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Comment by tincholio | Hacker News Reader

I think you misunderstood the parent post. Wolf3D was not really 3D, nor was Doom after it, and many other FPSs that came around at that time. Quake was the first really 3D FPS (e.g. you could walk under a bridge without "tricks").

I don't know what development process they had at ID at the time, but given that it was a Carmack project, I very much doubt it was anything like "any other" software project.

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Descent came out over a year before Quake and was full 3D (except the annoying hostage sprites). It may have taken advantage of being set in a mine to have twisty passages that obstructed views, but it did have its fair share of wide open spaces (most reactor rooms, for instance). I think the reason Quake gets all the credit is due to its popularity, not for being the first.

There was also Driller in 1987 which had full 3D representations though you could rarely take advantage of it. It was based on the Freescape technology which I played with in 3D Construction Kit in 1991 and that was definitely full 3D in terms of movement (though not a game in itself).

Was this similar to Oblivion? Where you had to plant some gas valves to relieve the pressure on the planet? Awesome, frustrating little game :)

Descent used affine texture projection, which makes texels slide around as your viewpoint changes, unless extremely small polygons are used (they weren't). It also had extremely simple lighting (intensities set at vertices, interpolated in a simple gradient in screen space like the texture projection). Neither of these things means you're wrong in calling it "full 3D", of course. I don't recall if the topology allowed room-internal objects other than the robots; I think it did.

> Quake was the first really 3D FPS (e.g. you could walk under a bridge without "tricks").

Sometimes the tricks were cool.

In Bungie's Marathon for instance, the map format allowed you to have multiple rooms occupying the same physical 3-d space. Imagine a spiral stair case that doesn't go up or down, you just run around and around this long corridor like a manifold mobius loop. Quite fun in multiplayer maps with radar. Also worth noting that Marathon was the first game that allowed rocket jumping due to being able to look up and down slightly.

Obviously Marathon had nothing on Quake, but it was really a great multiplayer FPS for its day.

I'm pretty sure a few of the LookingGlass games came out before Quake and would qualify as 3D.

Ultima Underworld came out in 1992: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultima_Underworld

I also remember Mechwarrior 2 came out before Quake and was mostly 3D-ish. Granted most of the levels were flat but you could jump (with jump jets) and climb on top of some terrain.

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