Old Style 3D Game Engines / Graphics

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4 comments, last by Cygon 11 years, 10 months ago
I am looking for the exact name ( or names ) and information on 2 old school 3D items:

The first would be the engine type, that rendered primitive shapes & textures, based on what was read from a text file.
A good example would be Wolfenstein 3D ( DOS ) http://www.dosgamesarchive.com/download/wolfenstein-3d , Doom ( DOS ) http://www.dosgamesarchive.com/download/doom , and to a lesser extent, Quake ( DOS ) http://www.dosgamesarchive.com/download/quake/

The second would be the name of the style ( or method ? ) of psudo 3D effects, were a picture rotates with the player, so that the player always sees the same side.
Examples would include Wolfenstein 3D, and Runescape Classic

Any help would be greatly appreciated - Thanks.

I cannot remember the books I've read any more than the meals I have eaten; even so, they have made me.

~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

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Wolfenstein used raycasting.
You are mistaken about Doom and Quake, they do not read a plain grid from a text file. Doom still used a more advanced version of raytracing, I'd recommend googling "doom 2.5d engine" or something similar. Quake uses a plain software renderer, and is fully 3D.

When a 2D picture rotates to always face the player, this is known as a billboard
If your looking for similar engines, the original doom engine is open source so you could modify that
It's worth noting that none of the named id engines read map data from a text file. They certainly may have used text files for other purposes, but not map data. Text files are a bitch for this kind of thing - inefficient storage usage, awkward and slow to parse, prone to error, and human readability goes right out the window when all you're faced with is a wall of numbers.

Direct3D has need of instancing, but we do not. We have plenty of glVertexAttrib calls.


Wolfenstein used raycasting.
You are mistaken about Doom and Quake, they do not read a plain grid from a text file. Doom still used a more advanced version of raytracing, I'd recommend googling "doom 2.5d engine" or something similar. Quake uses a plain software renderer, and is fully 3D.

When a 2D picture rotates to always face the player, this is known as a billboard

Thank you very much. Very helpful.

I cannot remember the books I've read any more than the meals I have eaten; even so, they have made me.

~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

It's worth noting that none of the named id engines read map data from a text file. They certainly may have used text files for other purposes, but not map data. Text files are a bitch for this kind of thing - inefficient storage usage, awkward and slow to parse, prone to error, and human readability goes right out the window when all you're faced with is a wall of numbers.


Never say never: the engine employed by "Dark Forces" was a 2.5D portal engine that stored all of its levels as text files (with indentation and all). It had large, complex levels and loading times were acceptable on a 486.
Professional C++ and .NET developer trying to break into indie game development.
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