Doom to Dunia: A Visual History of 3D Game Engines
Posted 07/21/09 at 11:00:00 AM by Paul Lilly
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Doom might arguably be the most memorable (or at least the most popular) PC game of all time, and with good reason. Prior to Doom's release, programmers found themselves in the stone age of game development. For the most part, building a game meant starting from scratch and compiling all new code, but like the invention of the wheel, the advent of the game engine forever changed the PC gaming landscape.
Now, we know what you're thinking, and we're well aware that game engines existed prior to Doom's release in 1993; we're even going to cover some. But it was id Software's now legendary first-person shooter that pushed reusable 3D game engines as a viable programming model, and videogame development has never been the same since then.
On the following pages, we look back at all the major PC game engines and what made each one special. As a prerequisite, be sure to check out our history of 3D graphics, which covers videocards from the Voodoo to the GeForce and everything in between. Once you've digested these two features, you're guaranteed to have a new-found respect for gaming on the PC!
Space Rogue / Ultima Underworld
What would eventually morph into the Ultima Underworld engine started off several years prior as the Space Rogue engine, named after the sci-fi game with the same name released in 1989. Naming a game's engine after the game itself is a practice that, to some extent, lives on today.
After releasing Space Rogue, Origin Systems began work on Ultima Underworld and its accompanying engine. After a bit of work, an algorithm was developed that allowed for texture mapping, which was applied to walls, floors, and ceilings. The development team would add varying height throughout the map for a 3D effect, as well as inclined surfaces.
NPCs consisted of two-dimensional sprites, but objects were rendered in 3D. This, along with the use of physics to create movement, bogged the engine down. This led to Ultima Underworld running slow even on higher-end 486DX systems at the time, though system requirements called for a 386-based PC.
Date Released: 1990
Notable Games: Space Rogue, Ultima Underworld:The Stygian Abyss
Doom / id Tech 1
Id Software's Doom engine wasn't actually a true 3D engine at all, but a very well conceived two dimensional sector-based engine with 2D sprites representing objects, characters, and anything not tied down to the map. Because of this 2D limitation, rooms could not be stacked on top of one another, but this also allowed for faster rendering on the less powerful hardware of the time. All that was needed to run Doom was a 386 level PC (in low-detail mode) with a standard VGA videocard capable of rendering texture-mapped environments.
Despite the underlying 2D nature, Doom was, and still is, considered a 3D title. Id created the illusion of 3D with height differences added separately to the environment, and later titles built around the Doom engine would even implement the ability to look up and down, albeit with a distorted view.
Date Released: 1993
Notable Games: Chex Quest 1+2, Doom, Doom II, HacX, Heretic, HeXen, Strife
Voxel
Every Comanche game ever made was constructed with some form of NovaLogic's proprietary Voxel Space engine, while several other games implemented voxels for specific parts, like rendering vehicles or in-game items.
A combination of the worlds volumetric and pixel, a voxel is a way to represent volumetric objects as three dimensional bitmaps rather than vectors. Think of a stack of legos with each piece representing a voxel, and you get an idea of how the Voxel Space engine rendered terrain. Only these were really 2D bricks with varying height. By rendering terrain this way, graphics were more smoothly contoured and detailed than other flight simulations using vector graphics, along with offering smoother gameplay.
Date Released: 1992
Notable Games: Blade Runner (characters and artifacts), Comanche series, Command & Conquer: Tiberian Sun and Command & Conquer: Red Alert 2 (most vehicles), Delta Force series, Master of Orion III (space battles and solar systems)
What about the Mechwarrior
Submitted by Grim123 on Sun, 11/01/2009 - 1:44pm
What about the Mechwarrior games?
Submitted by mallthus on Mon, 09/07/2009 - 8:43pm
Wonderful engine that was, sadly, underused.
Submitted by Vladislav_Draculva on Fri, 09/04/2009 - 6:22pm
What about neverwinter nights...good stuff even though it is a little bit obscure...
