Knee-Deep in the Dead, Redux

December 4, 2008 5:30 AM

DOOM is a 3D adventure game with arcade-style elements. It was programmed for computers running DOS Flash 10. Here's the plot: your character is a Space Marine on the planet Mars, who uses guns his fist, and even a chainsaw to kill monsters from another dimension.
posted by Smart Dalek (85 comments total)

That's awesome/crazy. Moore's Law is an amazing thing.
posted by Happy Dave at 5:36 AM on December 4, 2008 [1 favorite]

Pfft. This game will never catch on.
posted by Pastabagel at 5:37 AM on December 4, 2008

Immediately crashed my browser. I think I need to put himem.sys in my autoexec.bat
posted by East Manitoba Regional Junior Kabaddi Champion '94 at 5:53 AM on December 4, 2008 [95 favorites]

If I could gun my fist, I'd never leave the house.

Wait. That so didn't come out right.
posted by Spatch at 6:02 AM on December 4, 2008

AWESOEM!1
posted by KevinSkomsvold at 6:07 AM on December 4, 2008

Immediately crashed my browser. I think I need to put himem.sys in my autoexec.bat

Ha!

device=himem.sys
device=emm386.exe noems
etc.....

Arghh. Those were the days.
posted by KevinSkomsvold at 6:09 AM on December 4, 2008 [3 favorites]

I just want to admit that this is the first time I have ever played doom.
posted by Stonestock Relentless at 6:17 AM on December 4, 2008 [4 favorites]

I remember playing Doom and getting horrible motion sickness. I think it was because the view never pointed up or down, just sideways..... so it felt like spinning around and around.

Thank the god of falling objects for mouselook.
posted by dunkadunc at 6:22 AM on December 4, 2008

No IDSPISPOPD?
posted by broken wheelchair at 6:22 AM on December 4, 2008 [2 favorites]

Has anyone ever tried talking to the monsters? Maybe they just dropped by our dimension to borrow a cup of sugar.
posted by Flunkie at 6:24 AM on December 4, 2008 [6 favorites]

I used to play Doom with my sweet little golden-haired toddler daughter. I'd steer and change guns, and she'd sit on my knee pressing the fire button. Happy times, until my wife came in and witnessed our chubby offspring shouting "KILL! KILL! DIE MONSTER! KILL!"
posted by Phanx at 6:25 AM on December 4, 2008 [27 favorites]

Unfortunately, this game will NOT work on PowerPC Macs.

Will the oppression never cease???????
posted by Pogo_Fuzzybutt at 6:29 AM on December 4, 2008 [2 favorites]

...your character is a Space Marine on the planet Mars....monsters from another dimension.

I never knew this. I just liked punching and shooting.
posted by DU at 6:32 AM on December 4, 2008

Doom and the Heretic and Hexxen games, which run on its engine are super-cheap on Steam; get the zDoom or GZDoom source ports and go nuts. They run very happily off a flash drive.
posted by Pope Guilty at 6:33 AM on December 4, 2008 [5 favorites]

Maybe they just dropped by our dimension to borrow a cup of sugar.

You're absolutely right about that, if by "borrow" you mean "forcibly extract" and "a cup of sugar" you mean "your head with spinal column attached."

DOOM was another one of those 3D gaming milestones for me. I'd played the hell out of Wolf3D my freshman year in college ("GET PSYCHED!") and the first time I saw Doom, I went... whoa, wait, wait, rooms don't HAVE to be all 90-degree angles? There can be STAIRS? And WINDOWS?! Holy cats!

Ah, DEU, level editor extraordinaire, how I miss thee. And BSP, how I miss your faithful node builder. But what I miss most is trying to get that game engine to do new and stupid things. (Even so, the key sequence was always Blue - Yellow - Red, remember...)
posted by Spatch at 6:33 AM on December 4, 2008

Ah, DEU, level editor extraordinaire, how I miss thee.

