Doom.

Correct me if I''m wrong, but I thought Ultima Underworld by Looking Glass (Such a pity they are gone), came before Doom, and basically was able to accomplish everything the Doom engine could.

It actually could do much *more* than Doom.It just wasn''t that big a hit cause you didn''t go around slaughtering stuff (you don''t need to flame me OK )

Ultima Underworld had far more capable 3D than Wolfenstein.

Uhh.... are we talking about the same Ultima Underworld here ? I have it on CD (both UU and UU2), and I must say it is awfully crappy. How can you compare it to Doom ? the viewport is like a 100x100 window, the 3d is all distorted and collision detections are awfully bad. I agree that it was meant for i286 CPU''s, but still...

I think you're all missing the point of sympathy's post. Every hotshot kid tries to program the next Quake clone when they probably couldn't even program Doom if it wasn't for APIs that do a lot of the hard work for you. That's not to say anything bad about APIs. They're invaluable now that we have so many incompatible video cards and have to use Windows. They also save development time so you can concentrate more on other parts of the game. But old games aren't necessarily easier to program now just because they're old. Somebody shouldn't dive in over their head. I think that Doom probably had the greatest engine of its time. It wasn't exactly the most 3D... there were flight sims and racing games before that had "more 3D" graphics including polygons... but the Doom engine was extremely fast and versatile. Ultima Underworld had a good engine, but to me it didn't seem NEARLY as refined or impressive.

Alex
bigshot@austin.rr.com

Foolish man give wife grand piano. Wise man give wife upright organ.

Edited by - Bigshot on January 4, 2001 6:07:07 PM

Two different engines, made for two different games, but Ultima Underworld II was my first PC game, and a true classic, xcept for the stupid "EMS not installed" error, which made me have to learn DOS.

P.S. Carmack gets plenty of credit, and money, but where are Looking Glass?

Edited by - Tyrian on January 4, 2001 6:08:57 PM

Ultima Underworld I beleive came before Wolf 3D. And it was a pretty big success, just not as big as Wolf or Doom (as someone said above, it was more complicated than a blood bath). The engine is far more complex than Wolf or Doom, being light years ahead of either. I have both Underworlds, and they are pretty cool, but too hard for my tastes. It just got too confusing about what to do next, and too much of it was dungeon crawling. All the Ultimas were great of course, except 9, and 7 owns them all.

Now to get to the point of original post, yea, but let the kids have their dreams. It''s such dreams that got a large amount of us into programming. I got some cool game designs i made for games i was planning on writing. I had every intention of doing them soon. But everytime i thought that i was almost ready, i found another thing i needed to learn. And it''s that need to learn that stuff that has caused me to learn it in the first place. One day, i will make these games, cuz looking back on em, i still love the ideas and i spent many months on some of the designs =)

Actually I believe that the very good gameplay and the fantastic atmosphere make Doom worth talking even after 10+ years. Not only 3D graphics. I consider it as an ''all-time classic'' game.

Jim Valavanis

quote:

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Original post by Tyrian
P.S. Carmack gets plenty of credit, and money, but where are Looking Glass?

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Pretty much the entire staff moved over to Ion Storm where they''re at work on Theif 3.

quote:

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Original post by Jimmy Valavanis
Actually I believe that the very good gameplay and the fantastic atmosphere make Doom worth talking even after 10+ years. Not only 3D graphics. I consider it as an ''all-time classic'' game.

Jim Valavanis

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I concur. Quite a revolutionary game. I remember getting hooked on the trial version of Doom, and I *never* like computer games prior. I''ll never forget the first time a CyberDemon confronted me - palms sweating, heart pounding, etc.

I still have some of those MIDI tunes in my head. I quite possibly need professional help...

Ray casting itself is actually quite a simple technique. Even the floorcasting used to generate textured floors is pretty simple. What is a little harder is the generating of an efficient BSP tree to allow efficient culling of sectors.

Key phrase here: efficient BSP tree. Building the tree isn't even the hard bit in a 2d sector list world, but making it well balanced, now there's a challenge.

Damn fine game to. I still play it to this day.

[edited by - zoggo on May 20, 2004 4:01:03 PM]

I think a good progression of projects to work on is something like this:

1) Hello World
2) Hello World on Crack (aka another console app)
// Insert more learning projects as needed to get a hang of C++
3) Console Tetris
4) OpenGL Tetris
5) Simple topdown tilebased RPG or Action game.
6) Simple topdown nontilebased RPG or Action game.
7) Rotating cubes stuff
8) Doom style game

And then:

9) Simple cursor/3d object interaction program
10) Model viewer
11) Simple model editor
12) More advanced model editor
13) Simple 3d version of Doom
14) Addition of animation tools to model editor
15) Implementation of that into Doom like game
16) Um?

Actually, I think new programmers attempt one of three projects. And to be honest, FPSes rank lowest from what I''ve seen.

1) MMORPGs. This, of course, is a given.
2) RPGs. A very good project IMHO.
3) FPSes. For those who start with the 3D APIs.

You guys do know that this thread is over 2 years old...right?

Yar, damn gravediggers

Necrosized

MindEngine Development | http://medev.sourceforge.net
E-Commerce Business Architecture | http://ecba.sourceforge.net

Don''t forget that doom was actually a very good game in itself. Excellent monster and weapon sets, an above all an incredible athmosphere. The story and gameplay was perhaps not so intellectually challenging, but damn fun nontheless.

quote:

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Original post by Programmer One
You guys do know that this thread is over 2 years old...right?

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Who cares? I still like talking about Doom.

The (re)appearance of this thread inspired me to download Doom. It is still to this day quite a technical achievement. All of that, coded by hand. No API to ease the workload.