Submitted by Orionsword on Tue, 09/01/2009 - 8:43pm
I remember this game used to push hardware back then just as much as Crysis and fear was at least used for benchmarking at one time
Submitted by The Nexus 6 on Sat, 08/08/2009 - 12:25am
What about Wolfenstein 3D's engine, which predates doom, and was used for many classic games.
Wolfenstein 3D, Spear Of Destiny, Blake Stone, Planet Strike, Rise of the Triad...
How can you leave out this revolutionary engine, and skip directly to Doom's engine???
You also totally skipped over the Tomb Raider engine incarnations from CORE! come on guys!
Submitted by foamcup on Thu, 08/13/2009 - 11:25am
No one cares about Wolf3D and the Tomb Raider games are awful.
Submitted by Sajt on Thu, 08/06/2009 - 2:09am
RE: (concerning Quake3): "The newer engine marked a departure from skeletal animation and instead
made use of per-vertex animation. Without diving into the technical
details of both, the switch paved the way for smoother animation."The Quake 1 and 2 engines (which were very similar) did not use skeletal animation. Both used per-vertex animation, like Quake 3.
The reason Quake 3's animations were of higher quality is because the vertex coordinates weren't compressed (quantized) so aggressively. Quake 1 and 2 stored vertex coordinates with 8 bits per component (each of X, Y, Z), while Quake 3 used 16 bits per component. Quake 1 and 2's aggressive compression led to an ugly effect known as "vertex swimming".
Also, Quake 3's animations were created with more keyframes, generally 20 to 30 per second, whereas all animations in Quake and Quake 2 were created at 10 frames per second. But that's not nearly as noticeable as the compression.
Submitted by ducis on Tue, 08/04/2009 - 4:53pm
OMG!!! NO X-RAY ENGINE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
have fun without any volumetric smoke, no realistic ballistics, ai lifecycle
Submitted by camillus_mmi on Mon, 08/03/2009 - 4:14pm
Great article on the history of game engines but HOW COULD YOU LEAVE OUT BULLFROG??? Anyone remember the Magic Carpet Engine? What about the greatest PC shoot'em up - racing game of all time, Hioctane??? You owe us a seperate article devoted to Bullfrog, with a focus on Hioctane's amazing if not quirky AI.
To The MAX!
Submitted by andre.goddard on Wed, 07/29/2009 - 11:02am
I really miss Mafia 3D engine. It features really nice physics and everything. It's stunning!!!
Submitted by aachrisg on Wed, 07/29/2009 - 9:01am
AFAIK, there's not a single line of code from space rogue's engine in ultima underworld's.
The underworld engine was the engine from the (best left forgotten) Car+Driver game, augmented with an upper layer to handle interior environments modelled on a grid. The texture mapper that drew the billboards in c+d is basically the same one that drew the walls in UU.
- Chris Green
Submitted by Agent1138 on Wed, 07/29/2009 - 7:34am
So they acknowledge Renderware as a key engine in the last generation but neglect to mention that it was used in one of the biggest titles in that generation, namely the GTA III trilogy (GTA 3, Vice City, Sandreas). That's a massive oversight, no? That would be like talking about the Unreal engine in today's market and not mentioning Gears of War or something. Seems like some one didn't do much research or has limited games knowledge.
videos fps benchmarks
Submitted by mitcoes on Mon, 07/27/2009 - 5:44am
It would be a lot more of work, but it would become a "wikipedia article" if each game would have a video with FPS ON THE SAME MODERN MACHINE, and benchmark tests.
And of course a picture of each game, links to where to buy, or where to download - some are now free or abandonware - or even where to play online, there are versions of doom and hexen online.
I missed GLdoom that ported wads to a opengl engine.
Submitted by u-r-a-johnson on Fri, 07/24/2009 - 9:39am
Rick
I gotta agree with John P.: yeah, I know Diablo 2 is old, not true 3D, and uses sprites on a background; but it, and other Blizzard games are Popular. The D2 ladders are still full! The news of Diablo Three has caused firestorms! I still love the bird's eye camera, no-fuss controls, and gameplay as simple or complicated as you want (normal, NM, or hell difficulty). I have a bunch of character classes at different points along the game.