Try Doom Builder. It's spectacular. Seriously, if you've got a copy of Doom lying around and haven't ever made a video game level, grab Doom Builder and make a level. Building levels for the Doom engine is super-easy, and running around in a world that you yourself designed and implemented is an amazing feeling.
posted by Pope Guilty at 6:37 AM on December 4, 2008 [8 favorites]

Was I the only one who would manically type IDDQD, trying to get a good view of what the hell was going on when you dropped through the portal and "died" in the first part?
posted by griphus at 6:39 AM on December 4, 2008

Oh, and if you've got a Something Awful account, the 2.5D FPS Megathread, which covers a lot of old FPS games from that era, is a solid read and contains lots of neat stuff.
posted by Pope Guilty at 6:41 AM on December 4, 2008 [3 favorites]

Was I the only one who would manically type IDDQD, trying to get a good view of what the hell was going on when you dropped through the portal and "died" in the first part?

IDBEHOLD L
posted by Pope Guilty at 6:41 AM on December 4, 2008

Whatever happened to itplaysdoom.com -- the website that attempted to list every known device that Doom had been ported to?
posted by Rock Steady at 6:49 AM on December 4, 2008

Doom, of course, was sort of related to the Castle Wolfenstein theme of games, which was first released in 1981 for Apple. I was impressed by Doom and knew it to be revolutionary, but not as impressed when first seeing Castle Wolfenstein for some reason. Wikipedia calls it the first "stealth game" and that may be the reason.
posted by stbalbach at 6:56 AM on December 4, 2008

I don't think this is because Flash's VM has become bucketloads faster. It's using the new mechanism to load libraries of C code into the flash runtime ('Alchemy'). Doom was simply compiled against this library, then some bridge work was added to map Doom's graphic output to the flash viewport.

This is why it won't work on PPC - it's native intel code. You can port a dos-based game easily enough; things hooking into system libraries and DirectX probably won't be so regularly ported. But export more of this kind of thing; highly performant flash, built with very specific 3rd party extensions.

Flash is finally turning into Director/Shockwave. Desktop runtime, untrusted 3rd party platform-specific extension, ever-moving language goalposts... this may mark the spectacular shark jump moment of Flash.
posted by davemee at 7:07 AM on December 4, 2008 [2 favorites]

This takes me back..... I haven't killed an imp in years.
posted by Mastercheddaar at 7:10 AM on December 4, 2008

No IDSPISPOPD?

idclip and iddqd work.
posted by ROU_Xenophobe at 7:13 AM on December 4, 2008

Hey! Why does the Flash VM get a port before the Amiga version comes out?!?
posted by davemee at 7:19 AM on December 4, 2008 [1 favorite]

I was SUPPOSED to be working today. But OH NO. Gotta feed the monkey now.
posted by ColdChef at 7:27 AM on December 4, 2008

No music? Aw.. Incomplete without the E1M1 theme. Guess I'll just have to blast the DooM Remix Project mp3s in the meantime.
posted by pyrex at 7:28 AM on December 4, 2008

That's awesome/crazy. Moore's Law is an amazing thing.

What?! How on earth is the idea that a modern computer can now do what a 486 PC could to 15 years ago somehow indicative of advancement or improvement?

If anything, it shows how the transition to web technology has been totally botched and just how badly performance has decreased, or at least not been handled properly.

There has never been a good reason for flash not to support the 3d acceleration found in almost all PCs for nearly a decade, other then laziness or something.
posted by delmoi at 7:32 AM on December 4, 2008 [2 favorites]

John Stalvern waited. The lights above him blinked and sparked out of the air. There were demons in the base. He didn't see them, but had expected them now for years. His warnings to Cernel Joson were not listenend to and now it was too late. Far too late for now, anyway.
John was a space marine for fourteen years. When he was young he watched the spaceships and he said to dad "I want to be on the ships daddy."
Dad said "No! You will BE KILL BY DEMONS"
There was a time when he believed him. Then as he got oldered he stopped. But now in the space station base of the UAC he knew there were demons.
"This is Joson" the radio crackered. "You must fight the demons!"
So John gotted his palsma rifle and blew up the wall.
"HE GOING TO KILL US" said the demons
"I will shoot at him" said the cyberdemon and he fired the rocket missiles. John plasmaed at him and tried to blew him up. But then the ceiling fell and they were trapped and not able to kill.
"No! I must kill the demons" he shouted
The radio said "No, John. You are the demons"
And then John was a zombie.
posted by m0nm0n at 7:36 AM on December 4, 2008 [14 favorites]

Ah...I used to love Doom after a rough day at the ref and circ desks.

