Ladna
Junior Member
Posts: 115
Registered: 04-10 |
Doom is more complicated than you think. For one, software rendering isn't easy, but BUILD shares that handicap so it's not really relevant. However, BSP allows Doom to support huge maps without chopping them into parts and only loading one at a time, or using more complicated tricks like procedural generation. Without that stuff, you're faced with the daunting task of collision detection and occlusion over thousands and thousands of sectors. Doing this even at the low rate of 35fps is pretty intense, and really the only way Doom gets away with it is using BSP.
It's easy to say, "Pff, Doom/BUILD is so primitive compared to Black Ops or Bad Company, surely there will never be performance issues", but in many ways Doom's technical achievements still dwarf modern games. The vast majority of advances that have been made are graphics-oriented and implemented in hardware. But when you start talking about game logic, collision detection, or physics in general, we're basically still at Doom/BUILD technical levels, with all the limitations that suggests.
Well, it's also perhaps worth mentioning that tons of engine limits have been lifted from the original Doom source code by heroic source port authors, so it's not as if something written in 1992 could magically handle modern maps like Sunder. In many ways Doom has kept current with hardware advances, so it's probably more accurate to say that while Doom's renderer is arguably a lot more primitive than that of modern games, source port engine updates continue to take advantage of hardware advances (more RAM, bigger/faster disk drives, faster CPUs).
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04-13-11 04:14 
