MFGamers

Doom To Dunia (part 1)

03/12/2009 at 11:45 (Features)

A Brief 3D Engine History by Cyberpunk

Let me introduce you to a brief history of 3D engines, without which most of the games we all know and love would not exist. It basically covers most of the well known re-usable 3D engines.

Doom might arguably be the most memorable (or at least the most popular) PC game of all time, and with good reason. Prior to Doom’s release, programmers found themselves in the stone age of game development. For the most part, building a game meant starting from scratch and compiling all new code, but like the invention of the wheel, the advent of the game engine forever changed the gaming landscape.

Of course game engines existed prior to Doom’s release in 1993. But it was id Software’s now legendary first-person shooter that pushed reusable 3D game engines as a viable programming model, and videogame development has never been the same since then.

Space Rogue / Ultima Underworld

In the beginning, there was darkness. Then there was Origin Systems. And low, Origin Systems looked out upon the darkness, and saw that it was alone. Let there be Space Rogue!

What would eventually morph into the Ultima Underworld engine started off several years prior as the Space Rogue engine, named after the sci-fi game with the same name released in 1989. Naming a game’s engine after the game itself is a practice that, to some extent, lives on today.

After releasing Space Rogue, Origin Systems began work on Ultima Underworld and its accompanying engine. After a bit of work, an algorithm was developed that allowed for texture mapping, which was applied to walls, floors, and ceilings. The development team added varying height throughout the map for a 3D effect, as well as inclined surfaces.

Non PLayer Charectors (NPC’s) consisted of two-dimensional sprites, but objects were rendered in 3D. This, along with the use of physics to create movement, bogged the engine down. This led to Ultima Underworld running slow even on higher-end 486DX systems at the time, though system requirements called for a 386-based PC.

Date Released: 1990
Notable Games: Space Rogue, Ultima Underworld:The Stygian Abyss

Doom / id Tech 1

Id Software’s Doom engine wasn’t actually a true 3D engine at all, but a very well conceived two dimensional sector-based engine with 2D sprites representing objects, characters, and anything not tied down to the map. Because of this 2D limitation, rooms could not be stacked on top of one another, but this also allowed for faster rendering on the less powerful hardware of the time. 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.

One reason for Doom’s huge following was Shareware. The first world of Doom was released for free on one floppy disc, and owners of this disc were encouraged to copy it, and pass it along to their friends. Pretty soon, everyone had the shareware world of Doom, and hungered for more. Id Software had another three worlds for them.

Despite the underlying 2D nature, Doom was, and still is, considered a 3D title. Id created the illusion of 3D with height differences added separately to the environment, and later titles built around the Doom engine would even implement the ability to look up and down, albeit with a distorted view.

Date Released: 1993
Notable Games: Chex Quest 1+2, Doom, Doom II, HacX, Heretic, HeXen, Strife

Voxel

Every Comanche game ever made was constructed with some form of NovaLogic’s proprietary Voxel Space engine, while several other games implemented voxels for specific parts, like rendering vehicles or in-game items.

A combination of the worlds volumetric and pixel, a voxel is a way to represent volumetric objects as three dimensional bitmaps rather than vectors. Think of a stack of legos with each piece representing a voxel, and you get an idea of how the Voxel Space engine rendered terrain. Only these were really 2D bricks with varying height. By rendering terrain this way, graphics were more smoothly contoured and detailed than other flight simulations using vector graphics, along with offering smoother gameplay.

Date Released: 1992
Notable Games: Blade Runner, Comanche series, Command & Conquer: Tiberian Sun and Command & Conquer: Red alert 2, Delta Force series, Master of Orion III

Build

Made famous as the engine upon which Duke Nukem 3D was constructed, Build shared a similar trait with the Doom engine in that both rendered worlds on a 2D plane with sprites populating the map. The Build engine broke worlds into individual sectors arranged in a grid, and the ceiling and floors in each sector could be built to a different height. Coupled with the ability to look up and down with the mouse from the get-go, this presented the illusion of 3D.

But that wasn’t the only 3D trick up Build’s sleeve. By applying special tags to walls or a spot on the floor in a sector, developers could make it so that when a gamer walked into or over the designated spot, he would be transported to a completely different part of the map. One way in which this was used was for creating holes in the ground that a player would appear to fall through, but really would be transporting to a different part of the 2D map.

To get the best out of the Build engine, gamers needed a Pentium class PC and an SVGA videocard, although early Build games, Duke Nukem 3D being the one, also ran on 486-based machines.

Date Released: Late 1993
Notable Games: Blood, Duke Nukem 3D, Extreme Paintbrawl, PowerSlave, Redneck Deer Huntin’, Redneck Rampage, Redneck Rampage Rides Again, Shadow Warrior, William Shatner’s TekWar, Witchaven, Witchaven II

XnGine

One of the first true 3D engines ever made, Bethseda’s XnGine was also a bit buggy early on. The DOS-based engine ran into stability issues on Windows 95 systems, and clipping issues caused gamers to get stuck on 3D polygonal objects in games like Battlespire. Other engines avoided this problem by still using 2D sprites for in-game objects.

XnGine would later make use of high-resolution graphics and be compatible with 3dfx videocards. It would also make possible huge game worlds, such as was seen in Daggerfall.

Date Released: 1995
Notable Games: Battlespire, Daggerfall, Redguard, NIRA: Intense Import Rage Racing, Terminator: Future Shock and Terminator: SkyNET, X-Car

Jedi

The Jedi engine didn’t go on to provide the basis for a large number of titles, but for the games it did power –Star Wars: Dark Forces and Outlaws — it proved highly successful in creating a 3D-like environment. Built from the ground up (some have accused LucasArts of reverse-engineering the Doom engine, but these claims were never proven true), the Jedi engine allowed for areas, or sectors, to be stacked.

