MFGamers

Doom To Dunia (part 2)

03/12/2009 at 11:51 (Features)

A Brief 3D Engine History by Cyberpunk

Part 1 can be found here

And so, onwards and upwards, pop-pickers!

Lithtech

What started off as a joint collaboration between Monolith and Microsoft, the Lithtech engine, at one time called DirectEngine, was one part software renderer and one part DirectX renderer. This didn’t last long, however, as Monolith parted ways with Microsoft and bought back the rights to its engine, renaming it Lithtech.

Early on, Lithtech could best be described as the poor man’s game engine. With the notable exception of No One Lives Forever, Lithtech is the engine of choice for cheap, quick games. It says to the customer, ‘This game wasn’t worth the effort of paying for Quake or Unreal.” Though development would continue on Lithtech over the years, No One Lives Forever would remain the high point of the engine’s life up until it was overhauled and again renamed, this time to Jupiter Extended, or Jupiter EX. Technically the fourth version of Lithtech, Jupiter EX supports DirectX 9, a new lighting model, Havok physics, and new content creation tools, and was used in both F.E.A.R. and F.E.A.R. 2.

Date Released: 1998
Notable Games: Aliens vs Predator 2, Blood II: The Chosen, F.E.A.R., F.E.A.R. 2, The Matrix Online, Might and Magix IX, No One Lives Forever, Tron 2.0

Quake III / id Tech 3

Like AMD versus Intel and Nvidia versus ATI, the game engine wars being fought a decade ago largely consisted of Quake III (now known as id Tech 3) versus Unreal.

As the name implies, Quake III took its cue from Quake II, but it was much more than just a refinement of id Software’s previous game engine. The newer engine marked a departure from skeletal animation and instead made use of per-vertex animation. Without diving into the technical details of both, the switch paved the way for smoother animation.

Quake III also put a heavier emphasis on shadows, as well as introduced shaders, curved surfaces, 32-bit color, and advanced (for its time) networking capabilities. All these effects required a 3D videocard with full OpenGL support and at least 300MHz of computing power, whether it be an Intel Pentium II or AMD K6-2 or Athlon series.

Date Released: 1999
Notable Games: American McGee’s Alice, Call of Duty, Medal of Honor: Allied Assault, Soldier of Fortune II: Double Helix, Star Wars Jedi Knight II: Jedi Outcast, Star Wars Jedi Knight: Jedi Academy, Quake III Arena, Return to Castle Wolfenstein, Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory

GeoMod

These days we’ve come to expect a certain level of destructible environments, but for many gamers, the first memory of wreaking havoc on virtual surroundings came from playing Red Faction, well before the recent push towards realistic in-game physics. John Slagel, Red Faction’s lead programmer, developed the Geodmod engine, which stands for Geometry Modification.

As the name implies, the GeoMod engine changes the geometry of the world in response to what’s going on. GeoMod does this through a complete real-time subtractive boolean from the world’s geometry. As Red Faction’s lead designer Alan Lawrence explained to Gamespot, “When a rocket hits a wall, we take this shape and basically subtract that shape from the world. So we boolean with that ‘bit’ — we call them GeoMod bits — and that takes a chunk out of the world

Date Released: 2001
Notable Games: Red Faction, Red Faction II

Torque

A fully 3D graphics engine, Torque was first created to power the first person shooter Tribes 2. One of the highlights of the Torque engine was that it featured an in-game terrain engine capable of manipulating levels of details on the fly so that fewer polygons would need to be rendered.

Torque also became known for its built-in world editor complete with drag-and-drop GUI creation. Combined with flexible multi-player network code, Torque was a fairly robust game engine despite lacking a laundry list of titles.

Date Released: 2001
Notable Games: Penny Arcade Adventures, Tribes 2, Wildlife Tycoon

Serious

Several years in the making, one of Croteam’s main goals in developing the Serious engine was to allow for large spaces and large numbers of on-screen characters at any given time. By doing so, Serious Sam became an adrenaline pumped arcade style first-person shooter with near non-stop action.

The Serious engine came as two parts: Serious Editor and Serious Modeler. Game models consisted of 3D files importanted from standard 3D object editors like Lightwave or 3D Studio, whereas the Serious Editor was tasked with creating the world and populating it with characters. The original Serious engine didn’t support pixel or vertex shaders, but those and more would later be added in subsequent revisions.

Release Date: 2001
Notable Games: Serious Sam (entire series)

Max-FX

While Max Payne wasn’t released until 2001, Remedy Entertainment had been working on the game’s Max-FX engine since 1997. It was developed from the ground up as a hardware-only 3D rendering engine optimized for DirectX 7.0.

Max Payne was best known dazzling gamers with its use of bullet-time, which slowed down game play, a trick made famous in the movie The Matrix.