Now, I can play at work, when I'm having a rough day at the library.

Doom isn't the only thing running around and ending up in the same place, I guess.
posted by QIbHom at 7:43 AM on December 4, 2008 [2 favorites]

insert Duke Nukem Forever joke here
posted by Joe Beese at 7:44 AM on December 4, 2008

As if this post weren't great enough, I must also point out the awesomeness of the massive list of tags. Love it.
posted by shiu mai baby at 7:52 AM on December 4, 2008

Has anyone ever tried talking to the monsters? Maybe they just dropped by our dimension to borrow a cup of sugar.

Until we understand and address the root causes of the monster invasion (hint: it's John Romero's head), we'll just keep wasting precious government resources on space marine salaries, powerups, and thousands upon thousands of explosive barrels.
posted by Krrrlson at 8:00 AM on December 4, 2008 [1 favorite]

Cool, a game based on the movie starring The Rock!
posted by ALongDecember at 8:02 AM on December 4, 2008 [2 favorites]

Back in 1994, a buddy of mine scored a job as a computer operator on the night shift of some dsitibution center out in the sticks of Aurora, Illinois. It was just after the very first Pentiums came out and he had three of them in his office. For almost 6 months my weekends went like this:

1. Show up at his office at 11:00PM on a Friday night
2. Make a huge urn of black, strong coffee
3. Raid the snack area (pop tarts, pretzels, soda, etc...)
4. Play DOOM over the network
5. Play DOOM over the network
6. Play more DOOM over the network
7. Make more coffee
8. Go home at 3:00PM the next day.
9. Show up at his office at 11:00PM on a Saturday night...

Seriously, thats how much we loved this game. After playing Civilization for two years and thinking that was the cats pajamas, DOOM rocked our world. We started fucking around with all the mods and got bored (automatic shotgun anyone?) but DOOM was my gateway to the sad, sad world of having to piss in a coffee can and not showering for three day stretches. Good times.
posted by KevinSkomsvold at 8:04 AM on December 4, 2008 [4 favorites]

I first heard about Doom on an NPR story about some new game that was wiping out productivity in offices all over the country. This had to have been around '95. I went home, downloaded the demo (over dialup, natch), and fired it up first thing Saturday morning. When I stopped playing, I looked up and it was evening.

Good times.
posted by jquinby at 8:06 AM on December 4, 2008

Better than playing an otherwise excellent game re-implemented in Flash (which is a terrible resource-hog when used for this sort of thing - I still don't understand why people are making complicated 3D games in Flash) you could do something much more sensible, like download a modern, mouselook-supporting, OpenGL-based engine for Doom. Like Doom Legacy. You'll probably need to turn the difficulty up a few notches, as the interface constraints were one of the major challenges, in retrospect.
posted by Dysk at 8:06 AM on December 4, 2008

Flunkie : Has anyone ever tried talking to the monsters? Maybe they just dropped by our dimension to borrow a cup of sugar.

Oh sure, you get taken in by the hard luck story "yeah, my dimensional rift broke down and I'm just looking for a couple of bucks to get catch a bus home", and you think to yourself that this is a demon you can help. So you invite him over to make sure he gets a good meal in him, and the next thing you know, he's been living on your couch for three months, eating all your food and taking up the bathroom at all hours of the day. Worse than that, he keeps inviting his imp friends over and one of them has a predilection for humping your ironing board.

Finally you say "Enough, get out" and that's when it gets ugly, they start giving you that look like "Hey, we are demons you know" and you have to go to the closet, get your plasma gun and show them the door.

It's all a scam. Demons aren't your friends, so don't get tricked. If you see one, just ignore it, if it gets persistent, use your chaingun. It may be hard at first, but think of it as 'tough-love'.
posted by quin at 8:11 AM on December 4, 2008 [12 favorites]

Cool, a game based on the movie starring The Rock!

I saw the Doom movie in an actual movie theater. I was blitzed out of my mind and, in fact, either passed out or fell asleep a few times. The next day, one of the guys I was with tried discussing the movie with me, but I couldn't remember a thing about it. He said I was better off that way.
posted by uncleozzy at 8:14 AM on December 4, 2008 [1 favorite]

it was only a matter of time once they created DOS4g for flash.
posted by shmegegge at 8:49 AM on December 4, 2008 [1 favorite]

Nothing captures the utter nerdgasm that was Doom (and John Carmack's weird low-level programming genius) like the BFG FAQ.

