I guess the thing about rapid change is... it's hard to imagine what kind of games would exist in a DOOMless world in an alternate 1995.
The first 3d console games started to come out that year, like Rayman.
Star Wars Dark Forces with its own custom 3d engine also came out. Of course Dark Forces was, however, an overt clone of DOOM.
It's a bit ironic, but I think the gameplay innovation of DOOM tends to hold up more than the actual technical innovation. Things like BSP for level partitioning have slowly been phased out of game engines, we have ample floating point compute power and hardware acceleration ow, but even developers of the more recent DOOM games have started to realize that they should return to the original formula of "blast zombies in the face at high speed, and keep plot as window dressing"
> but even developers of the more recent DOOM games have started to realize that they should return to the original formula of "blast zombies in the face at high speed, and keep plot as window dressing"
There's still a lot of chatter breaking the continuity. In the original, the plot was entirely made up of what you were experiencing directly.
> Things like BSP for level partitioning have slowly been phased out of game engines
Hey, can you say more / do you have a link about this? I mean, for what reason are BSP trees phased out, and what are they replaced with? (quad/oct tree? AABB trees? or something entirely different?)
The pipeline bottlenecks all changed in favor of bruteforcing the things that BSP had been solving with an elegant precomputed data structure - what BSP was extremely good at was eliminating overdraw and getting to where the scene could render exactly the number of pixels that were needed and no more. It's optimized around small, low-detail scenes that carefully manage occlusion.
More memory, bandwidth and cache means that more of your solutions are per-pixel instead of per-vertex and you can tolerate overdraw if it means you get to have higher polycount models. Likewise, the environment collision that was leveraged by the BSP process reduced the number of tests against walls, but introduced edge cases and hindered general-purpose physics features. Scaling physics leads in the direction of keeping the detailed collision tests at their original, per-poly detail, but doing things with sorting or tree structures to get a broadphase that filters the majority of tests against AABB or sphere bounds.
On a Wii(original Wii) 3D action game I helped ship, we just rendered the whole level at once, using only the most basic frustum culling technique; the hardware did the lifting, mostly through the z-buffer.
Adding to this, the nice thing about the bsp partitioning was you could also leverage it to make off screen monsters go to sleep or reduce their tick rate. Was helpful for optimizing AI as well as rendering. DOOM not only had some of the first pseudo 3d but also huge numbers of enemies... something that a lot of other games still cut down on
Read the quake pvs article linked to in this thread.
On top of my head as I remember it.. one of the reasons for Quake's use of a bsp was to allow back to front rendering of the world geometry without the use of a zbuffer. This was required to get decent performance with the software rasterizer.
I'm not 100% sure what's most commonly used these days, but for a large open world requiring data streaming, I could see the use for something like an octree and even portals.
I'm misremembering Rayman for the Sega Dreamcast.
Looking at wikipedia, I now see that there weren't many games in 1995 even on the new consoles that really leveraged the 3d hardware. The PC actually had more such games despite many PCs lacking hardware acceleration for 3d rendering or even significant floating point capabilities.
There's Sega Rally Racing for the Saturn, Virtua Fighter, Tekken...
Perhaps it's really 1996 that's the real turning point (with Mario 64 coming out), which makes DOOM about 3 years ahead of its time. And of course id shipped Quake that year....
The first 3d console games started to come out that year, like Rayman. Star Wars Dark Forces with its own custom 3d engine also came out. Of course Dark Forces was, however, an overt clone of DOOM.
It's a bit ironic, but I think the gameplay innovation of DOOM tends to hold up more than the actual technical innovation. Things like BSP for level partitioning have slowly been phased out of game engines, we have ample floating point compute power and hardware acceleration ow, but even developers of the more recent DOOM games have started to realize that they should return to the original formula of "blast zombies in the face at high speed, and keep plot as window dressing"