In addition to powering Max Payne, Futuremark implemented the Max-FX engine in its 3DMark99, 3DMark2000, and 3DMark2001 benchmarking suites.

Date Released: 2001
Notable Games: 3DMark (99-2001), Max Payne

Warcraft

Warcraft is the 3d Engine developed by Blizzard Entertainment for use in their game Warcraft 3: Reign of Chaos. It is the second sequel to Warcraft: Orcs & Humans, and it is the third game set in the Warcraft Universe. The game proved to be one of the most anticipated and popular computer game releases ever, with 4.5 million units shipped to retail stores and over one million units sold within a month. Warcraft III won many awards including “Game of the Year” from more than six different publications.

Warcraft III ships with a “World Editor” program that allows players to create their own custom scenarios and maps. The World Editor has features such as unit editing and event triggers. Through Battle.net, players can download and play peers’ custom maps. A much improved version of this engine is used within World of Warcraft, and it’s add-ons.

Date Released: 2002
Notable Games: Warcraft 3: Reign Of Chaos, Warcraft 3: The Frozen Throne, World of Warcraft, World of Warcraft: The Burning Crusade, World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King

Unreal 2

Whereas the original Unreal engine burst onto the scene with the game it was named after, the Unreal 2 engine first appeared in America’s Army. More than just a minor update, Unreal 2 is a highly modified version of the first engine, with the overhauled code adding integrated physics and 64-bit support. It also introduced improved special effects, like true moving water, and is said to be able to handle ten times more polygons.

Date Released: 2002
Notable Games: America’s Army, Brothers in Amrs, Deus Ex: Invisible War, Lineage II, Magic: The Gathering – Battlegrounds, Postal 2, Thief: Deadly Shadows, Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six 3, Splinter Cell, Ghost Recon 2, and Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter, Tribes: Vengeance, Unreal II: The Awakening, Unreal Tournament 2003 and 2004, XIII

Gamebryo

Fans of Fallout 3, Warhammer Online, and Oblivion all have the Gamebryo engine to thank. So do console gamers, for that matter, as Gamebryo was designed to be cross-platform friendly and is the only third-party engine with Nvidia’s PhysX technology directly coordinated with the Wii toolset. To call Gamebryo flexible would be an understatement.

The Gamebryo engine is written in C++, and supports a host of platforms and technology. Just some of these include DirectX 9 and 10, multi-core development, integration with 3D modeling tools such as 3ds Max and Maya, dynamic collision detection, particle systems, 3D audio, and it dives through the windows to deliver chocolates to your wife/girlfriend. Ok, I may have made that last one up.

Since the Gamebryo engine was first launched six years ago, Geoff Selzer, president and CEO of Emergent Game Technologies (developer of Gamebryo), estimates it has been used in the development of around 200 games.

Date Released: 2003
Notable Games: Bully: Scholarship Edition, Dark Age of Camelot, Empire Earth II and III, Fallout 3, Oblivion, Prince of Persia 3D, Six Meier’s Civilization IV, Zoo Tycoon 2

Doom 3 / id Tech 4

Now known as id Tech 4, the Doom 3 engine ended up being a major rewrite of id Tech 3, though that was never the original intention. But when id Software decided to make the switch from C to C++, an overhaul couldn’t be avoided.

The Doom 3 engine pushed the hardware envelope, requiring DirectX 8.0-capable or higher videocards such as a GeForce 3 or at least a Radeon 8500. This was primarily due to the addition of unified lighting and shadowing, whereas every surface would go through the same rendering pipeline. Most light surfaces were also done in real-time, allowing for more realistic shadows, but at the expense of being able to render soft shadows. To get around this, projected lights could be used to create the illusion of soft shadows.

It was heavily criticied upon it’s release as being too heavy on computer resources, and prompted many gamers to upgrade their rigs. For a long time, Doom 3 would serve as a popular performance metric while benchmarking, but has since been supplanted by much more demanding titles, such as Crysis.

Date Released: 2004
Notable Games: Doom 3, Enemy Territory: Quake Wars, Prey, Quake 4

Source

Now a four year old engine, Valve continues to tweak Source so that it stays relevant. Source was first used to drive Counter Strike: Source, but was really developed for Half Life 2.

The Source engine attacks game development on all fronts, including advanced Shader technologies, dynamic lighting and shadows, physics, several effects such as realistic looking reflective water surfaces and real-time motion blur, and much more. It also sports an advanced facial animation system and lip-syncing.

A modern engine, Source now includes multi-processor optimizations, an efficient networking architecture, and hordes of zombies that have never been so fun to kill (Left 4 Dead).

Date Released: 2004
Notable Games: Counter Strike: Source, Dark Messiah of Might and Magic, Half Life 2 and following episodes, Left 4 Dead, Portal, Postal III, Left 4 Dead 2, Team Fortress 2

Part 3 next