Is there anything Doom engine is better at than Quake engine?

[Hisymak]

Recently I started playing some Quake to get some new experience apart from playing Doom.

The Quake engine is indeed more technically advanced and superior to Doom engine. It's full true 3D engine, it supports actual 3D models (instead of sprites), full 3D environment with room-over-room and 3D platforms, horizontally moving walls and platforms etc.

However, when playing through Quake, I'm feeling, that it is missing something compared to Doom. Someting Doom is better at. This is primarily the detail and variety of environment and big open spaces and complex city-themed maps.

Althrough in Quake the environment is much more three-dimensional with all the 3D platforms and details and sloped floors/ceilings, as a trade-off it's missing micro-details. I feel that in Quake the corridors and rooms are more flat and plain. The less variety in textures and color palette does not really help to that. I also feel that in Quake the majority of levels are indoor places, with just ocassional outdoor spaces, which are rather tight. In Doom 2 we have lot of primarily big outdoor open levels, mainly the city levels in the second decade. And finally, I also feel that in Quake the levels are overally smaller, and there are less levels in each episode (not 9 levels, but only 8 or even 7).

I'm just wondering, is it anything related to the engine? Does Quake engine has any limitations and flaws compared to Doom engine? Or this is not that much related to engine itself, but rather to how the levels are made by level designers, and the overall Quake theme, for example big open city levels not making sense for Quake story?

EDIT: in other words, would it be possible to 100% replicate Doom 2 maps in Quake engine (meaning just the map geometry)?

Edited May 15, 2020 by Hisymak

[Gez]

The vanilla Quake engine has harsh limitations, kind of like the vanilla Doom engine. There's not much micro-details in a vanilla-compatible Doom level. Of course we're all used to limit-removing advanced ports by now, so it'd be fair to compare those with the equivalent on Quake, and for that there's no better IMO than the Arcane Dimensions mod; it's really a gorgeous set of levels. Kind of like Quake's Eviternity in a way.

 

There is one thing the Doom engine remains better at than the Quake engine, and it's having a lot of thinkers/entities active at once. Basically the modern slaughtermap scene is not going to move to Quake.

[andrewj]

Map editing is significantly easier for Doom (unless you want lots of 3D floors and then it becomes harder).  With Doom you don't have to worry about your map "leaking" (which is when there is a hole to the outside space somewhere), and lighting and visibility compiling for Quake maps used to take a long time, though nowadays computers are much faster and it isn't a big deal anymore, but deciding on how to light up a map and adding/tweaking all the light entities can still take a while.

[Murdoch]

Your observations are quite correct. The things you mention are a combination of both limitations of the engine which, as Gez says, were quite significant, but some were design related. I do recall some community made maps for the original Quake engine that ran well and had more open environments. There is nothing in the engine limiting texture variety to my knowledge unless it was memory related. I concur with the rest of Gez's statements.

 

So basically the answer to your question of is there something the Doom engine is better at than Quake (using the original engines, not ports), it would definitely be in having more entities active at once without performance deterioration. And better at open environments... probably. I do not recall seeing a Quake map on the scale of say Downtown in the early days in terms of openness. Maybe someone just never attempted it. Someone on the forum with better Quake mapping experience than myself may be able to clarify this.

It should be pointed out that these limitations are likely not necessarily a fault of the engine per se, but rather limitations that had to be enforced to keep performance adequate on the hardware available at the time.

[Hisymak]

Just to note into this, recently I finished the last level of Episode 4 (Azure Agony) and for the big part, it just looked like "Wolfenstein 3D level design brought into true 3D". A big labyrinth of stereotypical blue corridors with stairs here and there. The most other levels in the game were overaly pretty good, through.

[Guest Unregistered account]

Funnily enough the typical corridor in Quake seems to be way more detailed than a Doom one upon second inspection, with more trims, beams, vertically angled walls, relatively detailed brush light fixtures and so on. Only things the engine does objectively better are sharp baked shadows, less flat lighting (Doom has diminishing, Quake's requires mixing sun angles and wall height in outdoor areas to stop them becoming flat eyesores) and in Doom you don't have wonky physics when traversing different heights (Quake's slopes let you shoot off them if you jump up them and irritatingly cause you to slide down them if you stop based on their incline, while running up stairs causes your view to jerk up and down horribly, and if you jump while on them all your forward momentum is completely stopped if your toe grazes a step which SUCKS. Not sure how much of that can be considered the engine VS. the game itself).

[Chip]

Quake does not have a use, but I'm sure you can change that when editing. You can have much map, and much fun.

[incel]

On 5/15/2020 at 2:11 PM, andrewj said:

Map editing is significantly easier for Doom (unless you want lots of 3D floors and then it becomes harder).  With Doom you don't have to worry about your map "leaking" (which is when there is a hole to the outside space somewhere), and lighting and visibility compiling for Quake maps used to take a long time, though nowadays computers are much faster and it isn't a big deal anymore, but deciding on how to light up a map and adding/tweaking all the light entities can still take a while.

 

I opt to disagree, leaking is not that bad of a problem if taken into consideration right from the start. Lighting is much harder aspect of level design, IMHO. In Quake it's easier to make a structure the way you see it, in Doom there's plenty of restrictions. What I miss in Quake is capability to work with sprites.

 

I think that limited open space and the limit of blocks are blatant disadvantages of Quake.

[Kronecker–Capelli]

3 minutes ago, incel said:

in Doom there's plenty of restrictions

Like?

[Tetzlaff]

Quake engine can't render automaps in that simple and elegant way the Doom engine does. But that's of course just a side effect of being true 3D.