The only reason I don't play online is because of all the PlayerKillers and Cheaters Duping and selling items-for real cash. But that's gotta tell ya something about popular! I'll get set in a comfy chair, mouse table, hand-held keypad, and just lose myself for a while. Like a peaceful walk by a mountain stream, with a$$kicking. And I'm preordering D3 as soon as I save the money. (I've got some other upgrades going on.)
Submitted by Pball1224 on Wed, 07/22/2009 - 9:07am
I'd really like to know a little more about the Halo and WoW engines as well, more so Halo, but I doubt they are used for any other games.
Submitted by Converge on Tue, 08/11/2009 - 8:35am
Stubs the zombie was built with the halo engine.
WoW and other Blizzard games
Submitted by JohnP on Tue, 07/21/2009 - 3:42pm
I wonder what kind of engine runs World of Warcraft? No loading levels, low system requirements, tons of toons and NPC's on the screen at once, AND it is the more often played game in the world.
and how about Starcraft or even Starcraft 2? What are they using?
Blizzard should have definitely been mentioned in this article! Well perhaps not, as whatever engine they used, it was only used for their own games.
Anyone know?
Submitted by crunchieman on Tue, 07/21/2009 - 2:42pm
Im pretty sure Bioshock was going on U2.5. I do recall that it has some U3 features....
Where the hell is X-Ray?
Submitted by deject on Tue, 07/21/2009 - 1:27pm
S.T.A.L.K.E.R.'s game engine might have been overshadowed by the Crysis engine, but it is still pretty impressive, especially with all the DirectX 10 effects like the dynamic wet surfaces and such. How could you leave that one out?
Submitted by tehR0XX0Rz on Tue, 07/21/2009 - 12:26pm
"A combination of the worlds volumetric and pixel, a
voxel is a way to represent volumetric objects as three dimensional
bitmaps rather than vectors. Think of a stack of legos with each piece
representing a voxel, and you get an idea of how the Voxel Space engine
rendered terrain. Only these were really 2D bricks with varying height.
By rendering terrain this way, graphics were more smoothly contoured
and detailed than other flight simulations using vector graphics, along
with offering smoother gameplay."I hope you got a big, fat check for copying that little bit of press release. I actually bought that damn game when it came out, and there was NOTHING smooth or detailed about it. It fact, the graphics looked worse than anything else on the market at the time. Even your crappy screen shot doesn't reveal how lousy the game looked once those blocks started swirling around the screen. Honestly, a puddle of vomit looked better and was more fun to play with.
Halo engine? I'm not sure if
Submitted by lunchbox73 on Tue, 07/21/2009 - 10:55am
Halo engine? I'm not sure if any other games used it...
Submitted by fnordfnord on Tue, 07/21/2009 - 9:42am
Setting the record straight: Space Rogue was not developed by Origin. It was a contract game written by Paul Neurath and published by Origin. Nor did Origin develop Underworld (or System Shock, or Underworld 2). They were produced by Origin, but all of those games were developed by Blue Sky (later the legendary Looking Glass Studios).
Submitted by AZWizo on Tue, 07/21/2009 - 8:56am
Dude, Doom and Duke Nukem 3D, best video games of ALL time!
RT
www.be-anonymous.tk
Submitted by Transmuter on Tue, 07/21/2009 - 7:39am
Excellent article!
Long ago, I played the demo for an FPS. Years later all I could remember of the game was that the player collected money that could be used to purchase items from a merchant in a town, and that there was some sort of electric weapon the player acquired early on in the game. I could never find that game again, but thanks to this article I know that game was called Strife! Thanks MaxPC!
Time for some retro gaming...
Submitted by SpazzAttack on Tue, 07/21/2009 - 7:30am
Dungeon Master from FTL Games was the first game engine that worked as "a viable programming model." It was released in 1987. The same code base for Dungeon Master (DM) would build on the Amiga, Apple IIGS, Atari ST, PC, SNES, TurboGrafx-CD, Sharp X68000, PC-9801 and FM Towns. The same game engine was used to produce four more titles.