My favorite part: The gun emits invisible death rays the moment the projectile hits something. If jump off a ledge at the exact moment you fire, your character's grunt covers the sound of the BFG firing. So if you jump off a ledge and fire the gun down a corridor, you can run toward your deathmatch opponents, face them at the moment your shot hits the wall at the end of that corridor, and silently make them die for no apparent reason.
posted by straight at 8:58 AM on December 4, 2008 [5 favorites]

has anyone else found that the mouse doesn't work? I mean, I can see my OS X cursor and everything, but the mouse does bupkis in game.
posted by shmegegge at 9:02 AM on December 4, 2008

has anyone else found that the mouse doesn't work? I mean, I can see my OS X cursor and everything, but the mouse does bupkis in game.

Doom was pre-mouselook. You play it with just the keyboard. The '3D'-ness of it is illusory; it's really 2D, but you can move up and down to different planes of those two dimensions.
posted by Happy Dave at 9:32 AM on December 4, 2008

You can do some wild stuff with mods.
posted by BeerFilter at 9:41 AM on December 4, 2008 [1 favorite]

Yep, it's still fun.
posted by paisley henosis at 9:44 AM on December 4, 2008

That's really neat Straight; Doom is an all time favorite of mine, but I never knew that about the BFG. I knew there was something funky going on with the secondary blast radius, but hadn't thought to investigate further.

Another interesting and somewhat obscure play mechanic that always makes me chuckle is the effect of the berserk packs. When you pick one up it boosts your punching power and turns your screen red for about thirty seconds, but in reality the upgrade to your fists last the rest of the level and the red tint doesn't offer any advantage over regular play, it's just a fake-out attempt to get players to rush into combat with fists swinging.

I also always enjoyed the antagonistic relationships coded into the different monsters, so that when there were enough different types around they were as likely to start slaughtering one another as they were to focus on you.

Anyway this flash version is neat conceptually, but without the ability to remap the keyboard Doom ends up being kind of unplayable.
posted by CheshireCat at 9:46 AM on December 4, 2008

Is there a multiplayer option?

ATQ0V1E1S0=0

Mom! I told you, do not touch the phone !!!11!
posted by racingjs at 9:57 AM on December 4, 2008 [1 favorite]

Basically, Doom levels are big two-dimensional fields. Within the fields are lines that are joined to make what are called sectors. Sectors have floor and ceiling height values. Walls (and doors) are just sectors that have an equal ceiling and floor height. "Widows" are created by having a sector with space between the ceiling and the floor between two sectors without any. The difference from one sector to the next determines whether you can run between them, shoot through them, and so on. There are no ramps (well, there are, but only in much, much later modifications of the engine). Any time you trigger something by movement (like in E1M1, where reaching a certain point in a hallway lowers the platform the imps are on), you've crossed a line which has been set to cause something to happen when crossed. Any decent editor makes that part pie.
posted by Pope Guilty at 10:11 AM on December 4, 2008 [2 favorites]

I also always enjoyed the antagonistic relationships coded into the different monsters, so that when there were enough different types around they were as likely to start slaughtering one another as they were to focus on you.

The way it works is that projectile attacks will provoke monster infighting if they come from a different kind of monster, except bullets which always provoke infighting. So a Former Soldier who is shot by a fellow Former Soldier will retaliate, but an Imp hit by a fireball will not. Melee attacks will provoke infighting regardless of the source.

The Partial Invisibility is more awesome than people realize, since it causes monsters to attack inaccurately; if you know what you're doing, you can very easily get large groups of otherwise-dangerous monsters to wipe each other out.
posted by Pope Guilty at 10:18 AM on December 4, 2008

straight: you could also just bump the nearest wall [space bar] to cover the sound of the BFG firing up, no ledge required. I remember thinking "Hmm, a grunt sound. I bet Chad just shot the BFG."
posted by jmcmurry at 10:23 AM on December 4, 2008 [1 favorite]

Doom was pre-mouselook.

this is entirely untrue. you could not look up and down, but you could look left and right and shoot with mouse1. none of these is true in the flash version.

so again, has anyone else gotten their mouse working with this version? i'm wondering if i'm encountering this problem because i'm on a Mac Pro.
posted by shmegegge at 10:32 AM on December 4, 2008

I can't jump. Why can't I jump?
posted by Burhanistan at 10:51 AM on December 4, 2008 [1 favorite]

IDKFA
posted by Grimp0teuthis at 11:07 AM on December 4, 2008

And my space bar won't open anything. I'm doomed.
posted by maxwelton at 11:15 AM on December 4, 2008

And my space bar won't open anything. I'm doomed.

