cosmicnut on 6/3/2008 at 08:18
The system shock engine was about a year ahead of the doom engine. Doom was based on square polygons as the smallest unit where SS used a triangular polygon.
It ment that the designers had more freedom when creating shapes.
It was also capable of rendering resolutions that no PC of the day could handle!
Add to that the sheer variety of enemy and visual detail they put into the game...
What I think is funny is that Doom 3 ended up nicking ideas from SS1/2... I mean PDA audio logs picked off dead characters.... SS1 was doing that in the 90s! Add to that, email, etc that you recieve on route...
ZylonBane on 6/3/2008 at 15:37
Quote Posted by cosmicnut
Doom was based on square polygons as the smallest unit where SS used a triangular polygon.
So very, very wrong.
The SS renderer is based on polygons. The Doom renderer is based on raycasting.
cosmicnut on 6/3/2008 at 15:53
duly noted :tsktsk:
ZylonBane on 6/3/2008 at 19:18
You... don't actually understand a word of that, do you?
flexbuster on 7/3/2008 at 04:39
Not to mention that the interfaces are completely different, and that SS1 supposedly had rather advanced physics at the time.
At any rate, these days you can play SS1 at non-circa-1994 resolution anyway using the SSP resolution packs, which helps a bit. Either way, if graphics are going to break the hell out of a game for you, SS1 probably never was the game for you in the first place.
cosmicnut on 7/3/2008 at 11:25
Quote Posted by ZylonBane
You... don't actually understand a word of that, do you?
Actually we are both true.
I've tried to make Doom maps (a long time ago). You cannot make diagonal lines in object. They have to have square faces. This is why you only see stairs and lifts in doom, there are no ramps, etc.
Raycasting is a method of speeding up rendering time. Tradition 3d engines would draw the ENTIRE level. On 386 hardware, this ways very time consuming. Raycasting detects what areas are being masked from the players view. If you are in a room with all the doors closed, standard rendering would still render every room of the level if you could see it or not (very wastefull on CPU cycles). Raycasting the same scene would only render the objects in the players field of vision, taking a fraction of the CPU cycles. Basically it said, "can the player see this wall, yes, OK I'll paint a texture on it!"
System Shock would also use some variant of this (some way of removing rooms and objects that can't be seen). In the early 90s it was the only way that 3d games could render fast enough to be playable.
That a good enough explanation or have I got it wrong.....
Matthew on 7/3/2008 at 12:02
Quote Posted by cosmicnut
In the early 90s it was the only way that 3d games could render
fast enough to be playable.I'm sorry, are we still talking about System Shock?
ZylonBane on 7/3/2008 at 15:46
Quote Posted by cosmicnut
That a good enough explanation or have I got it wrong.....
Pretty much entirely wrong.
Muzman on 8/3/2008 at 04:40
BSP is a way of storing spacial data that SS1 probably used as well (or something similar), and not, in itself, a form of 'rendering' in the sense of CGI, surely
