First-person shooter engine

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A first-person shooter engine is a

3D environments for use in a first-person shooter video game. First-person refers to the view where the players see the world from the eyes of their characters. Shooter refers to games which revolve primarily around wielding firearms and killing other entities in the game world, either non-player characters
or other players.

The development of the FPS graphic engines is characterized by a steady increase in technologies, with some breakthroughs. Attempts at defining distinct generations lead to arbitrary choices of what constitutes a highly modified version of an 'old engine' and what is a new engine.

The classification is complicated as game engines blend old and new technologies. Features considered advanced in a new game one year, become the expected standard the next year. Games with a combination of both older and newer features are the norm. For example,

Jurassic Park: Trespasser (1998) introduced physics to the FPS genre, which did not become common until around 2002. Red Faction (2001) featured a destructible environment
, something still not common in engines years later.

Timeline

A diagram showing the history of FPS engines.

1970s and 1980s: Early FPS graphics engines

See also: List of first-person shooter engines § Early FPS graphics engines

Game rendering for this early generation of FPS were already from the first-person perspective and with the need to shoot things, however they were mostly made up using vector graphics.

There are two possible claimants for the first FPS,

Maze War and Spasim.[1] Maze War was developed in 1973 and involved a single player making his way through a maze of corridors rendered using a fixed perspective. Multiplayer capabilities, where players attempted to shoot each other, were added later and were networked in 1974. Spasim was originally developed in 1974 and involved players moving through a wire-frame 3D universe. Spasim could be played by up to 32 players on the PLATO network.[2]

Developed in-house by Incentive Software, the Freescape engine is considered to be one of the first proprietary 3D engines to be used for computer games, although the engine was not used commercially outside of Incentive's own titles. The first game to use this engine was the puzzle game Driller in 1987.[3]

Early 1990s: Wireframes to 2.5D worlds and textures

See also: List of first-person shooter engines § Early 1990s: Wireframes to 2.5D Worlds and Textures

Games of this generation often had "3D" in their names but were not capable of full 3D rendering. Instead, they used ray casting 2.5D techniques to create a seemingly 3D environment from a 2D map, and flat sprites to draw enemies instead of 3D models. These games also began to use textures for environmental geometry instead of simple wire-frame models or solid colors.

Wolfenstein 3D engine which was later used for several other games. Catacomb 3D was also the first game to show the player character's hand on-screen, furthering the implication of the player into the character's role.[1]

levels
were all on the same plane.

Even though it was still not using true 3D,

room-over-room
support.

Doom's success spawned several games using the same engine or similar techniques, giving rise to the term Doom clones. The

room-over-room
by stacking sectors on top of sectors, but the techniques used remained the same.

Mid 1990s: 3D models, beginnings of hardware acceleration

See also: List of first-person shooter engines § Mid-1990s: Mid-1990s: 3D Models, beginnings of hardware acceleration

In the mid-1990s, game engines recreated true

3D worlds with arbitrary level geometry. Instead of sprites the engines used simply textured (single-pass texturing, no lighting details) polygonal
objects.

platform game mechanics and had most of the action take place in free-roaming outdoor environments rather than the corridor labyrinths of Wolfenstein 3D. The following year, Exact released its successor for the PlayStation console, Jumping Flash!, which used the same game engine but adapted it to place more emphasis on the platforming rather than the shooting. The Jumping Flash! series continued to use the same engine.[6][7]

Parallax Software's 1994 shooter Descent.[citation needed
]

The

Map
) was simplified during the creation of the map to reduce the processing required when playing the game.

Static lightmaps and 3D light sources were also "baked" at render time and added to the BSP files storing the levels. These features allowing for more realistic lighting than had previously been possible.

The first

id Tech 2 (Quake II, 1997) was one of the first games to take advantage of hardware accelerated graphics[9] (id Software later reworked Quake to add OpenGL
support to the game).

NPCs artificial intelligence (AI) compared to the Quake engine.[10]

Late 1990s: Full 32-bit color, and GPUs become standard

See also: List of first-person shooter engines § Late-1990s: 32-bit color, GPUs becomes standard

This period saw the introduction of the first video cards with

Radeon 7200
, a true competing graphics card line.