Control and space bar seem to be switched.
posted by COBRA! at 11:19 AM on December 4, 2008

Needs more Marathon.
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 11:24 AM on December 4, 2008 [2 favorites]

And modern Marathon.
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 11:25 AM on December 4, 2008 [2 favorites]

Immediately crashed my browser. I think I need to put himem.sys in my autoexec.bat
posted by East Manitoba Regional Junior Kabaddi Champion '94 at 7:53 AM on December 4 [!]

Not ot nerd out or anything, but I think you need to add it to your config.sys instead.
posted by WinnipegDragon at 11:53 AM on December 4, 2008 [2 favorites]

I was waiting for that WinnpegDragon. Gold star.
posted by East Manitoba Regional Junior Kabaddi Champion '94 at 12:29 PM on December 4, 2008 [2 favorites]

Tech note: Flash doesn't have the ability to re-position the pointer, and probably never will. Until that happens, you'll never get mouselook. Even Java applets don't have permission to do that sort of thing unless you jump through a bunch of hoops.

Basically what needs to happen, is that the game needs to turn the pointer invisible, then move it to the center of the screen. Every update, it reads the position that the pointer is at, then re-positions it to the center.

Also, as far as using Alchemy to port C libraries, I thought it just translated it into bytecode for the interpreter. I'd think that the only thing keeping this from working on PowerPC macs is that the Flash plugin for PowerPC macs is slow as hell.
posted by fnerg at 12:37 PM on December 4, 2008

Just wanted to plug the recently found awesome open source remake of Quake, Cube and its latest incarnation Sauerbraten. Aside from ridiculously fast frame rates (I was getting 190+ fps on my Imac), the game is also amazingly editable.
posted by fenriq at 12:55 PM on December 4, 2008 [1 favorite]

The '3D'-ness of it is illusory; it's really 2D, but you can move up and down to different planes of those two dimensions.

Which makes it 3d.

A 2d map with height information (ie another dimension) is 3d. By definition. Truely genuinely really actually 3d.

The "2.5D" term came about because while much of the game and mechanics are 3d, where it was possible to optimize run speeds by substituting a 2d calculation for a 3d one in a way which was unlikely to be noticeable, they did so. For example:

1. Someone fires a rocket at you. You hop off your pedestal and the rocket flies directly over your head but does not hit you, because Doom does this collision calculation in 3d.

2. Someone fires a rocket not at you, but at a section of wall hundreds of feet directly above you. The splash damage hits you just as hard as if the rocket had hit the wall beside you, because Doom does the damage-radius collision calculation in 2d.

In the single player game, players are very hard pressed to notice the shortcut of #2 - a scenario where it makes a difference is very rare. (Deathmatch on the other hand...)

The biggest of these optimizations was in the texture mapping - the appearance of the walls having texture is done by scaling and skewing the textures, which is not a mathematically perfect mapping but is fast, and a restriction from this technique is that walls must be vertical and be rendered vertically. So if you were to look up, there would be no vanishing point in the Z axis (like using a zoom lense from an infinite distance). Hence when games using this engine did allow the players controls for looking up or down, they limited the angle so that the lack of vanishing point was less apparent.

As time went on and new engines came out, the meanings of "2D", "2.5D", and "3D" constantly changed into all sorts of contorted things, depending on the feature set of whichever game was allegedly the new hotness that had TRUE 3d (NO BUT FOR REALS THIS TIME!!!), in some way that the previously-declared "TRUE 3D" games didn't. (no use of sprites, rooms over rooms, mouselook, 3-axis controls, bump mapping, whatever)
It's all rather stupid - "2d" and "3d" are not useful declarations of feature set.

