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incel

Does Doom 2 have any significant engine improvements ?

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Subj.

 

What about "quality of life" (and death) ones ? Does it have an edge over the original in any aspects ?

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18 minutes ago, incel said:

Does it have an edge over the original in any aspects ?

 

It has new enemies, a new weapon, and a new powerup. These are important enough that the vast majority of custom content is made for Doom 2, not Doom 1.

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5 minutes ago, Pseudonaut said:

 

It has new enemies, a new weapon, and a new powerup. These are important enough that the vast majority of custom content is made for Doom 2, not Doom 1.

 

Well, duh.

 

I'm interested in the technical element. Or other subtle stuff.

 

Taking into consideration that it's Carmack's child, there must be some changes...

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The Doomwiki has a good run-down of the history of the Doom engine.  Doom 2 coincided with the release of v1.666 of the engine, but it wasn't the last change made.  id went all the way up to 1.9. 

 

The source code released was technically classed as 1.10, and the Doom Classic ports by Nerve took us up to 1.11.  The recent re-releases I'm not sure use the same numeric system.

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As for 1.9 (I could not care less about former versions, sorry), DOOM.EXE for Doom Registered is simply a renamed DOOM2.EXE for Doom II, or vice versa.

 

doomi_ii_19.png.8317f2fbce4fa332bd275f31ea041865.png

 

 

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Diababracadabra is correct. It's exactly the same executable and there are no engine technical improvements that get used for Doom 2 but not Doom.

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no, there are no engine differences in terms of how the game operates.

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1 hour ago, incel said:

Taking into consideration that it's Carmack's child, there must be some changes...

 

From the point of view of the engine, by the time Doom 2 was released, Carmack had already moved on to the next engine, which was the true 3D engine used in Quake. John Carmack has never really been one to look back, so I don't think he would have wanted to spend a lot of time on the Doom engine in advance of Doom 2 unless there was something wrong with it. Also, Romero has said that mappers were allowed to program in effects if they needed them. Thus, there would be little reason for Carmack to get involved in minor changes to add, for example, a new linedef tag.

 

1 hour ago, incel said:

I'm interested in the technical element. Or other subtle stuff.

 

You have an episodic structure in Doom 1, and there is no carryover from 1 episode to the next (i.e., you pistol start the first map of each episode). Doom 2 is completely continuous.

 

One of the few things that I can think of off the top of my head that was different between Doom 1 and Doom 2, upon release, was the inclusion of locked door switches. I don't recall there being any switches that opened locked doors in Doom 1, but there were in Doom 2. Perhaps that linedef type was added for Doom 2. However, it will work for both games (i.e., you can have a locked door switch in a Doom 1 map--see E2M1 of "The Classic Episode").

 

Otherwise, there are hard-coded effects in Doom 1 that are not in Doom 2, specifically dealing with E1M8, E2M8, E3M8, and E4M8. Similarly, the 667 tag only works on Doom 2 Map 07, as far as I know, due to the hard-coded nature of it.

 

I also don't think that you can have a KeenDie codepointer in Doom 1, because that particular Tag 666 functionality wasn't present, and the Keens weren't added until Doom 2, so they're not present in Doom 1. I've never tried it, and I've never heard of anyone else trying to do it.

 

The code for the explosion routine when you destroy a Romero Head is unique to Doom 2, and I don't think there is an analog for it in Doom 1. In principle, you could add the mancubus and the archvile to Doom 1, but I don't think you can add the Romero Head into Doom 1 and have it function the same way.

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Doom II added some linedef types such as fast doors. However, as others have stated, Doom 1 inherited these capabilities in its updates. The Doom Wiki has a list of linedef types that includes a column indicating the game from which they originated.

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17 hours ago, TheUltimateDoomer666 said:

BradyGames' Totally Unauthorized Guide To DOOM II claims "The frame rate of animation was increased for DOOM II.  This higher frame rate allows for faster gameplay and animation."

 

First I have heard of this. I doubt this is true unless anyone more familiar with the code than myself can back it up.

 

19 hours ago, Pegleg said:

I don't recall there being any switches that opened locked doors in Doom 1

 

Correct. This was indeed a Doom II specific addition.

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17 hours ago, TheUltimateDoomer666 said:

BradyGames' Totally Unauthorized Guide To DOOM II claims "The frame rate of animation was increased for DOOM II.  This higher frame rate allows for faster gameplay and animation."

There is nothing substantive to this statement on a technical level. It's meaningless and doesn't coincide with any changes between 1.6 to 1.9.

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I believe Doom II was practically v1.666, so any technical advances and optimizations are to be found in the v1.666 update, which eventually were easy enough to backport into Doom I.

 

Here's something that bugs me: why did id use the decimal convention when going through v1.666 (1.6 < 1.666 < 1.7) but then went with a non-decimal one after v1.9 (1.9 < 1.10)?!

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