Advanced for its time, the Jedi engine also helped make popular the ability to jump and crouch, and look up and down, feats made even more impressive considering this was LucasArts first attempt at an FPS (Dark Forces).

Date Released: 1995
Games: Star Wars: Dark Forces, Outlaws

Quake

Id Software’s first truly 3D game engine, the development team went to great pains to ensure the Quake engine ran smoothly without a ton of processing power. One way they did this was by introducing a new way to render maps that purged certain areas from processing that the player wouldn’t be able to see. Objects, or brushes as they were called, made up the border of the map and created an enclosed space. The map would then be run through a rendering preprocessor, which would identify empty space inside and outside of the border. It would then discard the back portions of the border. This highly effective technique reduced the amount of polygons usually by half and sometimes by much more.

Quake also included 3D light sources, which were added with a second pass of the preprocessor rather than on-the-fly by the CPU, and it also supported 3D hardware acceleration. Later a release of a native port of Quake called VQuake, or Vérité-accelerated Quake, designed to take advantage of the Vérité 1000 graphics chip’s hardware features, including anti-aliasing. OpenGL support would also be added, giving Voodoo and PowerVR owners justification for their graphics card purchase.

Date Released: 1996
Notable Games: CIA Operative: Solo Missions, HeXen II, Laser Arena, Quake, Silver Wings, Urban Mercenary

Renderware

Now we start to get into more modern games, and also games that started to make the console cross-over.

The Renderware game engine claims a ton of titles under its belt — over 200 in all — most of which are for the PlayStation 2 console, but still over two dozen on the PC platform. It’s also been used on the GameCube, Wii, Xbox and Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, and PSP, making it very much a multiplatform game engine.

Originally developed in 1998 as primarily a PC-based middleware solution, Renderware, like most of the engines up to this point, largely preceded the GPU, and this may have led to the engine’s eventual downfall as a leading API.

Before Epic’s Unreal engine began to overshadow Renderware, Renderware proved popular for its ability to allow developers to manipulate art and game processes in real time. A developer could, for example, change the color of a character’s clothing without altering the underlying code and rendering the scene all over again. This also worked for rudimentary physics, like jumping and moving. If movement looked ‘off,’ a developer could go in and alter the physics and see the changes in real-time.

Date Released: 1996
Notable Games: Airport Tycoon, Apache Air Assault, Bratz: Rock Angelz, Broken Sword: The Sleeping Dragon, Burnout Paradise, Chinese Paladin 4, Cold Fear, Commandos: Strike Force, Dream of Mirror Online, Evolution GT, Frank Herbert’s Dune, G-Nome, kill.switch, Madagascar, Manhunt, Red Jets, Startdon 3, Super-Bikes Riding Challenge, Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3, 4, and Underground, Trickstyle, and a shed load more

Quake II / id Tech 2

Whereas the original Quake game offered hardware graphics acceleration, Quake II offered native OpenGL support right from the get-go. 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, although you took a big performance hit.

Quake II also became known for its moddability. Because DLLs were also used for the game logic, id could release the source code into the modding community (and it did just that in 2001) while still keeping the rest of the engine proprietary. The engine was also incredibly robust, and savvy developers were able to use it to power full-fledged role-playing games (like Anachronox) and add features like dismemberment (Soldier of Fortune).

Date Released: 1997
Notable Games: Quake 2, Anachronox, CodeRED: Alien Arena, Daikatana, Heretic II, Kingpin: Life of Crime, SiN, Soldier of Fortune, UFO: Alien Invasion, Warsow

GoldSource

This tweaked Quake engine helped solidify the PC’s dominance over consoles as a powerful gaming platform, at least for its time period (the PC vs console debate gets a little more interesting with today’s tech). GoldSource brought support for both OpenGL and Direct3D, and was the engine that powered big name titles like Half-Life, Team Frotress Classic, Day of Defeat, and Counter Strike. Needless to say, Goldsrc helped promote 3D videocards with its API support and growing list of gaming hits.

While GoldSource shares its roots with the Quake engine, one developer who worked on Half-Life claimed that some 70 percent of the engine code was rewritten. In addition to adding Direct3D support, Valve also added a skeletal framework.

Date Released: 1998
Notable Games: Day of Defeat, Deakthmatch Classic, Counter Strike, Counter Strike: Condition Zero, Gunman Chronicles, James Bond 007, Half Life, Half Life: Blue Shift, half Life: Opposing Force, Richochet

Unreal

Unreal may have started off as strictly a first-person shooter game engine, but it would also become the basis for a number of RPG titles, the biggest of which might be Mass Effect. But of course it was most known for its use in Unreal and Unreal Tournament.

The Unreal engine was the main competitor to id Software’s Quake II / id Tech 2 engine, and like Quake II, Unreal became a popular engine in the modding community. In addition to having its own scripting language (UnrealScript) bundled with the game, Epic also provided a map editor and modification program called UnrealEd.

Both software and hardware rendering were present in the Unreal engine, as well as collision detection, colored lighting, and a rudimentary version of texture filtering. It also drew heavily from AMD’s 3DNow! and Intel’s MMX and SSE instruction sets. But to take full advantage of the Unreal engine and its heavy reliance on the Glide API, games needed a high level 3dfx videocard, which at the time was a Voodoo 5.

Date Released: 1998
Notable Games: Deus Ex, Harry Potter, Rune, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine: The Fallen, Unreal, Unreal Tournament, X-COM: Enforcer

Part 2 next