DM set the standard for adventure games in terms of the user interface and playability. The Ultima Underworld GUI looks remarkably like DM. DM was also the first 3D looking, first person, real-time adventure game.
As a plus, DM was also the #1 selling game on the Amiga, Apple IIGS, Atari ST and PC all at the same time. Doom the first? Pffft! Give me a break!
:-)
Visit the Dungeon Master Encyclopaedia
BTW - This was a very good article.
Submitted by ExarKun1138 on Tue, 07/21/2009 - 11:07am
I got an Atari ST back in 1987, and not too long after Sun Dog blew my mind, here came Dungeon Master. I have probably played that game more than any other game in my gaming history, which dates back to 1979 with the Mattel Intellivision(actually, right before that I had a Fairchild Channel F system.....). Dungeon Master is to me the grown up, more sophisticated version of the Intellivision's AD&D: Treasure of Tarmin, a first person adventure game. That game is my first experience with a "3-D Adventure" game, even though by today's standards(or even Dungeon Master at its time), it is a very simple looking/playing game, it none-the-less exposed me to the Third Dimension! But Dungeon Master was the first game to make me jump, scream at the screen, or just hit reset in frustration!! I racked up many a long distance phone bill with a buddy I would call at night and we'd walk through the game together, asking what to do, and so on! I still have DM on my PC today, so that makes it the oldest game that I still play regularly! Amazing!
Oh, and I visit The Dungeon Master Encyclopedia all the time!
Submitted by lunchbox73 on Tue, 07/21/2009 - 6:25am
Great article!
Outcast by far my favorite
Submitted by killerxx7 on Tue, 07/21/2009 - 3:46am
Outcast by far my favorite game in history,my heart stopped whene i herd there wasnt going to be a second one :(:(:(
Dunia
Submitted by Yusonice on Tue, 07/21/2009 - 3:13am
Far Cry 2's Technical Director, pointed out in an interview with Gamasutra that they had Far Cry 2 running on a Pentium 4-class processor with a GeForce 6600 graphics card.
Its true! I played Far cry on medium settings using pentium 4 3ghz and 8400gs (which is close to 6600)
Still nothing beats source engine! And what engine does COD 4 uses? It seems efficient too
Submitted by hentaiboi on Tue, 07/21/2009 - 1:30am
once wolfenstein is released would you kindly add id Tech 5 engine
also include Cry Engine 2 for Crysis 2.
Submitted by bjtalbot on Tue, 07/21/2009 - 1:06pm
If you look up "id tech 4" in wikipedia, you will find that the new Wolfentein is using id tech 4.
As far as I know, the only games that have been announced to use id tech 5 are Rage and Doom 4.
The worst engine on this
Submitted by vulchan on Tue, 07/21/2009 - 1:23am
The worst engine on this list is the unreal 3 engine by a mile; I bought UT3
a while back and played it for less than ten hours total. The sound went out in
the game for some reason, never could find a solution and gave up on it. It's
horrible on the eyes, the world melts together with the characters and objects
and all looks the same. I realized after Bioshock that the non-world objects
are extremely choppy in their animation. And I hate how most DX10 games either
look no better with AA or don't support it at all, it's like they think we
don't want it anymore.My favorites are the Quake III, Unreal I & II, and Source Engines. They
all contain games that are found on many top 5 games list
Not a very flexible, but none the less innovative engine
Submitted by QUINTIX256 on Tue, 07/21/2009 - 12:32am
Uh, Descent? I'm surprised Descent wasn't mentioned at all. It had graphics almost on par with quake, and the demo was released in '94.
If I recall, that segmented software renderer Volition created (which removed the need for BSP trees), was used in one other game.
You can have your recession. I'm not participating.