At the end of the day, the Doom gameworld is built from three-dimensional structures (among other things), the gameplay is three-dimensional, and there is a bunch of things that the game engine is not designed to do.
posted by -harlequin- at 1:00 PM on December 4, 2008 [2 favorites]

>Needs more Marathon.

That's exactly what I was going to say. Marathon was so much better...
posted by blastrid at 2:51 PM on December 4, 2008

-harlequin-, monsters 200 feet below block you from walking off a ledge. That's not quite three dimensional.

Plus, it's all radial coordinates. WTF, JC?
posted by NortonDC at 3:10 PM on December 4, 2008

fnerg, you're right. Alchemy compiles C/C++ to flash bytecode.

Having seen what an improvement ditching PPC architectures has seen for Apple, I'd doubt Adobe would see much value is pursuing any course other than to follow likewise. I think it's still Futurewave Splash Player on those PPC Apples.
posted by davemee at 3:14 PM on December 4, 2008

-harlequin-, NortonDC, the way I understand it is this: it uses a height map for movement. It all happens in 2d but shows as 3d from a fairly fixed viewpoint. You can't look up and down because this would make the view calculations much more complex, and rip the texturing to pieces for the walls.

You know you're running around on a 2d surface because you can never go underneath something, or on top of it, the map is 2d and so cannot support different spatial structures occupying the same (vertical) space.

The verticality is all a hack to make it feel more varied. Adding a quick height check for bullets using the raycaster is trivial.

The nerdgasm aspect of the improvements in Duke Nukem was that you could look up and down, and things could be on top of other things. And that 'forever' would have so much more than that, you ain't seen nothing yet.
posted by davemee at 3:22 PM on December 4, 2008

"Sauerbraten"? Really? Awesome!
I'm going to download it, only to be able to tell my friends that I was just playing an open source ego shooter called Marinated Beef.
posted by kolophon at 3:23 PM on December 4, 2008

monsters 200 feet below block you from walking off a ledge. That's not quite three dimensional.

That is the example I gave in example #2 - monster collision is optimized the same way as splash-damage collision.
But as demonstrated by example #1, other (more important) collision calculations are done properly.
posted by -harlequin- at 3:30 PM on December 4, 2008

Daveme:
-harlequin-, NortonDC, the way I understand it is this: it uses a height map for movement.

Firstly, a height map is 3D. There are clear limits to what kind of 3D structures can be constructed with a heightmap, but they remain genuinely 3D structures.

Little green toy soldiers are the same - they are injection-molded in a two-part cast, which has the same limits as a heightmap (because it is one) but those soldiers are genuinely 3D structures, even though no part of them can go under or over another part on the z axis.
You'll know they're 3D if you accidentally stand on one with bare feet. :-)

Secondly, it did not use a height map for movement, it used a height map to construct the structures of the environment. Movement was influenced by the height map, but not determined by it. Eg run off a cliff, and your trajectory will make a parabolic curve through space as you start to fall. If your movement was determined by the height map, there would be no falling, you would instead instantaneously be on the ground at the bottom of the cliff.

You know you're running around on a 2d surface because you can never go underneath something, or on top of it, the map is 2d and so cannot support different spatial structures occupying the same (vertical) space.

This is overbroad or false in the sense that you can go underneath and on top of some (non-map) game objects as noted, and it's irrelevant in the sense that (as noted) by this logic, toy soldiers are two dimensional. They're not. Structural limitations are not an absence of a dimension, or a fake dimension. It's really there. It really affects things. They're just structural limitations. Even your ipod has them ;-)

The verticality is all a hack to make it feel more varied.

The verticality affects gameplay in almost every way that it should. It is fundamentally present in the gameplay. There are glaring tradeoffs, but to suggest (if you are) that verticality is not actually present in the game, or that it does not affect the gameplay, is simply wrong. Some of the underlying mechanics lack verticality. Some have it. The ones that need it the most have it, the ones that need it the least, don't.

Adding a quick height check for bullets using the raycaster is trivial.

But it would be the wrong design decision. The controls for doom were complicated in the day, and they were trying to make the game accessible to all. This lead them to have the bullets auto-aim on the Z, which allowed them to abandon controls for looking up and down, which streamlined the gameplay.

