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Comment by Teslazar | Hacker News Reader

This is interesting but the site is missing many important game technologies and incorrectly attributing some.

The site lists Descent 3 as being the first to have procedural texturing and yet Unreal had it in 1998.

Doom is only listed as "first game to present panoramic skies". Doom may have been the first to have ambient lighting and built to be moddable. Probably also the first LAN-based multiplayer 3D first-person shooter.

Quake is only listed as "advanced 3D first person shooter" and yet Quake had many technologies that were probably firsts as well. First ip-ip client-server 3d first person shooter, first true 3D environments in first-person shooter, first to use pre-generated lighting in combination with dynamic lighting using a surface cache, and probably more.

I may have some of these wrong, but you get the idea. The site is missing a lot.

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>first LAN-based multiplayer 3D first-person shooter

that would be https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maze_(1973_video_game), its right there on this site https://ultimatehistoryvideogames.jimdofree.com/maze-war

Good point. I guess I could have said first modem-based multiplayer 3D first-person shooter or something like that. Being able to play against friends across town was great.

I actually played multiplayer Maze War at the Living Computer Museum on a Xerox Alto in 2017: https://photos.app.goo.gl/VUVXQ1cG3zWAMWY3A Right is a real Alto and the other two are emulated. The three were running a multiplayer game.

> first true 3D environments in first-person shooter

Descent had this before Quake, and I think even Ultima Underworld was "true 3d" (edit: but wasn't a shooter).

>The site lists Descent 3 as being the first to have procedural texturing and yet Unreal had it in 1998.

I couldn't find a reference for this, and my recollection is that Unreal had amazing (for the time) detail textures when you got close to an object, but they were very repetitive.

The water is procedurally generated. I don't recall any other textures that were procedurally generated in the game.

I think what unreal did was overlay the texture with another texture when you get close to it, so it looked more detailed.

Would work well as a wiki based site

One of the benefits of a single maintainer is that they can say 'this is my definition of these technical terms and if you don't like it you can go suck a lemon'. A Wiki will quickly devolve into endless bickering over what really counts as 3D and where the boundaries of certain genres lie.

Using some random individual's definition of something is rarely useful. If that means things can't be neatly fit into a list, so be it. On top of that, knowing that there is an open discussion around a topic is, in and of itself, usually useful to understand as well.

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