Submitted by bornhald on Wed, 07/29/2009 - 2:49pm
I was pretty taken aback by the fact that this list of influential 3D engines fails to mention ANY of the Descent titles. Parallax/Interplay's Portal Engine used in Descent II was far and away the best of the bunch when it debuted in 1996. Unlike all of the other FPS games out at the time, Descent II allowed the player to take advantage of 6 degrees of freedom in moving about the gameworld space. This gave rise to the concept of tri-chording, whereby the player would apply forward thrust (Z) while also sliding (strafing) on both the horizontal (x) and vertical axis (Y). The combination of these movements, once mastered, actually allowed the ship to fly faster than it could simply applying forward thrust.
All in all it was a ridiculously well made, entertaining game that still holds a small cult following today...
Descent III raised the stakes, adding portal rendering, procedural texturing, and advanced lighting. When it was released in mid 1999, it was probably the most graphically advanced game of its time.
Submitted by Digital-Storm on Mon, 07/20/2009 - 11:38pm
I love GeoMod
Favs
Submitted by Lilrockerdude on Mon, 07/20/2009 - 11:20pm
I think the Best Engine ever was Unreal because nothing could touch it when it came out and 2 generations later the Unreal3 Engine still looks beautiful and plays smooth. Next to that Voxel would be my fav oldschool, because C&C looked damn good, and Source as best new because its an evolving engine that next to CryEngine sets bench marks for others, and Source has pushed out so many great games in its still going life. My only big question would be if HL2 Ep3 will run off Source, a newer version as Ep2 did, or stay the same or will Valve deliver Source2 or something to show us how badass HL3 will look like on its relase date (whenever the game is set to come out.)
Submitted by Lilrockerdude on Mon, 07/20/2009 - 11:20pm
I think the Best Engine ever was Unreal because nothing could touch it when it came out and 2 generations later the Unreal3 Engine still looks beautiful and plays smooth. Next to that Voxel would be my fav oldschool, because C&C looked damn good, and Source as best new because its an evolving engine that next to CryEngine sets bench marks for others, and Source has pushed out so many great games in its still going life. My only big question would be if HL2 Ep3 will run off Source, a newer version as Ep2 did, or stay the same or will Valve deliver Source2 or something to show us how badass HL3 will look like on its relase date (whenever the game is set to come out.)
Submitted by The Relic on Mon, 07/20/2009 - 10:35pm
Uh, wasn't the Doom Engine simply a modified Wolf 3D engine? Could be wrong, but I recall hearing something to that effect...
Call of Duty was made using
Submitted by Netram on Mon, 07/20/2009 - 10:03pm
Call of Duty was made using the Quake 3 Team Arena engine, I'm sure of it. Then CoD2 and 4 where made use an extremely heavily modified version of the Q3TA engine, even the cvar's are the same as quake. I think because it was so heavily modified that they just said fuck it, we're calling it proprietary.
Also, why in pretty much all UE3 games is console BOUND TO FUCKING '. It's the most retarded fucking binding ever, yet it exists in all UE3 games.
Submitted by Zoomer on Mon, 07/20/2009 - 9:49pm
It may be made from scratch, but apparantly the mechanics are very much like Gears of War, so that may be something to think about.
Submitted by dabiddo on Mon, 07/20/2009 - 9:40pm
saw a video on youtube, that says the 3d engine for the new ghostbusters game was built from scratch... any more info on it?
Submitted by norman on Mon, 07/20/2009 - 9:54pm
I believe the engine that powers Ghostbusters is proprietary -- that is it's not a licensed engine like Unreal Engine 3. However, it hasn't been out for a while to make any waves in the development community. There are many more proprietary game engines that we didn't mention which appeared in only one or two games. We chose to focus on the ones that have pushed technology forward and excited us as gamers and hardware enthusiasts.
-- Norm
It's uses the Infernal
Submitted by willsmith on Tue, 07/21/2009 - 10:26am
It's uses the Infernal engine, first seen in the eponymous game from a year or two ago. So far, they haven't licensd it to anyone external.
Submitted by AeXStrider on Sun, 07/26/2009 - 4:38pm
Wasn't there an engine Lucasarts [tech demo using Indiana Jones] was working on going to be the next Big Thing? ...Was also a couple of years ago.
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