Evolution of FPS Renderers

[_xxx_]

I played Halo just weeks ago on my XP3000+ and FX5900, 1280x1024. It doesn't look good at all. It may have shaders everywhere, but these don't really contribute to the looks in any way.

Making everything shiny/glossy is not even evolutionary, the rest was there like 7 years ago

 

[SlmDnk]

Good idea, Luminescent. Good stuff

Thanks for mentioning Ultima Underworld, guys. That game and the engine was something else, back in the day

 

[slapnutz]

Outcast? With its voxel thingama'jig?

 

[Scali]

Holy thread resurrection, Batman!

Seriously though, did you ever finish your presentation, Luminescent?
I've never seen it, might be nice to read it, for old times sake

 

[_xxx_]

And since it's resurrected, Turok should have been included as well. It was the first fps I remember which had no loading times between levels, also very good looking for its time. It also had some effects which achieved the looks of shaders, but I don't know what the tricks exactly were.

 

[Love_In_Rio]

Talking about an outstanding 3d engine i would like to mention "F29 retaliator" that appeared in 1989. All written in assembler and was the first game of DID ( after that came EF2000, the best flighting simulator to date IMO ). It was in a 720 kb diskette and how it run in my 25 mhz 286! that was smoothness!.

Another great 3d engine was the one from "Severance: Blade of darkness", with its dinamic shadow and fluid system gave Quake 3 a run for its money IMO. It appeared in 2000 and was made by "Rebel act studios". Still nowadays looks great:

http://img443.imageshack.us/my.php?image=blade2007010513505485by3.jpg

http://img412.imageshack.us/my.php?image=blade2007010513502698fo8.jpg

 

[Scali]

F29 Retaliator certainly was nice.
I first ran it on a 9.54 MHz XT with a VGA card. Because of the clever renderer (I believe it used unchained mode, very fast polygon filling in VGA mode anyway), it was actually quite playable.
However, it didn't quite match up to the Amiga version.

 

[slapnutz]

Holy thread resurrection, Batman!

Woops, sorry about that. I think it came up as a related topic when i was creating a post and decided to reply without checking the last post date.

 

[Freak'n Big Panda]

Does Morrowind get a point for being the first game released to make use of DX8.0 pixel shaders? Granted it wasn't really impressive in any other way, but pixel shaders! I remember being very impressed with the water back in the day.

 

[Simon F]

- The Duke Nukem engine was an important evolution just for the fact that you could do the spiralling staircase case (i.e. you could be at two different height levels for the same XY position), among with other features.

Dark Forces engine could do that as well and was released almost a year before it.

That's nothing. IIRC the Descent engine allowed to different "rooms" to occupy the same XYZ coordinate space yet be logically distinct!

 

[Phantom69]

Quake 1: First attempt at 3D with polygons and texture mapping w/ widespread perspective correction, although limited to every 16th pixel with interpolation for those in-between; initially a software rendering approach.

Not strictly true. Whilst it was like this on a default installation, there was a console setting that could be made to change this to every pixel if desired.

HTH

P69

 

[Raqia]

That's nothing. IIRC the Descent engine allowed to different "rooms" to occupy the same XYZ coordinate space yet be logically distinct!

I think this is the case w/ "doorways" in many engines; they're sort of linked lists that let you see into the next node but traversing back "out" from the node through the same doorway could point you to a totally different room. I wasn't particularly impressed w/ the portals that were touted for "Prey" since they're more or less floating implementations of the "doorway" concept.

 

[Scali]

Not strictly true. Whilst it was like this on a default installation, there was a console setting that could be made to change this to every pixel if desired.

I believe Quake 1 also had a special case for very small triangles (less than 16 pixels wide).
Triangles under an angle nearly parallel to the camera will generally show lots of distortion if you only do a 16th pixel correction. Various early 3d engines have that problem, but Quake 1 doesn't.

 

[RejZoR]

Why aren't LithTech games mentioned? Blood 2 graphics were incredible at the time and later games based on LithTech Jupiter were no different (NOLF, AvP2).

 

[Davros]

I think you should replace the doom engine with the descent engine as doom wasnt really 3d

 

[Sxotty]

on shadow volumes: What did Q2 gl_shadows 1 command do? I used it, but don't know technically what it did, just that it looked cool.

 

[neliz]

I'm Late.

Doom etc. weren't 3D as you couldn't have multiple levels on one X,Y coördinate (i.e. walk under a bridge, later run over it) looks like the technical term is Level-over-Level environment.

The game that cheated 3D into that was Rise of the Triads with it's flying disks, of which they made stairs. All in all more advanced than the Doom engine, yet an evolution of the wolf3d engine.

Carmack and Romero based their work "Catacomb Abyss 3D (prequel to Wolf3D)" on Origin's "Ultima Underworld, the Stygian Abyss" Demo's. Link
What People also forget is that Ultima Underworld was released before Wolfensteind3D.

 

[Davros]

dont forget strike commander first game to use gouraud shading
shattered steel first game to combine voel terrain with polygon models

 

[neliz]

dont forget strike commander first game to use gouraud shading
shattered steel first game to combine voel terrain with polygon models

wasn't Eternia the first to use Goureaud?

 

[jlippo]

I would like to add Midwinter ('89) to the list of old FPS engines, after all it did have huge fractal landscape and freedom of movement.