History of mportant advances in gaming engines you should know about
I'm not going to cover EVERYTHING, just the bits I deem important.
Commander Keen - Released in 1990 and bought us Adaptive Tile refresh, which is what make Commander Keen a smooth sidescoller (any quite literally every other side scroller since then)
Wolfenstein 3D - While not quite "3D" it did bring us Ray casting which greatly sped up rendering of 3D scenes.
Doom - Bought us Binary space partitioning (too complex to explain quickly, look it up)
Quake introduced us to Gouraud shading for moving objects, and a static lightmap for nonmoving objects; It was also one of the first major titles to take advantage of 3D Accelerators.
Past that point we started seeing the Unreal and iD Tech 3 engines showcasing :
- Shaders : Shaders are described and rendered as several layers, each layer contains a texture, a "blend mode" which determines how to superimpose it over the previous layer and texture orientation modes such as environment mapping, scrolling, and rotation
- Advanced Models : Greatly enhancing the texturing and animation of models
- Dynamic Shadows : The name says it all
- volumetric fog
- mirrors
- wave-form vertex distortion (makes water look pretty and more like water)
It's at this point where 3D Accelerators became really powerful (aka Enter CyTek Engine)
Here we started seeing advanced pixel and vertex shaders, High Dynamic Range lighting and further enhancements to models and shadows.
Just look at how far we have come :
What technological advances in gaming engines has got you excited?
Originally Posted by matt
