Post
by Raziel » Thu Oct 04, 2007 8:10 pm
You all have some knowledge but with missing parts. FPS (First Person Shooter) games has a real interesting background. And the source of this era is absolutely ID Software. I said that because in the beginning many companies tried to make such FPS games but they were really unsuccessful. Wolfenstein 3D was the first FPS game to achieve some level of quality, and the Doom legend followed it. They all were DOS based games including logical 3D environment and Sprite based character animation. Enough technology for that time. And John Carmack was the architect of this games. At last he made the revolutionary game, Quake. Fully textured, 3D modelled graphics; dark atmosphere, real adrenaline, this game was almost perfect. But still in the DOS environment. Then he began to work with Silicon Graphics, the creator of OpenGL. And he created the most flexible graphics engine of all time, Quake2 Engine. So our FPS games were carried to the new platform, Windows. And the legendary game, Half-Life is build on this engine, but with great improvements. Counter-Strike is a Half-Life MOD, so it's based on Quake2 Engine, too. But a new Engine grew up from the depths of the Epic Megagames, Unreal Engine, trying to beat the Quake2 Engine domination, and made it by developing their stuff to this far, Unreal3 Engine, the ultimate graphics for Unreal Tournament 2007. Even better than Quake4 Engine. So almost all game developers buy this Engine for their games in these days. That's the evolution of FPS gaming technology, but if you ask for FPS games, it differs. As I said before, the timeline 'till the creation of Quake was the rise of ID Software. Then Half-Life got the flag, and carried it with CS MOD. Then many games had been created without the soul of a real FPS game. Then John Carmack created Doom3, a real sequel to the legendary game Doom2. Quake3 was successful in graphics but failed in game stuff. So Quake4 turned to origin, single player gaming, but I thin it sucks. Quake was really good because it depends on the foundations of Doom and Doom2, the other Quakes (2,3,4) were just useless scraps. Unreal was a good game, indeed but Unreal2 was lack of Unreal spirit, so the saga continued only in multiplayer gaming platform. To me, the best FPS ever is Quake.
What is an Engine? An Engine is some programming stuff including reading models and textures, combine them for visulation, calculate physics for realistic movement, create ligting for enhanced graphics, etc.