[Scrabbs]

map editing and it aged much more gracefully even without source ports

[Mangcubus]

Doom's simplicity is a blessing in disguise. As much as I love Quake, there's a good reason why it's mod scene isn't as active. Shit's hard and annoying, 3D is a bitch to deal with.

[dr_st]

16 hours ago, Tetzlaff said:

Quake engine can't render automaps in that simple and elegant way the Doom engine does. But that's of course just a side effect of being true 3D.

I wonder how they did the automap in Doom 2016. It's as nice as I could imagine it while being true 3D. Not as confusing as Descent, where if you ever need to consult the map, might as well rage-quit.

 

The power of the Doom engine is in its relative simplicity.

[fraggle]

I always felt that Quake's weapon models were a step backwards from Doom's photorealistic sprites. The polycount matters a lot more when the model is right in front of the camera and I think it probably took at least another 5 years for the technology to fully catch up again.

[Tetzlaff]

54 minutes ago, dr_st said:

I wonder how they did the automap in Doom 2016. It's as nice as I could imagine it while being true 3D. Not as confusing as Descent, where if you ever need to consult the map, might as well rage-quit.

 

I think the automap in Doom 2016 uses a 3D model specifically build for each level. Hand-crafted 3D map basically.

[Gez]

I must be the only person on the Internet who didn't have too much trouble navigating the automaps in Descent and in Daggerfall.

[seed]

3 hours ago, dr_st said:

if you ever need to consult the map, might as well rage-quit.

 

Hey that's what I do when I open it on complex or big levels, I can never hope to make sense of that sector spaghetti.

 

Textured automap is better but still has its moments.

[Dark Pulse]

29 minutes ago, Gez said:

I must be the only person on the Internet who didn't have too much trouble navigating the automaps in Descent and in Daggerfall.

I can make sense of PO'ed's automap, which is about the same difficulty, I think.

 

Edited May 19, 2020 by Dark Pulse

[whirledtsar]

Doom's monsters can have any arbitrary radius and height. In Quake monsters have just a few predefined hitboxes (when it comes to collision with the world), so some monsters are actually much larger than they appear and can't fit through hallways. Also hitboxes never rotate and stay aligned to a grid, so moving on small spaces can be awkward.

[ETTiNGRiNDER]

12 minutes ago, whirledtsar said:

Also hitboxes never rotate and stay aligned to a grid, so moving on small spaces can be awkward.

Isn't that aspect true of both engines though?

[Koko Ricky]

Quake vanilla sucks at implying sunlight which Doom handles more easily due to it lighting entire sectors uniformly. In Quake there's no global light sourcing, forcing outdoor areas to have these weird pools of light that aren't realistic.

[boris]

Doing lighting in Quake mapping is much more convenient with ericw-tools than it used to be.

 

A funny thing is that to this day it's not possible to properly rotate brushes, it's all fake.

[whirledtsar]

1 hour ago, ETTiNGRiNDER said:

Isn't that aspect true of both engines though?

Could be, I never noticed much difficulty in walking on ledges in the Doom engine though.

[dr_st]

6 hours ago, Tetzlaff said:

 

I think the automap in Doom 2016 uses a 3D model specifically build for each level. Hand-crafted 3D map basically.

Interesting. This would explain, for example, why SnapMap maps don't have it. It also shows the dedication of the developers to recreate the original experience that they would go through the trouble of hand-crafting maps for all the campaign missions, and the classic maps.

[Maximum Matt]

9 hours ago, fraggle said:

I always felt that Quake's weapon models were a step backwards from Doom's photorealistic sprites.

Quake's weapon models sucked unforgivably - it was almost as if they were an afterthought 

[Redneckerz]

14 hours ago, Dark Pulse said:

I can make sense of PO'ed's automap, which is about the same difficulty, I think.

 

One of the earliest examples in a FPS.
 

Technically quite impressive, sporting a true 3D engine before Quake (Just no floor textures). Had static reflections on 3DO and PSX and its honestly one of the better looking 3DO titles if you ask me (Immercenary takes the cake)

Bonkers title by its premise, too. A pissed off chef having to whack walking butts with his frying pan. I feel Duke Nukem could have stolen some of those ideas back in the day. :P

[SaladBadger]

On 5/19/2020 at 12:21 PM, Gez said:

I must be the only person on the Internet who didn't have too much trouble navigating the automaps in Descent and in Daggerfall.

I actually really like Descent's automap, and one of the many things I disliked about Descent 3's automap was the use of flight controls in the automap. The "orbit around the player's position" thing worked quite well, I feel, and it doesn't feel all that different compared to the map view in modern games like Doom 2016.

 

I think the only thing that makes Descent's map confusing is that sometimes the levels just mesh together too much and it's hard to make out, but this is probably more on the level design than the map itself.

[Master O]

On 5/19/2020 at 1:21 PM, Gez said:

I must be the only person on the Internet who didn't have too much trouble navigating the automaps in Descent and in Daggerfall.

 

You must also be one of the only ones not to have some form of Vertigo by the time Descent ends.

[Dark Pulse]

10 hours ago, Redneckerz said:

One of the earliest examples in a FPS.
 

Technically quite impressive, sporting a true 3D engine before Quake (Just no floor textures). Had static reflections on 3DO and PSX and its honestly one of the better looking 3DO titles if you ask me (Immercenary takes the cake)

Bonkers title by its premise, too. A pissed off chef having to whack walking butts with his frying pan. I feel Duke Nukem could have stolen some of those ideas back in the day. :P

The PSX version actually did add floor textures in some places! It's most notable in the Boot Camp stage.

 

 

[Chip]

Quake can't have any memorable Bosses, while DOOM can.