (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Wolfenstein 3D? (Score:4, Insightful)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolfenstein_3D_engine [wikipedia.org]
With 9 games to it's credit, it's probably more worthy than some others that were mentioned.
Re:Wolfenstein 3D? (Score:4, Insightful)
The Dark Engine (Score:4, 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.
Where is descent 1 / descent 2 they where true 3d (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re:The Dark Engine (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm not sure what you mean. Deus Ex always used the Unreal Engine.
Re:not 3d shooters... (Score:2, Insightful)
unique renderers (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re:Graphics don't matter (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Where's Descent? (Score:4, 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?
Re:Oh great, another fucking history lesson... (Score:3, Insightful)
[citation needed]