It all happens in 2d but shows as 3d from a fairly fixed viewpoint. You can't look up and down because this would make the view calculations much more complex, and rip the texturing to pieces for the walls.
The nerdgasm aspect of the improvements in Duke Nukem was that you could look up and down, and things could be on top of other things.

You're confusing things. The Duke Nukem engine allowed you to look up and down the same way that the doom engine did - it ripped the texturing to pieces. In terms of 3d-ness, the underlying techniques for the look-up/down were the same. What was different was the design decision in Duke to give the player controls that allowed them to look up and down, whereas the design decision in Doom was to have the weapons auto-aim on Z and have simple controls.
The Nukem gameplay put more emphasis on the gameplay involving Z axis, because Doom had paved the way for more sophisticated gameplay and controls and the market was ready and eager, not because the Duke engine had a an extra dimension that Doom engine didn't - it didn't - they both had the same bag of tricks. Doom left a lot of those tricks in the bag, and Nukem made as much use of them as possible.
posted by -harlequin- at 4:18 PM on December 4, 2008 [3 favorites]

No music? Aw.. Incomplete without the E1M1 theme.

DOOMSTOLEYRMETALS

This is seriously cool, and I'm thinking of all kinds of uses for Alchemy. I wasn't aware such a thing existed.

_{goes off to beat 3D Realms to the release of DNF}
posted by [user was fined for this post] at 4:33 PM on December 4, 2008

>Doom was pre-mouselook.

>this is entirely untrue. you could not look up and down, but you could look left and right and shoot with mouse1. none of these is true in the flash version.

Not entirely untrue. You could indeed use the mouse to look left and right in Doom, Doom95, Doom2, and Final Doom. This is not what is usually meant by 'mouselook', however.

Also, Doomworld's 10 Years of Doom. The mod and source port community is still pretty vibrant after all these years.
posted by stavrosthewonderchicken at 4:54 PM on December 4, 2008

Actually, with Alchemy, I wonder if you can use pointer arithmetic to read from out of bounds memory locations, or if the interpreter's still doing bounds checking.
posted by fnerg at 5:15 PM on December 4, 2008

Harlequin, can you show me how to look up and down in Doom, because I'm struggling to follow what you're claiming here. The engine doesn't support look up/down because this adds a whole tier of extra transformations on the rendering process - we're talking rotation of the view camera here and not just a translation on the z-axis, right? That jiggle as you run or mounting a lift has zero computational impact.

But yeah, you're right, I meant 'for the environment' when I said 'for the map'. 3d is still a hack in Doom, and used to break the environment up in ways that, for example, a different coloured floor, could not achieve, rather than creating structurally-realistic environments. You could raise or lower a floor, but you couldn't go under it.

Duke supported genuine 3d geometry which Doom didn't, but I don't want to get into a my least-favourite-fifteen-year-old-game-is-better-than-your-favourite-fifteen-year-old-game territory.
posted by davemee at 5:16 PM on December 4, 2008

What screams good weapon design is when you cheat and you choose to use the shotgun instead of a better weapon because it looks and feels better. Didn't idkfa give you the BFG too?

I used to copy dos4gw.exe on every new computer I got, to make sure my old DOS games would run.
posted by ersatz at 6:13 PM on December 4, 2008

So they compiled the C source to Flash bytecode? I wonder how long until someone tries compiling a Linux kernel.
posted by dunkadunc at 6:22 PM on December 4, 2008

davemee

The engine doesn't support look up/down because this adds a whole tier of extra transformations on the rendering process

No, the whole tier of extra transformations is needed to do it correctly.
- Neither Doom nor Duke could do it correctly, because they both used the same texture mapping technique - they both skipped the whole extra tier of maths. (And rightly so).
- Both the Doom engine and Duke engine could give a limited but passable approximation.
- The designers chose to make this approximation available to the player in Duke.
- The designers chose not to make this approximation available to the player in Doom.
- Other designers using the Doom engine did make it available to the player. Initially in games that licensed the engine (Heretic, etc), and later in Doom itself when Id released the Doom source code, and fans (by that time now long used to look-up/down controls being the norm in games) promptly made versions with the necessary controls added.

[And since then, Doom (the game, not the engine) has been ported to far more powerful 3d engines, which have the whole tier of extra transformations, run in 24bit instead of 8bit, use 3d acceleration and so on. I'm not referring to those.]