While all games of this period supported

scripting language made it easy to mod it.[13][14] One other improvement of Unreal compared to the previous generation of engines was its networking technology, which greatly improved the scalability of the engine on multiplayer.[15]

id Tech 3, first used for Quake III Arena, improved from its predecessor by allowing to store much more complex and smoother animations. It also had improved lighting and shadowing and introduced shaders and curved surfaces.[16]

Early 2000s: Increasing detail, outdoor environments, and rag-doll physics

See also: List of first-person shooter engines § Early 2000s: increasing detail, outdoor environments, rag-doll physics

New graphics hardware provided new capabilities, allowing new engines to add various new effects, such as particle effects or fog, as well as increase texture and polygon detail. Many games featured large outdoor environments, vehicles, and

rag-doll physics
.

Average Video Hardware requirements: a GPU with hardware

Rage 128, and software rendering (with an integrated Intel GMA
), though this was apparent that even a powerful CPU could not compensate for the lack of hardware T&L.

Games engines originally developed for the

sixth generation consoles like PlayStation 2 or GameCube
, those now having the computer power to handle graphic-intensive video games.

Mid 2000s: Lighting and pixel shaders, physics

See also: List of first-person shooter engines § Mid 2000s: lighting and pixel shaders, physics

The new generation of graphics chips allowed

GLSL (for OpenGL), or Cg
.

This resulted in the obsolescence of

Pixel shader 2.x support). The Radeon 9700 demonstrated that anti-aliasing (AA) and/or anisotropic filtering
(AF) could be fully usable options, even in the newest and most demanding titles at the time, and resulted in the widespread acceptance of AA and AF as standard features. AA and AF had been supported by many earlier graphics chips prior to this but carried a heavy performance hit and so most gamers opted not to enable these features.

With these new technologies game engines featured seamlessly integrated indoor/outdoor environments, used shaders for more realistic animations (characters, water, weather effects, etc.), and generally increased realism. The fact that the

Jurassic Park: Trespasser, but limited hardware capabilities at the time, and the absence of a middleware like Havok to handle physics had made it a technical and commercial failure.[18]

MegaTexture technology in the id Tech 4
engine.

The same year,

lip-syncing technology.[20]

Late 2000s: The approach to Photorealism

See also: List of first-person shooter engines § Late 2000s and beyond: the approach to photorealism

Further improvements in

Radeon X1xxx
series, allowed for improvements in graphic effects.

Developers of this era of 3D engines often tout their increasingly

motion blur, etc.), high-dynamic-range rendering, and unified lighting models with soft shadowing and volumetric lighting
.

However, most of engines capable of these effects are evolutions of engines from the previous generation, such as

Virtual Texturing technology[21]
).

The first games using

CryEngine 2 (Crysis
) was released in 2007.

Early 2010s: Graphic technique mixes

Further improvements in

Displacement Mapping and Tessellation
.

As of 2010, two upcoming evolutions of major existing engines had been released:

CryEngine 3, which powers Crysis 2 and 3
.

Few companies had discussed future plans for their engines;

John Carmack, the hardware capable of id Tech 6 did not yet exist.[24] The first title using the engine, Doom
, was released in mid 2016.

In September 2015, Valve released Source 2 in an update to Dota 2.[25]

