honestly this is super damn interesting. thank you hogsy.
Download here:
added a comment to the IA upload with some extra commands you can run ingame. It'll run in DOSbox no problem. Sadly there's not a lot there - I wish this had been a build from a bit later, because it doesn't have any of the juicy 96-97 era portal stuff.
Scrubbed through the main EXE with /bin/strings. Don't see anything suggesting code borrowed from any other engine, so it appears to be scratch built, except for references to "LIBMACT" which I believe was a general "toolbox" library someone at 3D Realms developed that got used in Duke 3D among other things, with a bunch of input/output primitives, keyboard handling routines, etc.
Curiously though, the .WAD is definitely based on the Doom format. There are references to "lumps" in the strings, and that file will open in a Doom WAD editor, though it doesn't quite read correctly. The Doom source wasn't out yet, but the WAD format was fully documented by 95, so presumably they just chose it as a convenient starting point for game materials.
The .BSP map file is unrelated to the Quake files of the same name, and BSP was a universal technique of the time so I suspect that's a total coincidence. The file format is completely plaintext!
node 1771 A 0.000000 B 1.000000 C 0.000000 D 27648.000000 inid 504 outid -1 samenormal polygon 1692 verts 2416 2428 2424 2415 2419 2420 tname PREY5 tu 0.000000 0.000000 -64.000000 tv -64.000000 0.000000 0.000000 to -32768.000000 -27648.000000 -251904.000000 back 1772
so that's fun.
Post-Doom, a bunch of companies started independently developing polygonal 3D engines; Quake became the most well known, but there were others that developed independently and, if I recall, ended up with similar results. This demo looks a lot like Quake, but in 95 I don't think anyone had seen that game yet. Maybe there were personnel connections to id that let them see what the future held, but I imagine this is just convergent evolution.
The 486 enabled 3D programmers to do things they'd been champing at the bit to implement for years. I'd guess most of the techniques that games like Quake or Chasm: The Rift utilized were the subject of SIGGRAPH papers and demos from 92 or 93 that required $15,000 machines to demo.
that's a good point, and something that's been clawing at me since the demo -- this looks like Jedi Knight, which came out in 1997, but in software rendering mode.
which makes me realize that most of these were not so much various engines being 'visionary' or 'having breakthroughs', but instead that the state of everything was raising all the boats, and first to market kept being given credit for what the hardware + graphics software innovations brought as if it was their invention
or, rather, the devs WERE having breakthroughs, and visionary in their ability to keep a finger on the pulse of the leading edge of consumer hardware, and various ways of coding that allowed them to cram even more into that limited space. But the innovations themselves were just from the computer equivalent of "the face of archetecture was completely changed when we learned a new way to make steel that allowed huge lengths of it to be manufactured in bulk" or "hey guys when you put sticks in the cement it's way stronger"
as someone who has absorbed just about every piece of publicly available information on the first decade of id software's history, if there's one thing i wish i could impart to the collective gamer + game dev consciousness about this period of game history it is that the quake 1 engine was not some great leap forward by a lone promethean genius (and i think carmack himself would wholeheartedly reject this narrative as well; he's many things but not an egomaniac). if id hadn't shipped qtest in february 96 and quake that june, the evolutionary trajectory of 3D engines would not have turned out substantially differently. the timeframes of a few "firsts" might have shifted a bit, but many studios had already been working towards various quake-like (let's define that as: true 6DOF texture-mapped 3D, hybrid precalculated + dynamic lighting, complex overdraw management techniques) rendering approaches since the doom timeframe: looking glass, 3DR, lucasarts, bethesda, bungie, bullfrog, and probably dozens of european and japanese devs most of us know less about because of various language and cultural-historical barriers.
the truly exciting thing about this era of game dev history was that so many talented people, not just carmack and sweeney and whoever else history [mild rolleyes] has decided belongs in the marble bust gallery, could see what was just around the corner and knew what kinds of creative possibilities the new technology could unlock - and unlike the promises of so many later generations, much of that potential actually panned out instead of just dumping more money and fancier hardware into an arms race whose parameters were already very well understood.
it also brings the tragedy of id software's first decade into sharper focus - i would argue that the true "secret weapon" id possessed was less one heroic wizard who could pull some world-changing tech out of his hat, but the creative chemistry the whole team had built during their first few years of frantic creative and technical exploration, which of course was already unraveling by the beginning of quake's development and would come completely apart before its end. and if you'd told them in late 94 / early 95, "you can have this hot shit new 3D engine, but it'll cost you the team's creative soul", i think any game dev who was wiser than they were smart would've stepped off that path. but, sadly... we know how it turned out.
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