Duke supported genuine 3d geometry which Doom didn't, but I don't want to get into a my least-favourite-fifteen-year-old-game-is-better-than-your-favourite-fifteen-year-old-game territory.

It supported the same geometry as Doom. No more, no less. But you had little way of knowing that if you were a player (and thus not able to see what was really going on).
The engines used the same tricks and the same optimizations, and consequently had the same geometry and rendering limits, but Duke had tools for hiding many of those limits from the player, while Doom was plain.

Putting rooms over rooms, for example. This was done with both the Duke engine, and in later Doom-engine games, and it was faked in the same way in both cases (portals). And in both cases, neither game ever had geometry that placed a room on top of another room - but a player would never know this from their play experience, because they could exit a room, go up some stairs, and walk into a different room that was directly above the previous one. And that's great - as far as the player is concerned, the geometry in Duke has fewer limits, and the player experience is the only thing that matters...

...unless you try to claim that Doom was faking 3D and Duke wasn't, when in reality, they operated the same way. That is a claim about the underlying mechanics, and those were the same, even though the end result to the player was totally different.

The Nerdgasm was deserved, but on grounds of the resulting player experience, not on the grounds of a leap in underpinning engine technology, because that wasn't how the leap in the player experience was achieved.

I may seem like I want to have my cake and eat it too by alternately pointing to the gameplay and other times the engine, but claims that one is fake 3D and one is not are disproved by how the engines worked, while at the same time I don't want to be misunderstood as claiming that this means the gameplay is no different. The advances in Duke were substantial and wonderful, but they weren't done the way you think they were.
posted by -harlequin- at 6:45 PM on December 4, 2008 [2 favorites]

I remember seeing the first screenshots of DOOM and, unfamiliar with "first person shooters," totally misunderstanding them. See, all the screenshots were from the first level, and thus featured only the pistol. So I thought the pistol was the head and shoulders of your character, a sort of hunchbacked man, wearing a big, bizarre mechanical helmet of some sort and a brown cloak.

I was still confused when I sat down to play it; instead of carrying a weapon, my little man appeared to attack by exploding his own face.
posted by churl at 8:43 PM on December 4, 2008 [6 favorites]

Not entirely untrue. You could indeed use the mouse to look left and right in Doom, Doom95, Doom2, and Final Doom. This is not what is usually meant by 'mouselook', however.

stavros, please bear in mind that this was in response to my earlier question of "has anyone else found that the mouse doesn't work? I mean, I can see my OS X cursor and everything, but the mouse does bupkis in game."

when someone tells me that that's because doom didn't support "mouselook" in a game, I'm going to assume that their definition of mouselook is a little off, but that I know what they're saying and refrain from correcting them for the sake of discussion.
posted by shmegegge at 9:28 PM on December 4, 2008

Doomsday for all your offline doom fun. Supports OpenGl & Direct3d drawing modes, mouselook, lots of snazzy features. Great for lans. Needs the .WAD files from the DOOM version you're playing (supports all of 'em).

Also it's interesting how people rate a game's experience by how little one notices the time passing whilst playing.
posted by Submiqent at 10:46 PM on December 4, 2008

my little man appeared to attack by exploding his own face

This is actually a normal part of growing up.
posted by East Manitoba Regional Junior Kabaddi Champion '94 at 9:58 AM on December 5, 2008 [3 favorites]

um....no strafe?
posted by es_de_bah at 6:08 PM on December 5, 2008

dunkadunc, oh yeah. My dad and I got weird dreams when we first started playing this game.

The only thing that would make this better is if the music worked. The music added a lot to the atmosphere.
posted by wastelands at 7:28 PM on December 5, 2008

>> my little man appeared to attack by exploding his own face

> This is actually a normal part of growing up.

Point, set, match.

(There's a .WAD joke here that I don't have the balls to make.)
posted by churl at 8:24 PM on December 5, 2008 [2 favorites]

um....no strafe?

Q, E. The controls are on the site.
posted by ersatz at 5:40 AM on December 6, 2008

-harlequin-, thanks for that. I genuinely was under the impression that Doom was an engine cul-de-sac.
posted by davemee at 6:01 AM on December 7, 2008