If Doom II was released with...

[yakfak]

stuff I wish Doom II had done:

- support for adding text between any level rather than just after MAP6, MAP11 etc
- leaving in all the trigger types they didn't use and expanding special sector types (all barons dead, all cuty brain spiders dead) so that every level had access to them
- adding more than one gimmicky Wolfenstein enemy A.K.A. more slots to Dehack =P

that's about it. I love Doom 2, just wish they had considered its own expandability a bit more seriously.

[joe-ilya]

With all those things you request it'll pretty much be a 2.0 version.

[Quasar]

Maes said:

Yeah, those could go all the way up to a Pentium upgrade, performance wise. I recall seeing a 100/120 MHz overdrive which behaved really weird: some software thought it was a 386, in some things it performed very well, in others not as much.

In any case, Descent was clearly a "Pentium recommended" type of game, not something designed to run on 386s and entry-level 486s for the time, unlike Doom.

My first PC was exactly this, but with the 75 MHz clock speed. It could run Descent just fine. All software I used reported it as being a 486DX4.

[Maes]

Quasar said:

My first PC was exactly this, but with the 75 MHz clock speed. It could run Descent just fine. All software I used reported it as being a 486DX4.

Define "just fine" :-) At the time I would define running Doom in the 20-something fps range "just fine", even though today I probably wouldn't stand it, especially at that resolution.

But let's say that back then, on a 14" monitor, and with nothing better to compare it to, anything above "slideshow" was "fine" for a 3D game with Doom's visuals. Keep in mind how most 3D games, even if polygon based, tended to run like slideshows anyway, so seeing anything 3D coming remotely close to "a refreash rate as fast as television" (25-30 full frames..some of the time) was really a novelty. But even on a 486 DX, this required setting the detail level to low, even on official IWADs, and simply due to disk trashing, it was unachievable unless you installed 8 MB of RAM.

Now, that was the "best case scenario" for Doom. Descent was, simply put, an order of magnitude slower at spec parity (just like any "competing" game with a more advanced engine was). Duke Nukem 3D? Simply unberable. Quake? Don't even talk about it. Only Dark Forces seemed to have an equally fast engine with more features, for some reason.

[Quasar]

Your system must have had some problems mine did not. I never had any slow down or thrashing in Doom, Duke Nukem 3D, or Descent on that machine.

Some of the larger levels of Doom II slowed down though. MAP29 was almost unplayable.

[Maes]

Quasar said:

Your system must have had some problems mine did not.

How much RAM did your system have? Actually, what were its exact specs (CPU type and frequency, RAM quantity and type). Mine were: Cyrix 486 DX/40 (later overclocked to 50 MHz), 4 MB of 30-pin RAM (not even 72-pin, let alone EDO), VLB Cirrus Logic graphics card. Basically, an OK system for 1993 or so, but Doomed (pardon the pun) to become terribly outdated in just a couple of years (by 1995 there were: Windows 96, Pentiums, PCI cards, EDO RAM, etc.)


In any case, the single most performance-killing factor in almost any "advanced 3D game" of the time including Doom, was the amount of main RAM. Doom just barely ran at 4 MB. The official IWADs were playable, yes, but disk accesses during gameplay were very common. Certain Doom 2 PWADs like "Castle of the Renegades" were nearly unplayable because of the disk trashing. You couldn't move or -worse yet- open a door and cause new textures and monsters to appear: disk trashing reared its ugly head every single time. When I upgraded to 8 MB I was finally able to play it.

But back to Descent: HOOOOOOOLY SHIT. With 4 MB you couldn't move or do anything, really, without triggering a continuous disk trashing. Perhaps it would've been better if the game actually required (not just "recommended") 8 MB of RAM. Who had that much RAM on a 1993 system? In any case, I really didn't touch it afterwards, except maybe once after the upgrade to 8 MB. Even with most of the disk trashing gone, the engine was plainly too slow to be playable, especially compared to Doom. Even at minimum settings, it was like a slideshow.

For Duke Nukem 3D, there isn't much to say. I certainly don't believe that you, a programmer, would claim that the Build engine is faster than the Doom engine, on a pixel-per-CPU-cycle criterion. Not much trashing there, it's just that the engine was shit-slow, that's all. Clearly a Pentium-class game, not much to say there (BTW, those later model 486s with 75/100/120/133 MHz CPUs were meant to compete with low-end Pentium systems, and had some of the same features like PCI slots and 72-pin RAM, so it's not just a matter of linear CPU speed increase).

Of course, that causes some problems when using the term "486": you may mean one of those later machines, someone else might mean a 486 DX/25 with an 8-bit VGA ISA card ;-)

Quasar said:

Some of the larger levels of Doom II slowed down though. MAP29 was almost unplayable.

Yeah, big and ugly level, made worse by the smaller screen and low detail mode. Those were the times that Doom really felt ilke a miserable experience.

But, compared to nearly every other competing 3D game at the time, it was like a breath of fresh air. I had to adjust to Doom's (relative) smoothness again after trying the Duke Nukem 3D Shareware for a while ;-)

[TendaMonsta]

Would the features mentioned in the OP been feasible when Doom95 was released?

[Vermil]

D'sparil in Heretic behaves differently depending on his health (three fireballs versus one on serpent and teleporting more on foot), so checking the health of a monster had already been done by Doom95's release.

However, an important part of a game is not to feel cheated or beaten by random elements. D'sparil works, but bad guys randomly firing projectiles at different speeds could be considered such.

[Maes]

TendaMonsta said:

Would the features mentioned in the OP been feasible when Doom95 was released?

All of them would've been feasible even with the vanilla Doom -at the cost of slightly more protracted development, maybe a negligible CPU overhead, but most importantly, the risk of unbalancing the gameplay severely.

[TendaMonsta]

Vermil said:
However, an important part of a game is not to feel cheated or beaten by random elements. D'sparil works, but bad guys randomly firing projectiles at different speeds could be considered such. [/B]

Maybe I didn't explain the various projectile speeds properly. You'd be able to tell they were going fire something faster depending on their distance from you or something like that.

If an important part of games is to not feel cheated or beaten by random elements then why the fuck did they include random spread on hitscan and projectiles? What crack were they smoking when they designed that? I think I should revise my OP to remove random elements from enemies. I kind of just rushed that post without thinking. I absolutely hate random elements in most video games especially shooters (TF2 I'm looking at you).