See also

References

  1. ^ a b c d Dharamjit Rihal. "The History of First-Person Shooters" (PDF). Retrieved 2009-07-04.
  2. ^ "The history of the FPS. A pictorial". 2007-04-11. Retrieved 2009-07-04.
  3. ^ "Exploring the Freescape". IGN. 2008-10-22. Retrieved 2009-07-04.
  4. ^ Paul Lily (2009-07-21). "Doom to Dunia: A Visual History of 3D Game Engines". Pcgamer. Maximum PC. Retrieved 2009-07-05.
  5. ^ Metal Head at MobyGames
  6. ^ Geograph Seal (X68000), The Next Level
  7. ^ Fahs, Travis (4 November 2008). "Jumping Flashback". ign.com. Retrieved 20 April 2018.
  8. Rage 128
  9. ^ "id Tech 2". id Software. Archived from the original on November 8, 2009. Retrieved 2009-07-05.
  10. ^ a b "half Life: Improved Technology". GameSpot. Archived from the original on 2011-02-25. Retrieved 2009-07-08.
  11. ^ a b Paul Lily (2009-07-21). "Doom to Dunia: A Visual History of 3D Game Engines". Pcgamer. Maximum PC. Retrieved 2009-07-05.
  12. ^ "History of Unreal - Part 1". beyondunreal.com. 2005-05-31. Retrieved 2009-08-05.
  13. ^ "History of Unreal - Part 1". beyondunreal.com. 2005-05-31. Retrieved 2009-07-05. Probably the biggest draw to Unreal was the ability to mod it. Tim Sweeney (Founder of Epic) wrote a simple scripting engine into the game called UnrealScript.
  14. InformIT
    . 2009-07-21. Retrieved 2009-08-08.
  15. ^ "Network". Epic Games. 1999-07-21. Archived from the original on 2010-07-28. Retrieved 2009-08-08.
  16. ^ Paul Lily (2009-07-21). "Doom to Dunia: A Visual History of 3D Game Engines". Pcgamer. Maximum PC. Retrieved 2009-07-05.
  17. ^ "Playing Dead: Physics in Pop Games". hlhmod.com. 2007. Archived from the original on 2009-04-01. Retrieved 2009-08-09.
  18. Gamasutra. 1999-05-14. Archived from the original
    on February 27, 2008. Retrieved 2009-08-09.
  19. ^ "Doom 3". ixbtlabs.com. Retrieved 2009-08-09. The main advantage of the new system of lighting (besides the mentioned direct control of an artist over its masterpiece) is the capacity to render shadows in real time for every frame (...) Secondly, it's very hard to render muzzy, "soft" shadows prevailing in reality using shadow volumes. (...) Thirdly, summing up the two previous paragraphs we draw a conclusion that shadow volumes do not fit well for rendering shadows at vast open spaces.
  20. ^ "Half-Life 2". Eurogamer. 2004-11-14. Retrieved 2009-08-09. But yet the incredibly lifelike detail and unparalleled attention to detail in the facial and body animation bring the characters to life like no game has ever even come close to doing. Six years ago there were a handful of facial models, bags of imagination and some great voice work; now we've got a huge cast list who all have plenty to say (with impressively accurate dynamic lip synching) and do so with such an impressive array of visible emotions that infuse the game with a head-turning credibility that will change the way people view games forever.
  21. ^ "From Texture Virtualization to Massive Parallelization" (PDF). Id Software. August 2009. Archived from the original (PDF) on 2009-10-07. Retrieved 2009-07-07.
  22. ^ IGN (8 March 2011). "Unreal Engine 3: Official Samaritan Demo". Archived from the original on 2021-12-22. Retrieved 20 April 2018 – via YouTube.
  23. ^ "John Carmack on id Tech 6, Ray Tracing, Consoles, Physics and more". PC Perspective. 2008-03-12. Archived from the original on 2010-03-14. Retrieved 2010-03-27. What John does see ray tracing useful for is a very specific data model he has created called "sparse voxel octrees" that allow him to store immense amounts of data in a fashion that is easily accessed using ray tracing methods(...) This new data model and algorithm being worked on for id Tech 6 would allow, according to John, nearly infinite amounts of geometric detail in the world without the problems seen with tessellation engines or trying to store gigabytes of data locally.
  24. ^ "QuakeCon 08: id Tech 6 Will Utilin Carmack Interview. Rage, id Tech 6, Doom 4 Details, and More!". Pcgamer. Maximum PC. 2008-07-15. I still think there's one more generation to be had where we virtualize geometry with id Tech 6 and do some things that are truly revolutionary. (...) I know we can deliver a next-gen kick, if we can virtualize the geometry like we virtualized the textures; we can do things that no one's ever seen in games before.
  25. ^ "Dota 2 - Reborn". Dota2.com. Retrieved 2016-06-23.
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