4 days ago
There are no walls in Doom! Sounds like a clickbait, but it's a technical truth. Doom's map is a flat chart, a
There are no walls in Doom!
Sounds like a clickbait, but it's a technical truth. Doom's map is a flat chart, a view from the top. A wall at the level of is just a line at the boundary of the sector: a zero-thick line with two sides with textures and nothing between them. But the doorway looks deep, right? It's an illusion.
In Wolfenstein 3D and it's a year and a half older everything was the opposite: the wall is a whole cell. The map is a grid of 64 by 64, and the wall takes up the whole square like a cube in a constructor.
Doom threw away the cubes and got free: any corners, any heights, any stairs. But it paid for the famous limitation not to build a room above a room. The plot is flat: every dot of the map belongs to exactly the same sector. A bridge you can walk under?
Build, the Duke Nukem 3D engine, turned the same idea around: the level is not built, it's cut. The world by default is an infinite stone-thickness, and you're breaking through the cave-sectors. I really like this look. It's very accurately conveying the spirit of the shooters of those years: their levels are not buildings, but labyrinths cut into the rock. But the walls are still lines.
The real thickness is what the Quake brought in. The level is being assembled like bricks: the brach is a whole block of stone with six branches and a real volume. Two blocks next to each other, and between them is a fence.
I remembered what I felt on my skin: in my free time I carved a little game in the spirit of King's Field, and the walls there are now thought-provoking (don't ask why) each wall is not a block, but a flat sheet placed on the boundary of the cell. #game
Sounds like a clickbait, but it's a technical truth. Doom's map is a flat chart, a view from the top. A wall at the level of is just a line at the boundary of the sector: a zero-thick line with two sides with textures and nothing between them. But the doorway looks deep, right? It's an illusion.
In Wolfenstein 3D and it's a year and a half older everything was the opposite: the wall is a whole cell. The map is a grid of 64 by 64, and the wall takes up the whole square like a cube in a constructor.
Doom threw away the cubes and got free: any corners, any heights, any stairs. But it paid for the famous limitation not to build a room above a room. The plot is flat: every dot of the map belongs to exactly the same sector. A bridge you can walk under?
Build, the Duke Nukem 3D engine, turned the same idea around: the level is not built, it's cut. The world by default is an infinite stone-thickness, and you're breaking through the cave-sectors. I really like this look. It's very accurately conveying the spirit of the shooters of those years: their levels are not buildings, but labyrinths cut into the rock. But the walls are still lines.
The real thickness is what the Quake brought in. The level is being assembled like bricks: the brach is a whole block of stone with six branches and a real volume. Two blocks next to each other, and between them is a fence.
I remembered what I felt on my skin: in my free time I carved a little game in the spirit of King's Field, and the walls there are now thought-provoking (don't ask why) each wall is not a block, but a flat sheet placed on the boundary of the cell. #game