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Comment by dexen | Hacker News Reader

>Quake and Doom were all about elaborate fake 3d

A nitpick: DooM (1 and 2), just as well as Duke Nukem 3D were indeed "2.5D" elaborate fakery of 3D. One of examples of the ruse: a level was basically a (floor, ceiling) height map, and there could be no two overlapping rooms one above the other.

On the other hand, Quake (1) was an early pioneer [1] of real, actual 3D, including an OpenGL backend and all that. That's one of the reasons it required significantly beefier hardware: needing a Pentium for smooth gameplay, while DooM would run perfectly fine on a mid-end 486, which is a generation older.

[1] cf. Marathon

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> On the other hand, Quake (1) was an early pioneer [1] of real, actual 3D

The Quake rasterizer with its overlapped divide for perspective correction is a thing of beauty and possibly my favourite piece of code ever. If there's anyone out there who loves optimisation and hasn't read Abrash's "black book", it's well worth a read.

One interesting thing about Quake is that not only it was 3D, but it was excessively 3D in many ways. For example, they have rendered all flames as 3D models, even though sprites and/or procedurally generated 2D flame (as used in e.g. Unreal two years later) would look much better given the very low poly counts.

https://media.moddb.com/images/members/1/240/239733/qv1.gif

Curiously, explosions were still sprite + particles. But I can't remember anything else outside of UI that was using a sprite.

Q2 took it even further - it has 3D models for explosions, and even puffs of smoke when bullets hit walls (these were simple particle effects in Q1). IIRC the only thing that was a sprite was the BFG10K plasma ball?

Back then, I just found it strange. In retrospect, I wonder if it was an attempt to associate some kind of "uncompromising real 3D" branding with id engines. It's interesting that Q3 - which was the first engine id released after they got serious competitors in that space (Unreal, Source) - switched back to sprites for fire, smoke and explosions. And Unreal especially made it a point that it wasn't just 3D, but it was shiny:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zqdeyseQAP4

> A nitpick: DooM (1 and 2), just as well as Duke Nukem 3D were indeed "2.5D"

Double nitpick: Duke Nukem could actually have stacked floors and bridges over other playable areas.

As such, if it didn’t use “real” 3D, its 2.5D scheme were considerately more elaborate than Doom or Wolfenstein.

Thank you a lot, josteink; I mixed up map format's with renderer's limitation.

Yes, but I remember you still had to use a really contrived way of explaining that 3d 'geometry' on the editor (BUILD.exe).

Basically you still drew in 2d but you could overlap rooms with other lines that wouldn't intersect with any already existing lines, and that would configure 'a room above/below the current room'. Then you had to slope the floor until it actually connected with the newer room.

It was pretty strange but yeah, some people built insanely detailed things with Duke3D :-)

> Basically you still drew in 2d but you could overlap rooms with other lines that wouldn't intersect with any already existing lines, and that would configure 'a room above/below the current room'.

Elaborating a bit -- the Build engine had a feature called "sector effectors" that, when triggered, would teleport the player to a completely different sector in the map. The transition was seamless and permitted interesting effects like the illusion of having stacked floors.

The designers used this feature to most profound effect in the level Lunatic Fringe. In order to complete a full circuit of the central ring room, the player had to move through a 720-degree circle to return to the entrance. It was _extremely_ confusing playing that level for the first time.

https://dukenukem.fandom.com/wiki/Lunatic_Fringe

Fabian Sanglard wrote an excellent series about the engine here: https://fabiensanglard.net/duke3d/

Interestingly enough the Portal games leverage similar level design given to the Source engine, not only for the obvious user controlled portals but also to stitch levels together seamlessly, including impossible architecture (the long bridge leading to the glados confrontation in the first Portal shows the room you're about to enter, but its actually too small and shaped differently to hold the room.

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